User talk:MatthewFP
Matthew - please, contact me DUStory dash owner at yahoogroups dot com re Busby - we should correspond - this article on Busby should not even be in Wikipedia - Busby is a self-promoter, not a scientist. Roger — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.106.32.139 (talk) 04:54, 20 March 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for your kind and supportive words. I have replied in detail on my talk page. [1] Yakushima (talk) 09:03, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
- Agreed about the importance of testing. But that's a big problem with studying radiation effects on human beings: you can only do so much testing. The rest has to be observational (as with the Hiroshima/Nagasaki long-term survivors study). Animal testing or in vitro lab work on human cell cultures just doesn't have much effect on public perceptions, no matter how wide the spectrum of species (or human organ-cell types) in which you demonstrate (or fail to demonstrate) some hypothesis. Finally, there's the fact that this is low-dose radiation, which makes it very hard to observe any effect at all through the statistical noise. Hormesis, linear-with-threshold, linear-no-threshold (LNT) are perhaps all on an equal footing as far as the real science goes, but only because the science can't go very far. So scientists throw up their hands and say, "We go with LNT to be conservative, but nobody really knows." And that gets translated by the anti-nuclear activists as "there is no safe dose", and "scientists themselves say they don't really know what's going on."
- I've done some editing today on Ernest J. Sternglass, who is, in some ways, a more impressive and more tragic figure than Busby. He was clearly an inventive genius early in his career, but was evidently not much of a statistician or public health researcher. His claims might have started out on a fairly even keel, but they just kept getting wilder, until he was blaming radiation not just for generally higher cancer rates and infant mortality (where at least you can say there's a plausible mechanism) but also for higher crime rates, lower SAT scores, more AIDS cases -- almost a caricature. You might want to take a look at this article. If you edit it, consider providing the environmentalist/anti-nuclear POV for a start -- I'm sure they have a lot more to say about him than I've got there at the moment. Yakushima (talk) 14:23, 21 April 2011 (UTC)