More Ed Calabrese

These videos are about a year old, but only uploaded a couple of days ago.  The topic is Calabrese's claim that Herman Muller (Nobel laureate who studied radiation genetic effects on fruit flies in the 1930's & 1940's) lied about his work.  It's contrived and meant to rally the Hormies (health physics deniers who believe in hormesis).  

The pseudo-issue reminds me of the creationists' Haeckel's embryos propaganda (see my webpage, "Comparing The Creationists & Hormesis Cults" on upper right hand side of this page):

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Watching Calabrese you might think that central to Muller's Nobel prize acceptance speech was his formulation of the linear, no threshold model.  That's the impression Calabrese projects.  But if you actually read the speech, "linear" is not mentioned AT ALL!  And "threshold" is only mentioned ONCE!

Yet in Calabrese's original paper, the abstract starts out:

"In his Nobel Prize Lecture of December 12, 1946, Hermann J. Muller argued that the dose–response for radiation-induced germ cell mutations was linear and that there was “no escape from the conclusion that there is no threshold”.

Yup, there is the one instance of "threshold" in the entire speech.  Since Calabrese wants hormesis to be accepted he exaggerates the context of what Muller actually said and he assumes he knows what was going on in Muller's head when Muller delivered his speech.  We may never know what Muller was thinking at the time...he may not have been impressed with Stern's and Caspari's work, or hadn't had the chance to look into it, or he may have ignored it or maybe he was consumed with his earned prize or maybe something else.

In any event, that has no bearing on modern science, in which modern scientists have looked at all the relevant studies going into the latter half of the 20th century and now to almost 2013 and concluded that the linear, no threshold model best describes radiation induced cancer.  In contrast, Muller was discussing a threshold for gene mutations, which as far as we know is still true.  A single photon can cause a single mutation (and then some).

Here is a response by a geneticist to Calabrese.