The attached fascinating article summarizes the Journey that Ed Calabrese has undertaken, for most of the past decade, leading to discovery of the discrepancies of the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) Model –– for which Hermann Müller was awarded the 1946 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine –– although it was clear that (before the Nobel lecture) Müller had known of the strong data that seriously challenged the LNT Model. The story tells how Curt Stern had sent Müller the manuscript that he and Ernst Caspari had written, stating their seriously challenging data on 6 Nov 1946, after having alerted Müller in September to expect it. Caspari and Stern found that irradiation to living organisms exhibited a threshold effect on mutations and not a LNT effect. Müller acknowledged receipt of the Caspari manuscript and offered preliminary comments on it in a 12 Nov 1946 letter to Stern; in the letter, Müller acknowledged that these findings seriously challenged the LNT model, that the study needed to be replicated, that Stern needed to get the funds to do this, that Caspari was a very competent researcher, and that Müller could not dismiss the study due to inexperience or other reasons.
This information was troubling. If any oe us were in Müller’s shoes (about to present the Nobel Lecture), would we ever admit that there was no possibility the LNT Model was biologically plausible after seeing the Caspari study findings? Would we acknowledge (in our Nobel lecture) that the shape of the dose-response curve in the low-dose range remained a viable research question that still needed to be resolved? Yet, although Müller acted like a scientist in his communications with Stern, in his public demeanor he was deceitful and very ideological — everything a reputable scientist should not be. To act this way during the most significant moment in his professional life revealed important character traits in Müller, including “those of dishonesty, risk-taking, manipulation, and arrogance.”
Did Müller ever have any new data or insights that would provide an explanation for his rejection of Caspari’s threshold conclusion? To the contrary, a detailed 7-page letter from Müller to Stern (dated 14 Jan 1947) re-affirmed the 12 Nov 1946 letter. With this now in hand, Calabrese came to the firm, but unsettling, conclusion that Müller was deliberately deceptive in his Nobel Lecture and used this opportunity to achieve a long-dreamed-of goal to have LNT as the default model for cancer risk assessment.
This was his chance and, apparently, the ends justified the means — again, a rationalization that scientists should never accept. The historical record shows to what lengths Stern and Müller, and others under their influence (or spell), would go to twist the truth to advance their emotional subjective ideology. As these GEITP pages have stated before, use of the LNT Model for the past 60+ years in lab animal cancer studies is the second biggest case of fraud resulting in wasted time, effort and billions of US dollars in research money. The largest case of fraud (resulting in wasted time, effort and trillions of US dollars in research money) is the global warming hypothesis since the early 1980s –– perpetuated by United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and supported by NASA and NOAA employees who continue to “adjust” the raw data to fit their hypothesis. 🙁
Acad Quest 2o17; doi 10.1007/s12129-017-9660-6