Response to Letter of Ralph J Cicerone and Kevin Crowley regarding “How the US National Academy of Sciences misled the world community on cancer risk assessment: new findings challenge historical foundations of the linear dose response.” [DOI 10.1007/s00204-013-1105-6, Review Article

Abstract

genetics community, one a Nobel Prize winner, more than three decades after their deaths was made only after an exhaustive examination of the published literature, previously classified documents, and copious letters and other types of personal documents in the files of Curt Stern, Hermann J. Muller and other key people. The discovery of their scientific deceptions/misrepresentations occurred unexpectedly during research for an earlier paper entitled “Toxicology Rewrites its History and Rethinks the Future: Giving Equal Focus to Both Harmful and Beneficial Effects” (Calabrese 2011a, b, c). Prior to my submittal of this manuscript, I sent it to several people for a final set of informal evaluations. One reviewer’s comments, which suggested an extensive study of Muller and his role in the development of the linear-no-threshold (LNT) concept and its acceptance by regulatory agencies, prompted the present Muller–Stern-NAS investigation. The first inkling of an “honesty” issue occurred after a detailed evaluation of Muller’s Nobel Prize Lecture of December 12, 1946 in which he vigorously denied even the possibility of a threshold response for radiation-induced genomic mutation, demanding a switch to a LNT risk assessment model (i.e., note Muller’s—”no escape from the conclusion that there is no threshold”—comment during his Nobel Prize Lecture). While his statements were not surprising, I linked them to data that had recently emerged at the University of Rochester. A newly completed chronic study on the effects of ionizing radiation on germ cell mutation in male fruit flies in August 1946 by Dr. Ernst Caspari, working under the direction of Stern, supported a threshold rather than a linearity dose response. The Caspari data were important since they were derived from the strongest lowdose-rate study to date. The threshold findings were so unexpected and challenging that Stern, a strong proponent of the LNT, refused Dear Editor,