Talk:Bernard Cohen (physicist)

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Vote for Deletion[edit]

This article survived a Vote for Deletion. The discussion can be found here. -Splash 05:55, 28 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

POV[edit]

It shouldn't be deleted, but an actual biography should be put in place! Simesa 18:11, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

404[edit]

The reference "[1]" to "Cohen's fallacy", http://radlab.nl/radsafe/archives/0202/msg00329.html, goes to a website that no longer exists. Brief searching has not revealed an alternative source.

There is a wayback machine copy from 2007 at: http://web.archive.org/web/20070927041759/http://radlab.nl/radsafe/archives/0202/msg00329.html

The reference "[2]" to the journal Health Physics does not point to the abstract mentioned.

Thus the lede of the first topic ("... debates ... are well known ...") in this supposedly biographical article has become nothing but badly referenced POV. Snezzy (talk) 04:13, 6 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Passing of BL Cohen[edit]

I've found the obituary for BL Cohen here. Regards, ConradMayhew (talk) 22:55, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a longer one [1]; I'll look at it later to see if there's anything with which to supplement the WP page, unless someone does it first. --Old Moonraker (talk) 06:38, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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Suspected misrepresentation[edit]

The intro says "Cohen was a staunch opponent of the so-called Linear no-threshold model [...]" which was "considered in the 1980s and 1990s a self-marginalizing posture"; considered by whom? I've been reading his book online and he makes it clear in Chapter 5 that he is simply trying to convey the conclusions of scientific organizations (BEIR, UNSCEAR, NCRP) that are tasked with studying radiation hazards. Either the intro is misleading, or Cohen is lying about their findings (which I very much doubt, first because the book makes a strong case, and second because if he was a liar, wouldn't other scientists accuse him of being one? If I Google "Bernard Cohen accused of lying in his book on nuclear power", google responds "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search".) Relevant book quote: "both UNSCEAR[12] and NCRP[19] estimate that risks at low dose and low dose rate are lower than those obtained from the straight line relationship by a factor of 2 to 10. For example, if 1 million mrem gives a cancer risk of 0.78, the risk from 1 mrem is not 0.78 chances in a million as stated previously, but only 1/2 to 1/10 of that [....] The 1980 BEIR Committee accepted the concept of reduced risk at low dose and used it in its estimates. The 1990 BEIR Committee acknowledges the effect but states that there is not enough information available to quantify it and, therefore, presents results ignoring it but with a footnote stating that these results should be reduced."

Later it is said that "Professor Cohen stated [...] that low levels of radiation can have beneficial health effects" but the quote afterward from Cohen does not support this claim. Cohen's book doesn't mention hormesis, either, nor does it ever suggest that low doses of radiation are either beneficial or harmless. If Cohen ever expressed a belief in hormesis (I doubt it, but I can't read the two offline references for this claim), it would mean that he had changed his mind after publishing his book. This is illustrated quite vividly in a quote from Chapter 13: 'Nader continued to state, in his speeches and writings, that a pound of plutonium could kill 8 billion people, 4,000 times my estimate. In fact, he accused me[37] of "trying to detoxify plutonium with a pen." In response, I offered to inhale publicly many times as much plutonium as he said was lethal. [....] My offers were such as to give me a risk equivalent to that faced by an American soldier in World War II, according to my calculations of plutonium toxicity which followed all generally accepted procedures. These offers were made to all three major TV networks, requesting a few minutes to explain why I was doing it. I feel that I am engaged in a battle for my country's future, and hence should be willing to take as much risk as other soldiers.'

Edit: I suspect that the original author(s) of this article simply made the mistake of conflating hormesis with the general idea of a sublinear dose-response - which is a serious mistake that caused the author to believe that Cohen was a "marginalized", contrarian scientist. My judgement so far is that he is close to the mainstream scientifically, and only marginalized in the sense that mainstream scientific views about radiation are marginalized by the media/public. This is illustrated by a passage in chapter 5: 'If TV producers took their role of educating the public seriously, they would have considered it their function to transmit scientific information from the scientific community to the public. But this they didn't do. They wanted to decide what to transmit, which means that they made judgments on scientific issues. When I brought this to their attention, they always said that the scientific community was split on the issue of dangers from radiation. By "split" they seemed to mean that there was at least one scientist disagreeing with the others. They didn't seem to recognize that a unanimous conclusion of a National Academy of Sciences Committee should be given more weight than the opinion of one individual scientist who is far outside the mainstream. Their position was that, since the scientific community was split, they had no way to find out what the scientific consensus was. To this I always proposed a simple solution: pick a few major universities of their choice, call and ask the operator for the department chairman or a professor in the field, and ask the question; after five such calls the consensus would be clear on almost any question, usually 5 to 0. The TV people never were willing to do this. My strong impression was that they weren't really interested in what scientists had concluded. They were only after a story that would arouse viewer interest.' I'd like to correct the article myself, but I am not an expert on radiation or Cohen's research, and I'm unfamiliar with proper Wikipedia protocols and customs. I think the appropriate thing is to add a "Dispute template". Qwertie (talk) 22:05, 28 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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