Dr. WOLMAN. Anybody can buy any kind of a radiation machine he would like to buy and he can use it almost without any restraint. Representative HOLIFIELD. I daresay that there has been more somatic and genetic damage done by these types of devices than has occurred in the atomic radiation field.

Dr. WOLMAN. There is a good side to this. The emphasis on the atomic radiation field, or that industrial complex, has had a tremendous influence on collateral fields where control has been very, very small. It has brought it into the open.

Dr. TURNER. In considering radiation hazards in the light of past experience with other hazards, is there any peculiar or particular property about radiation as opposed to other hazards which you would admonish one to consider in setting standards? I am thinking of possible genetic effects or a physical process involved in radiation damage which is not realized in other types.

Dr. WOLMAN. There are a number of significant differences, not only in the total complexity of the biological effects, but in the fact that they have secondary and tertiary effects which are certainly not measurable at this time and on which more light may be shed. They differ to that extent from most of the other public health problems we have had excepting those which are now coming into play in the carcinogens which again are beginning to give us a great deal of concern for roughly similar reasons. But not nearly as complex as in the radiation field.

Dr. TURNER. I thought that was worth pointing out.

Dr. WOLMAN. It is important. It is a very much different kind of phenomenon and effects.

Mr. HOLLISTER. Dr. Wolman, I would like to ask you one or two questions to pinpoint the implications of your statement.

The first one you may almost consider unfair, but consider yourself free to answer it in any way you wish. It seems a reasonable supposition that the United States could at any time over the last several years have decided that simply by an increased expenditure of money, no new technology, it could have conducted all of its weapons tests in the Pacific instead of conducting them alternately in the Pacific and Nevada. In terms of your philosophy of not equating risk and dollars, what would you say about such a policy?

Dr. WOLMAN. I would refuse to answer on advice of attorney. This is an area in which I have personal feelings and views, but I would have no major professional competence.

Mr. HOLLISTER. Would you go so far as to agree that questions such as these force one into the position of equating dollars and hazard? Dr. WOLMAN. It forces into equating not necessarily dollars, because I don't believe that was the particular reason for that kind of exercise of decision, good or bad. It forces you to assess risk versus the total benefits other than dollars-dollars also-I would say other benefits that would transcend dollars. Here we are talking of calulated risks which are not at all included in my discussion; namely, calculated risk for the defense of our country. I do not put that at all in the category of our formal regularizing of practice, not only because of my ignorance, but because I really believe it is a different kind of problem.

Mr. HOLLISTER. So your statement should be taken within a somewhat more narrow context than all possible sources of environmental contamination.

Dr. WOLMAN. Yes.

Mr. HOLLISTER. How about a peaceful use of atomic energy that results in environmental contamination?

Dr. WOLMAN. I would include within the philosophy of my paper all peaceful uses of atomic energy, even though they may use detonations of hydrogen bomb type or any other.

Mr. HOLLISTER. Would your philosophy say that a project such as Chariot if it leads to exposure of individuals should not be undertaken ?

Dr. WOLMAN. I think, before such decisions are arrived at, it should have the impact of the finest kind of public health interest and action.

Representative HOLIFIELD. I might say for the understanding of the audience that the reference to Project Chariot was the proposed detonation of a nuclear explosive to create a harbor in Alaska. This is just a proposal. It is not at this time a funded or planned operation.

Dr. WOLMAN. The question is a little difficult for me to answer for another reason. I happen to be on the advisory group to the AEC for such peacetime detonations for harbormaking or otherwise.

Representative HOLIFIELD. You are also on the reactor safeguards committee and I understand you have recently been appointed as the chief executive in that field in Maryland.

Dr. WOLMAN. Yes.

Representative HOLIFIELD. For which we congratulate you. Are there further questions?

Mr. HOLLISTER. I would like to change now, Dr. Wolman, to this question. You emphasized that the philosophy in developing watercontrol standards has been to get palatable pure water. Yet the people who are worried about radiation would come back to you and say here is a case where water standards and radiation hazards are mixed because we have some water that has radium in it, and would not be considered to be without hazard by some people. What would you say to this?

Dr. WOLMAN. The answer to that is quite clear and quite simple. The evaluation of those waters from a public health standpoint is underway, as you know. The revision of the public health standards of quality for water are likewise under revision, and will take into account these permissible criteria for radioactive materials. I should say, because I think the record should be clarified on this, water quality safety has never been the equivalent of distilled water. For another reason, distilled water is unpalatable and society does not like it. So if we have distilled water, we put materials back into it so that you will drink it. I mention that because we do, as you do in the radiation field, keep certain minimum values which you cannot escape for one reason or another.

Mr. HOLLISTER. I would like to ask one more question, Dr. Wolman. Do you believe that different hazards, accidents, one kind of disease, another kind of disease, should be regarded independently as far as the expenditure of money is concerned? For example, the Public

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Health Service officer knew that he could cut the Nation's death rate by withdrawing expenditures from one area, let us say, coronary diseases, and spending it on automobile accident prevention. Is this a concept that you would envision?

Dr. WOLMAN. This is a very interesting question in administrative practice. The intelligent health officer is always torn between what he is going to do with the limited amounts of money he gets. He makes selections all the time as to the areas he is going to attack. He makes that selection often on what does he know about the area he is going to attack and what probability of success he is going to have with it.

In the accident field until very recently he has avoided it, first, because of its complexity; secondly, because of definition; third, because he thought everybody in the highway business was worrying about accidents, which is not quite true. But he is moving into those areas for one simple appraisal that he always makes. What is the toll of death. What is the toll of disability? In the highway accident problem, the toll of disability as you know is astronomical. He moves into those because they become matters of great public health concern, perhaps belatedly. But he has to enter them in order to find out whether the same kind of tools and philosophy applied in other more familiar disease areas are not more applicable and promising. His choice is not on a slide-rule basis. You will find a health officer of very fine experience and quality who may be dealing with hairlip in New York City because it is appealing to a certain number of mothers. Its relationship to total disease and disability and death may be infinitesimal. It is a concession which I hope we always make to people's desires.

Mr. HOLLISTER. This notion of allocating budgets does again to some extent force the Public Health Service officer to tie risk and dollars together, in a different sense.

Dr. WOLMAN. Let me put it this way. He ties risk to potential of accomplishment. I know of no record in which it is explicitly set forth that he ties risk to dollars.

I could give you a great many papers on evaluating the dollar value of man. They have a singularly unappealing attraction to anybody, particularly to the man who is to be killed. Singularly unappealing. That is all I am saying.

Representative HOLIFIELD. It is rather an indictment of our society to a certain extent, maybe a lesser indictment than other societies we know, that many times the problem of dollars makes dollars more important than human life.

Dr. WOLMAN. I merely say that in this field precept should be scientific and not economic. Then you go into your economic operation to determine how well your precept can be applied. That is all I said.

Representative HOLIFIELD. This becomes a value judgment.
Dr. WOLMAN. Yes.

Representative HOLIFIELD. At this time we will make the announcement that we will have to give up this room this afternoon for another committee. We will be in room 457 of the Old Senate Office Building. We will gather there at 2 o'clock and Dr. Walter Selove, Department of Physics, University of Pennsylvania, who was slated for this

morning, will be our first witness this afternoon. We will have a very interesting roundtable in which Mr. Parker, Dr. Wolman, Dr. Selove, Mr. Taylor, Mr. James Terrill, Dr. K. Z. Morgan and Dr. Charles R. Williams will participate. Just preceding the round table, Mr. Lauriston Taylor will also be a witness.

(Thereupon at 12:30 p.m., a recess was taken, the subcommittee to reconvene at 2 p.m., in room 457, Old Senate Office Building.)

AFTERNOON SESSION

Representative HOLIFIELD. The committee will be in order. Some of our members will be late. We have the appropriation bill on the floor this afternoon for the Atomic Energy Commission. We will start out with Dr. Walter Selove. Dr. Selove, will you please come forward.

STATEMENT OF DR. WALTER SELOVE,1 UNIVERSITY OF

PENNSYLVANIA

Dr. SELOVE. Mr. Holifield, I want to thank the Joint Committee for inviting me to participate in these hearings again. I am not connected with any governmental group which has studied radiation hazards or standards, but I have been associated with a group in the Federation of American Scientists, which for the past several years has concerned itself with trying to understand and to help communicate to the public the nature and extent of radiation hazards both from fallout and from other sources.

The subjects covered by these present hearings are very broad and I am going to confine my remarks to just one aspect of the problem. Let me say at the start I think there are two kinds of radiation hazards that are really different from the other low level widespread radiation hazards that we have to be concerned with. These two types are, for one, medical radiation, and for the other, radiation from fallout. Each has its own special problems.

I propose to discuss here just the problem of radiation from fallout and the extent to which radiation standards or radiation guides can be applied to fallout radiation, and the nature of problems created if we find fallout levels exceeding some previously set tolerance level. The two major points I want to focus on as listed in this very brief outline are, first, that acceptable levels or tolerance levels for radiation, which are established for other purposes, such as radiation produced by industrial processes, acceptable levels established for other purposes cannot be applied in any simple way to fallout. There are considerations that go into establishing acceptable levels for other purposes, considerations which are useful when one considers the fallout problem. But one cannot take over tolerance levels established for other purposes in any direct simple way.

The second point I wish to make is that the proper authority to take responsibility for deciding what is or is not an acceptable level for fallout is, in my opinion, the Government, and cannot be any other body, either any agency of the Government or any private organization. It must be the Congress and the administration itself, as_representatives of the public, which takes on the responsibility. Let me carry out a bit of a discussion on these points. First, the problem of balancing benefits against risks for radiation. I was impressed in looking through some of the material in the preprint. I did not have a chance to read all of it, but it is a remarkable collection of very useful material. One thing that impressed me greatly was the number of separate writers who quite independently made the point that in trying to balance benefits against risks or against damage from radiation, scientists should not be given the responsibility solely. The responsibility should not be put solely on a group of scientists. Many other factors enter, as has been emphasized earlier in the talks today and emphasized in many articles in the preprint. Many other sociological and economic factors enter. Decisions as to an acceptable level altogether have to be made by a broad body of people representing all interests in the public and not just by a group of scientists.

In the case of fallout in particular, I think one of the greatest sources of confusion in the public in the past has been that governments have appeared to take recommendations as to acceptable levels which were established for purposes other than fallout, and to apply these acceptable levels to the problem of fallout. As a matter of fact, one has seen in the testimony in previous hearings and in the material in this preprint that the scientific bodies which have been considered the establishment of tolerance levels, the ICRP and the NCRP, have been aware of the problem of dealing with fallout levels, but have felt that this particular problem lay outside their competence, and that it was not within the province of the ICRP or the NCRP to try to make the balance involved in deciding what is an acceptable level of fallout.

I note that Dr. Failla in his statement in the preprint says that the ICRP finally, because of failure of any other organization in the world to take this problem under careful study, decided it had to make some broad general recommendation even in the knowledge that these recommendations would be applied to fallout, even though the ICRP realized that it was not up to a body like the ICRP to make recommendations as to what an acceptable level of fallout is.

I think this is an extremely important point and one which has caused a great deal of confusion. It has been the principal source of confusion in the public, namely, that there has really been no body which considers itself to be competent or authoritative in recommending what is an acceptable level of fallout.

Why is it that fallout is such a much more difficult radiation problem than other sources of low-level radiation? I have listed two items here which I think briefly describe the answer to that question.

First of all, in tolerating anything which may produce some injury, whether radiation from any source, or food additives, one has come in recent years to ask the question, what benefits do we get in return for this injury? In the case of fallout, coming from nuclear weapons tests, there is the most severe kind of disagreement in the public as