The Major Radiation Hormesis Researchers since 1980

For further research please look at the scientific papers by the following researchers …

Dr T. Don Luckey

Dr T. Don Luckey of the USA:  The original researcher to surprise the world by stating that radiation can be biopositive!  Here he is with Jay Gutierrez, a medicine man from Colorado who heals with uranium and thorium ores.  Luckey is in his 90s in this picture from the fall of 2011.

Webage about Radiation Hormesis written by Don Luckey in 2009 …
http://giriweb.com/luckey.htm#ldeux

Thomas Donnell (Don) Luckey Obituary

Thomas Donnell (Don) Luckey, Ph.D., died Monday, March 17, in his home in Walnut Creek, California, at the age of 94.  He is survived by his three daughters, Sara Jane Luckey, Mary Luckey, and donna luckey, three grandchildren, and two great grandsons.Don was born in Caspar, Wyoming, on May 15, 1919, the youngest of five children of Lillian and Dr. Frank S. Luckey, a physician in the county hospital.  Spending his summers working on the family’s ranch, Don developed his love for horses as well as a fascination for snakes, providing many tales of his rattlesnake encounters.Don graduated from high school in 1936 and earned a B. S. in Chemistry from Colorado State University in 1941.  After one year at Texas A&M he transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where he received his M. S. in 1944 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry/Nutrition in 1946.  While at Wisconsin he met Pauline Mae Miller, and they were wed on September 1, 1943.

Don started his professional career at the Laboratory of Bacteriology at the University of Notre Dame.  In 1954 the family moved to Columbia where Don served as the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry in the Medical School.  His research involved many international collaborations, particularly in Germany and Japan, as he moved from nutrition and germfree research to hormesis and the effects of ionizing radiation.  Don continued to travel and publish after his retirement in 1984; in total he wrote 6 books, co-edited 4 more, and published over 300 articles covering a wide range of research topics.

Don and Pauline also collected and published material on antique dolls, an avid interest they shared during their retirement years in Loveland, Colorado.  After Pauline’s death in 2000, Don moved to Lawrence, Kansas; then in 2012 he moved to California with donna to be closer to more family members there.

Myron Polycove Obituary

Myron Pollycove was born in Arizona and died on August 4, 2013 in San Francisco, near his children, at the age of 92. He leaves many feeling sad at having lost a wonderful friend. He also leaves a multifaceted range of seminal achievements, highlighted by the use of radiotracers in clinical medicine and his attribution of the benefits and risks of a low dose of ionizing radiation to its effects on the adaptive protection systems.
In 1942, Myron began training in physics and mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (CALTEC). From 1942 to 1946, he served in WW II as a physicist in the US Navy. He completed medical
school at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) in 1950.

From 1951 to 1953, Myron served in the Army Medical Corps during the Korean War, with intermittent training in internal medicine at Harvard and work at the Army Chemical Center. After two years at Tufts Medical School in internal medicine, Myron returned to California to work as Research Associate at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and Donner Laboratory in Berkeley until 1961. In 1962, he accepted the position of Professor in Laboratory Medicine and Radiology at the UCSF School of
Medicine, where he introduced the young field of Nuclear Medicine. In 1968, he became the Director of the Nuclear Medicine Department and Chief of Service, continuing there until his retirement in 1991. Myron, as
a Professor Emeritus, moved to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Maryland, where he was appointed to the position of Visiting Medical Fellow.

His biomedical research began in 1951 at the US Army Chemical Center on non-hemorrhagic fatal traumatic shock. It continued at various places using radioactive isotopes as tracers in glucose metabolism, in assessing the mono-carbon pool, folic acid, and vitamin B12 kinetics. It included the application of iron-59 and chromium-51 in hematology. His research data appeared in the most prestigious journals, and they became internationally accepted milestones in clinical medicine. Being a board-certified specialist in pathology and nuclear medicine, and as director of the Clinical Laboratory at the San Francisco General Hospital, Myron was responsible for the services of the Chemistry, Microbiology, and Immunology Divisions. He was also clinically responsible as the Division Chief of the Nuclear Medicine, Hematology, and the Blood Bank services. Not to be overlooked was his enthusiasm for teaching in Nuclear Medicine, Hematology, and Clinical Pathology to medical students, residents and house officers.

Myron’s life-long clinical engagement and success, and his experience with radioactive tracers and his awareness of the associated health risks made him, in his top academic position, an ideal candidate for advising the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as Visiting Medical Fellow. In 1991, he and Rosalyn, whom he had married when he was 20 years old, moved into a lovely townhouse in Maryland, close to the NRC headquarters in Rockville. Their home became a cultural gem. As an NRC Visiting Medical Fellow, Myron had to adjust to the workings and goals of the NRC. He delivered his expertise in the medical use of radioisotopes, both diagnostic and therapeutic, and he served as an effective interface between the NRC and the country’s medical organizations.     Amongst his many obligations at the NRC, Myron began immediately to explore the experimental and epidemiological observations on effects and risks of low doses of ionizing radiation. These initial investigations led to the report “Positive health effects of low-level radiation in human populations.” It was published in 1994 in the conference proceedings “Biological Effects of Low-Level Exposures: Dose-Response Relationships,” edited by E.J. Calabrese; Lewis Publishers, Chelsea, MI:171-187. About a year later at a meeting on low-dose risks at the US
National Academy of Sciences, Myron and Ludwig Feinendegen met and they began a most fruitful collaboration producing together 14 peer-reviewed papers. This collaboration continued beyond Myron’s retirement from NRC in 2005. They gave presentations, often together, at numerous conferences and workshops. These included Jim Muckerheide’s “Radiation, Science, and Health” meetings, which also
touched political issues.
Ludwig lived in Maryland not far from the Pollycoves. They became close friends and also enjoyed social functions in the region and common hobbies such as music and theater in DC and Maryland, always in the
company of Rosalyn, an accomplished pianist herself. There was no get-together with colleagues, though, without talking and revolving at least a bit around the best way to accommodate published data and arguments into a pattern of mechanisms that could serve a model to describe system responses to low doses.

One of Myron’s particular contributions was his courageous unraveling of low-dose response functions as they were published by epidemiologists on the basis of the Linear-no-Threshold (LNT) hypothesis, without
consideration not only of actual data at low doses but also of the increasing experimental evidence and epidemiological suggestions against the validity of the LNT hypothesis and for hormetic responses to low doses.  In doing so he uncovered shortcomings by epidemiologists and statisticians in dealing with hard data.

Another particular initiative by Myron was estimating the rate of DNA damage production from endogenous reactive oxygen species (ROS).  This project together with Ludwig was supported by the US Department
of Energy (DOE) as a potential input into formatting the DOE Low Dose Research program that had started just then. The execution demanded repeated group discussions with experts, also on the West Coast. It was a great satisfaction to see their estimates fall into agreement with the experimental data reported later from different laboratories. The essential finding was that, irrespective of quality, the average number of double
strand DNA breaks (DSBs) per day from endogenous ROS per cell was about a thousand times higher than the respective DSB number from average background radiation. Until then, the production rate of non-
radiogenic DSB had been grossly underestimated.  This finding supported the hypothesis that adaptive protection, induced by low-dose radiation, can significantly reduce the incidence of non-radiogenic cancer. The hypothesis rests on what is called The Dual Response Model. This model endeavors to describe net radiogenic cancer induction as the difference between low-dose induced cancer and low-dose induced protection against non-radiogenic plus radiogenic cancer, as functions of absorbed dose. It had been discussed since the early 90s in different ways, at various laboratories. The model predicts the ben-
eficial effects of low doses as the balancing or even outweighing of detriment, and thus predicts a dose threshold for radio-oncogenesis or even a reduction of cancer incidence below the control level.

The growing evidence of beneficial effects of low doses, i.e., hormetic responses to low doses, strengthened the repeated proposal by Myron, with support from Jerry Cuttler and Ludwig, to attempt clinical applica-
tions of low doses in the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases, as Kiyohiko Sakamoto had carried out in Japan in clinical studies on two hundred cancer patients. Myron contributed this topic importantly already, in 1998, to the Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference (PBNC) in Banff, Canada and again to the 2004 PBNC meeting in Hawaii. The most recent paper on this issue was delivered by Myron and Ludwig just three
years ago at the Low-Dose-Workshop in Richland, WA, in honor of Vic Bond. Thereafter, Myron had increasing difficulties in traveling, but he kept in touch and continued publishing. His last paper, together with
Ludwig and Ron Neumann from the NIH, appeared in 2013 and presented an updated review on radiation hormesis.
It was a happy occasion in 2010 to witness Myron receiving the prestigious Outstanding Career Achievement Award from the International Dose Response Society, which was founded by Ed Calabrese and where Myron contributed greatly to the publication series Biological Effects of
Low Level Exposures (BELLE).

Throughout his work and many experiences, Myron was sharp-witted and meticulously precise in  definitions, planning and execution of all he did. And Rosalyn was always at his side and support, until overcome by her fast-evolving illness less than 10 years ago. Eventually, the Pollycoves returned to the Bay Area in San Francisco to be closer to their children. Myron remained full of ideas. He had a warm-hearted approach to people and enthusiasm towards all progress for the good. He had a realistic vision of human endeavors at all levels of life with a great capacity for tolerance, yet a stubborn resistance against what he saw as preventable errors or misconducts – just as the compassionate classical music lover
that he was rejects orchestras that are “out-of-tune.” His ideas will live on.

Douglas Boreham

Doug is a Radiation Biologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Physics and Applied Radiation Sciences, at McMaster University.

Professor Boreham is from Elliot Lake which was a small uranium mining town in Northern Ontario. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa in 1990 and worked for ten years as a Radiation Biologists for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. He moved to McMaster University in 2000 and in the past eight years has established four new state-of-the-art radiation biology laboratories to study the biological effects of low dose radiation exposures in humans and non-human biota.

Professor Boreham has attracted millions of dollars in research support for McMaster University and is building Canada’s first biological microbeam to study the effects of a single alpha particle in cells. He has over 22 years of radiation research experience and his expertise involves radiation cancer risk and genetic effects of radiation on living systems. He has published more than fifty scientific research manuscripts and has won four major teaching awards since moving to McMaster University. He has been invited to give scientific and public lectures about radiation risk around the world. Doug Boreham has been conducting experiments in Hamilton Ontario with low level X ray suppression of cancers.

Since 1995, Dr. Cuttler has been assessing the health effects of ionizing radiation and drawing international attention to radiation hormesis. He presented tens of papers at many conferences pointing out that low exposures are stimulating for curing infections, extending life and reducing the incidences of cancer and congenital malformations. He organized adaptive response sessions at nuclear energy conferences, inviting renowned radiobiologists to present remarkable evidence. He has urged many oncologists to use total-body low-dose radiation in cancer therapy. He has intervened with regulators with submissions that identify beneficial effects following low doses and debunk the LNT assumption. He arranged presentations by world specialists in low dose at hospitals, universities, nuclear centers and societies. He continues to communicate positive low dose information and fight politicized radiation scares on the Internet and at professional and social clubs.

Dr. Cuttler is the recipient of 2011 International Dose-Response Society Award for Outstanding Career Achievement. The award is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Dose Response

Edward Calabrese of the USA has advanced the theory of radiation hormesis through extensive toxicological experimentation.

Edward Calabrese, a professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been awarded the Marie Curie Prize for “outstanding achievements in research on the effects of low and very low doses of ionizing radiation on human health and biotopes.”

At an international conference this week at UMass Amherst, Andre Maisseu, president of the Paris-based World Council of Nuclear Workers, announced that Calabrese is the council’s 2009 Curie Prize winner. Maisseu saluted Calabrese during the annual meeting of the International Dose-Response Society, of which Calabrese, an environmental toxicologist, is a founder and current director. Maisseu said the prize recognizes an entire body of research that has improved scientific knowledge of low-dose ionizing radiation effects on human beings and biological communities. A formal award ceremony will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in September.
Dr. Sadao Hattori is the now retired Vice President in charge of Nuclear Energy of Japan’s Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI). He directed Japan’s research program on the effects of low-dose radiation, conducted at 14 universities. A 1959 graduate of Tokyo Institute of Technology with a master’s degree in nuclear engineering, Hattori received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo with a thesis on the risk assessment of nuclear energy. He has been a guest professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology and at the Nagoya Institute of Technology, and he has held his present position at CRIEPI since 1989. Hattori was interviewed by managing editor Marjorie Mazel Hecht in April 1997, and published in 21st Century Science & Technology. Summer 1997, Vol. 10, No. 2.

Dr. Sakamoto is famous for his cancer cures using radiation hormesis in Japanese government labs.

Here is a link to his last presentation when lecturing in the USA

The University of Ottawa hosts the International Centre for Low Dose Radiation Research.   This is a great source.
http://www.lowdose.uottawa.ca/projects.htm

The two main researchers can be contacted through the mail addresses below.

Philippe Duport,
Director,
555 King Edward Ave,
Ottawa, ON.
K1N 6N5

Russell Renaud
Project Manager,
555 King Edward Ave,
Ottawa, ON.
K1N 6N5

There are many many other researchers in the field of Radiation Hormesis.    This is just a sample of the researchers.

These researchers will lead you to other researchers.   The topic of Radiation Hormesis is a very hot topic in biology and many PhD papers have come out in the last few years on this subject.