The Risk of Fear of Risk (Nuclear)

The last surviving double hibakusha has died. Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who had the incredible fortune of surviving both atomic bombings in Japan, has succumbed at age 93 to stomach cancer, after leading an otherwise healthy life since he was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later. His story, and those of all the survivors, known in Japan as hibakusha, teach us many things. One of them is that ionizing radiation from nuclear energy is indeed a carcinogen. But it’s not nearly as potent a threat as many people believe. Another lesson is that our fear of nuclear radiation may actually be making things more dangerous, not less.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a horrible human experiment from which we have learned just what this type of radiation can do to human health. Nearly 90,000 hibakusha have been followed by epidemiologists for nearly 65 years. Scientists compared them to a non-exposed Japanese population, to see what the radiation exposure did. The current estimate is that 572 hibakusha have died prematurely from radiation-induced cancer. To many, that is a surprisingly small number.

Research by the international Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) http://www.rerf.or.jp/ also found that the developing children of pregnant hibakusha women suffered horrible birth defects. But, awful as those impacts are, that’s about it. Studies by RERF and many others have found little other long-term health damage, even among the 54,000 hibakusha who were close to the explosions and were exposed to extraordinarily high levels of all sorts of radiation. (Ionizing radiation comes in various sorts of radioactive bits and energy waves, each of which has a different penetrating power and thus, danger.) Not even genetic damage. “Thus far, no evidence of increased genetic effects has been found,” the RERF scientists say.

The World Health Organization estimates of the health effects from Chernobyl rest on what those atomic blasts in 1945 taught us. Based on a meta analysis of the epidemiological research done post-Chernobyl, the WHO says that of several hundred thousand people exposed to potentially dangerous levels of ionizing radiation, over the entire lifetime of that population, roughly 4,000 might die prematurely from cancer caused by the radiation. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html

Again, tragic. But again, a smaller number than many people assume.

But there are other reasons why nuclear radiation is scary. It’s invisible, which makes us feel like we can’t protect ourselves, and a lack of control contributes to fear. It causes cancer, a particularly painful end result, and the more pain and suffering something causes the more afraid of it we are likely to be. It’s human-made, and that makes it scarier than natural radiation risks, like the sun (which kills an estimated 8,500 Americans per year from skin cancer. www.cancer.org/downloads/STT/500809web.pdf).

Atomic bombings, and events like Chernobyl, are large scale and sudden, and catastrophic events tend to freak us out more than chronic killers, like skin cancer, or the air pollution from burning fossil fuels, estimated to cause tens of thousands of deaths each year in the U.S., 3 million globally according to the WHO.) The huge amount of attention these catastrophic events receive - rightfully - tends to burn the fear deep into our memories, raising our sensitivity to any similar risks when they come along.

Risk is subjective, a matter of both the facts and our feelings. Despite the evidence from the hibakusha and Chernobyl, nuclear energy scares many people, who resist it as one of the solutions to climate change, or a low emission way to reduce local air pollution. Their questions - “What about another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island,” “What about terrorist attacks on nuclear plants near big cities,” “What about the waste?” are all fair concerns that must be addressed. But, as we have learned from the experience of Mr. Yamaguchi and his fellow hibakusha, we should also honestly look to what science can tell us about this risk, or any risk, and keep the actual level of danger in mind as we weigh what to be afraid of and just how afraid we need to be. Otherwise the choices we make, both as individuals and as a society, may feel good, but may actually make things worse, not better.

This is Your Brain on Fear

So I was walking my dogs in the woods the other day and it happened again. There was this long skinny curving line on the ground, and my rational brain said “That’s a root” and my animal brain screamed “SNAKE! SNAKE!”, and the animal brain won. I froze.

This happens to me all the time, which is dumb for three reasons. First, I KNOW it’s not a snake. Second, this is what I study and teach…the way we human animals perceive risk and how to communicate about risk better, so I should be able to overcome this apparent irrationality. And third, every time it happens I tell myself not to let it happen again…but it does. By the way, this DOESN’T happen to my dogs.

The good news is we understand pretty well how this works…how whenever we encounter something that could be hazardous, that information goes first to the part of the brain that sets off a fight or flight response just in case, and THEN it goes to the parts of the brain that can give it a little thought, and send back the message “You did it again you idiot.” By which time, I’ve already frozen.

It doesn’t matter what the potential threat is. It doesn’t matter whether we see it, smell it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or even if it’s just information assembled in our brain…a thought…or a memory. The same thing happens. The information goes to where we fear first, and to where we think, second.

And then, in the ensuing battle between rationality and gut instinct…guess what? Instinct usually wins, or at least it has the upper hand, again because of wiring in the brain.

So there I am on the trail. My dogs look at me to try to figure out why we’re stopping. I ignore this innocent interrogation and move on. And I am reminded once again that talking to people about risk a messy affair. Most risk communication just tries to find really clear ways to explain the facts, to educate. But if just learning the facts was enough, I wouldn’t be freezing when I saw a root on the ground in the woods. If just the facts were enough, we probably wouldn’t be as afraid as we all are about a lot of things…like terrorism (the fear of which helped launch a war) or nuclear power, or industrial chemicals…and we’d probably be more afraid of the things that are much more likely to kill us, like heart disease (it kills 2200 Americans every day), and stroke, and motor vehicle crashes and other accidents.

I find that if I want to help my friends make informed, healthy choices about the risks they face…well, yes, it might help to offer what few facts I can…but I also have to respect their fears, and not just say ”Here are the Facts. Calm Down”. I have to respectfully help them know that risk perception is a combination of facts AND feelings, and though both are valid, sometimes the feelings can lead to behaviors that actually increase the risk. Just knowing that challenges me to think about risks more thoroughly.

Unless, of course, it’s another root in the shadows at my feet. Maybe I should just let my dogs walk ahead of me.

Slow Down, Doctors Frankenstein

The main character in Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” has always been known by that name. Frankenstein. But in the book, the new life form created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein has no name. In public talks, Shelley was said to have referred to the creature as “Adam”…the human created in the Bible by God. The subtitle of the book is “The Modern Prometheus”…another God who, according to some versions of Greek myth, created Man.

Now we are a significant scientific step closer to the day when the creators of life will be us, not in the stories of novel and myth, but in our modern laboratories. A group of scientists has taken the DNA out of one bacterium, put it into a bacterium of a similar but different species, and watched as the inserted DNA took over and turned the host cell into a replica of the species from which the DNA first came. Now all we have to do is manufacture the DNA ourselves, add own specifications, and we will have the ability to create new, completely synthetic, forms of life.

We’re not quite at the moment when Igor throws the switch and the voltage brings Dr. Frankenstein’s creation to life. But this work has brought us much closer. It has also brought us closer to a dangerous conflict between scientific progress and public perception. Public fear that scientists are creating new, synthetic forms of life….playing God in the lab. …could bring this work, with its risks and its phenomenal potential benefits, to a screeching halt.


Recent history bears this out. There was public apprehension about and resistance to recombinant DNA research in the 70’s. Uncertainty was high, and fear followed close behind. Scientists were alleged to be “toying with life”. Legislative restrictions started to limit such work. Experiments were shut down. Progress in the field slowed dramatically.
The relatively tepid resistance to that earlier work will pale compared to the public uproar sure to erupt when scientists announce they have manufactured DNA, put it in a cell, and created life. Reaction to that could interfere with progress in life sciences for years.

As was the case with recombinant DNA research in the 70’s, the science of manipulating life is charging ahead with all the energy of human curiosity, the seduction of ego, the lure of riches, and the promise of solutions to many of our most pressing health and environmental problems. And as was the case with recombinant DNA science, while the ethical implications of synthetic life science are being considered, the public perception implications are not. Far too little is being done to communicate to the public about this work; the safety controls under which it is done, the great benefits it can bring, the respect that scientists have (or should have) for public concerns, and their willingness to develop and live by self-controls.

Again, the recombinant DNA episode instructs. As the pressure mounted back then, researchers gathered with lawyers and doctors at a conference near Asilomar State Beach in California. They came up with a long list of biological safety procedures, self-imposed legal restrictions, and the vital acknowledgment that for scientific knowledge to advance, scientists also have to develop guidelines for how their work should be regulated.

The participants at Asilomar also recognized the need to help the public understand their work, to demystify their science, to respect and address public apprehension. Many of them engaged much more actively with the press and accepted the responsibility that communicating about their work to the general public was nearly as important as the work itself.

Asilomar was in many ways an act of self-interest. Nonetheless, by recognizing and responding to public apprehension in tangible ways, the participants at Asilomar took a vital step in re-establishing public trust in science, which in turn has allowed for decades of progress in biology that has put us on the brink of being able to create synthetic life.

But the lessons of Asilomar seem to have faded. The leaders in the field of synthetic life science need to recognize the concerns the public is starting to have about their work…ethical concerns, safety concerns…and deal with our apprehensions actively, now, before Igor throws the switch and some lab creates a life form in a glass beaker that has never existed on earth before. They need to tell us what they are doing to keep their work safe. They need to tell us what they are doing to try to develop new ways of improving safety. They need to tell us how they, and we as a society, might oversee their work in ways that will allow progress but avoid harm. They need to simply explain what they’re doing, to reduce uncertainty and the fear that goes with it. They need to demonstrate that they take our worries seriously, and not just give those worries lip service while they chase their Nobel Prizes, patents, and personal fortunes.

The ability to construct DNA to our specifications and insert it into living cells, the ability to powerfully influence all biological life, has profound ethical and safety concerns. But it also offers almost unimaginable promise, to eliminate hunger, clean the environment, cure disease. Far less of that promise will be realized if the men and women doing this work don’t recognize and address our concerns about what they are doing. Otherwise they may learn how to create their Adam, only to find that, out of fear, we want to chase down what they have done and kill it.