Revision 1
March 19, 1998
by Radiation, Science, and Health, Inc.,
Edited by J. Muckerheide

1.9
Conclusions

"I have found and adduced arguments for that the current pretensions to knowledge about low-dose transformations of cells into malignant phenotypes are inconsistent with modern oncology as well as entirely futile on purely epistemological grounds. In this respect, modern oncology has clearly shown that the contribution of a small (non-dominant) radiation dose is not a stochastic event but a highly conditional one.

"Furthermore, a malignant cell transformation is not synonymous with cancer. The transformed cell has to divide and, thus, new copies of the genome have to be formed more than a billion number of times before we can speak of a tumor or establish that an organism has contracted cancer. This is what the Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann means when he characterizes cancer as multi-iterative process in a complex, adaptive system. He (and others) has shown that the outcome of such a process is fundamentally unpredictable."