RADIATION HAZARDS

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28266, 2 May 1957, Page 11

RADIATION HAZARDS

U.S. Scientist’s

Warning

CHICAGO, April 30.

Dr. Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, said last night that Britain’s proposed hydrogen bomb tests could cause 1000 fatal cases of leukemia around the world.

If all hydrogen weapons tests were not banned, he added, the coming generation would give birth to an additional 200,000 feeble-minded children.

Dr. Pauling, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology, expressed this view in an interview after addressing the Chicago section of the American Chemical Society. He said the predicted 1000 leukemai deaths would occur over a period of years as a result of gene mutations.

Dr. Pauling told the meeting he was certain the human race could not survive an all-out hydrogen wfir “and remain in the human race.” The chemist, who has been studying sickle cell anaemia, based his estimate on a hydrogen bomb explosion equal to that of 5,000,000 tons of T.N.T. (A sickle cell is a sickle-shaped red blood corpuscle, and the cause of one form of anaemia.) Dr. Pauling explained that when a person with one normal gene and a sickle cell gene married another person with the same gene pattern, they could expect one fourth of their children to develop leukemia. He said radioactive fallout, like cosmic rays which constantly bombarded the earth, could cause a normal gene to turn into a sickle cell gene through mutation. These genes were the tiny microscopic organisms which determined heredity and the way the body produced such things as red blood cells. Other genes determined mental stability, Dr. Pauling added.