Helsinki/Finland, January 11, 2012-Epidemiological studies are given the most weight in evaluation of human health effects. Therefore, when researchers started their effort to find out whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer, epidemiology was given the most of attention – and the most funding.

Well… yes, since Epidemology is the study of health events, disease patterns, health statistics and disease rates and their relation to factors like environment, lifestyle and other causes, it would seem to be the field of study that would apply to such a question.

It’s as straight forward as determining that geology is the appropriate field of science to look to when trying to determine the characteristics of a rock.

However, and please let me play “devils advocate”,

Only if I can play with science advocate.

is the epidemiology overrated?

No.

There, are we done?

Will epidemiology ever give us reliable answers concerning cell phone radiation and brain cancer?

Yes, and they have. Or is it simply that you don’t like the answer and want it to be something else, therefore you consider it flawed?

In 2010 and in 2011, two of the largest epidemiological studies on brain cancer were published. It appears that the time and money were used generously,

There’s a lot of interest in the topic, so a lot went into it. I’m not certain which studies you mean, but there have been some enormous ones recently.

but the studies failed to provide reliable answers concerning cell phones radiation and brain cancer. Flaws in the design of both studies prevented delivering conclusive answers.

Really? Well, if you say so. But thankfully, we don’t have to rely on any two studies. Two studies don’t mean much in the world of epidemiology anyway. To actually get a conclusive answer, you need to have confirming data coming from many studies. In this case we’re lucky enough to have literally thousands. So, you could actually discard two of them if you so choose and it won’t change the balance of the evidence much, because there’s such a huge amount from other sources.

It was 1999 when the largest case-control epidemiological study, INTERPHONE, was planned. At that time, optimists hoped that by the end of this project in 2004 we would know whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer.

Actually, I think we had a pretty good idea even back in 1999, so it doesn’t seem very optimistic to think we would by 2004. That would be like me predicting that in the year 2017 we’ll know that the earth revolves around the sun. Unless there’s some kind of complete collapse of civilization that leaves behind only a handful of completely uneducated people, I am pretty sure we will know that in 2017, since we do already know it now.

I think I see where this is going though. The Interphone study was supposed to be one of the largest studies of this type and would dispel the doubt forever. It pretty much did.

After several delays, INTERPHONE published the results of the glioma brain cancer study in 2010.

The results were confusing, to say the least. Use of the cell phone for less than 10 years seemed to have a “protective” effect, whereas the use of the cell phone for more than 10 years showed a small increase in glioma occurrence.

Well I agree on one thing: The study abstract didn’t do a very good job of putting this all in context. It might simply be that research scientists are very apprehensive about using absolutes and tend to talk in degree of confidence. The tiny increase in giloma, but only in certain subsets was almost certainly statistical noise. It was miniscule. The “protective” effect can be attributed to a combination of statistical noise and possibly some slight confounding factors.

The balance of the data provides pretty good confirmation of no overall risk increase. Again, this should have been made more clear. The problem largely stems from having non scientifically literate persons get involved in the reporting. Reports and public officials have a tendency to focus on very narrow portions of a study like this and take them out of context. They will generally then demand to know whether the researchers can be 100% confident that this is not in fact a risk effect. The answer to that question is always no, statistical analysis never regards anything as being 100% certain. Then the study gets reported as if it raised doubts, when it actually does not.

Several problems with the design of INTERPHONE were debated. By design, the INTERPHONE study was unable to detect brain cancer induced by cell phone radiation because of its long (over 10 years) latency period.

Okay, that might be the case, but plenty of other studies did look at longer latency periods. A few went so far as to track down some of the early adopters of cell phones who started using them frequently in the early 1980’s and they also found no increase in brain cancer.

That said, even if the AVERAGE latency period were something like twenty or thirty years, it’s hard for me to imagine that there could be a bell curve so narrow as to have zero detectable risk increase after a much shorter period of time.

At the time of execution of INTERPHONE (2000-2004), cell phones were in common use for only a few years. There would be not enough time for the development and diagnosis of brain cancer if it was caused by cell phone radiation.

It does not matter how common they were by the early 2000’s. The fact of the matter is that they have existed since the late 1970’s and they have been used by many people since then. Sure, the actual proportion of the population that began using cell phones a lot in the early 1980’s is small, but it’s still more than large enough to produce good study results.

It’s not even really a cell phone issue. Wireless phones are just UHF/Microwave transmitters and those have been around for ages. There are studies that have been done on others exposed much longer. Police officers started using radar guns in the late 1950’s to measure the speed of motorists and some cops spent thirty years working highway patrol with a radar gun in their car. Others spent their careers as microwave technicians for AT&T or television networks. Military personnel worked on the deck of ships with radar antennas energized nearby.

Studies have been done on these individuals. Many of them, in fact. The results are consistent and compelling: The only health effects ever detected are acute thermal injuries and no chronic effect of exposure to RF fields has ever been documented.

However, there was an even more important design flaw. The information about the extent of exposures to cell phone radiation was based on individual recollection of the subjects in the study. The study subjects were asked about their history of using cell phone, including how long and how many phone calls they made in the past.

Perhaps in this study, but not in all. While it may introduce a potential source of error, I’m hard pressed to see how this could possibly skew the studies that badly. Even if you rely on spotty recollection, the fact that people who reported being heavy phone users show no greater cancer risks than those who never owned a cell phone at all would seem to be pretty hard to mess up.

By the way: Studies on cigarette smoking and cancer have largely been based on the subject’s recollection of how many packs they usually smoked a day. Despite this, they had no problem picking up on the fact that tobacco causes lung cancer.

It is a very unreliable method. Who of us remembers how many and how long calls made a few days ago? The study subjects were asked to recall cell phone use up to ten years before the study.

Okay, lets see if I can do this…

Got my first cell phone in the summer of 2001. Before that I had used cell phones a bit, but only occasionally when on that belonged to someone else. I worked for a company that sold cell phones so I had a good plan with a discount. Consequently, I used it a good few minutes a day or more. I would say my use has generally been on the increase since then, although not always. I’ve generally made or received three or four calls per day, usually each one only being a few minutes. Occasionally I have longer calls. In 2004 and 2005 I had a job that had me on the road a lot and my usage went up to about a dozen calls a day, but mostly short. As it stands now I use about 180 minutes of talk time in a month, but occasionally one or two long calls can push that way up. That’s how it’s been for the past few years.

Good enough?

Therefore, by design, INTERPHONE compared reliable information concerning diagnosed cancers with entirely unreliable information about exposures. Such kind of comparison can not produce reliable result, as was seen in the confusing results of the study published by INTERPHONE in 2010.

Again, you’re presuming that this error is so great that it would make someone who has never owned a cell phone indistinguishable in risk from someone who says they’ve been a heavy cell phone user for the past ten years. That just does not make sense. Even if recollection skewed the data, it shouldn’t so enough to cause that kind of discrepancy.

In 2011, the Danish Cohort published another largest study, evaluated in this column in December 2011.

Similarly to INTERPHONE, the Danish Cohort compared reliable information on diagnosed brain cancers with the absolutely unreliable information about exposures based not on the use of cell phone but on the length of subscription with the network operator.

No. That’s actually perfectly reasonable. It stands to reason that a person who has a cell phone contract and owns a cell phone will be more prone to using a cell phone than one who does not. This is even more true in the early years. In 1983, a handheld cell phone cost about four thousand US dollars. Anyone who pays that much for something obviously has reason to do so. For example, real estate agents were some of the first to embrace the technology, because even given the high cost, they needed to make appointments while traveling between properties.

It might be imperfect in that some cell phone owners will use it more than others, but a cell phone owner will always use it more than one who does not own a cell phone.

The study also contaminated the control group with the cell phone users.

The study looked at the habits of long term user as compared to the general population and to groups of similar demographic profiles. Some of those included those who had used a cell phone as well, but didn’t you just assert that it would not matter since the latency period is very long? In any case, it’s all but impossible to find a large group these days which has never owned a cell phone. So the study compared long term cell phone users to those who either had recently acquired a cell phone, never owned a cell phone or had been very light user. The study actually looked at the groups using more than one method. It examined it based on the length of the phone ownership, the average usage of the phone, the reported habits etc.

In all cases, no coloration to increases in brain cancer was ever detected.

Again, as with the INTERPHONE, the Danish Cohort made comparison of reliable data on cancer with the unreliable information about exposures cannot produce reliable final result.

And what the hell would you consider to be reliable data?

Brain cancer is a rare disease, somewhat in the range of around 10 cases per 100,000 people. It means that in order to reliably detect the change, which seems to be less than 50% according to flawed INTERPHONE, tens of thousands of the study subjects should be analyzed. This is very expensive but not necessarily productive.

It’s actually not quite that rare. In fact, it’s about twice as common as cited.

But regardless, the fact is that if the probability of brain cancer were increased by using a cell phone, it would be easy to detect if that probability increase were large. In other words, if it increased the risk from, 22 per 100,000 people to 23 per 100,000 people, that would be very hard to find and a massive sample would be needed. On the other hand, if it increased it from 22 per 100,000 people to 100 per 100,000 people, that would be easy to detect and would stand out from the statistical noise in even a modest study.

Therefore, what we can say from these studies, without doubt, is that while it is impossible to rule out the possibility that there is an increased risk, it must be vanishingly small, if it does exist, because otherwise it would have been easily detected.

As shown by the experiences with INTERPHONE and Danish Cohort, large amounts of money (tens of millions of Euros) and ample amounts of time (over 10 years) were used and no reliable answers received.

No, we have reliable answers. They’re just not the ones you want.

In the current situation, with the above presented experience, should the epidemiology be the first kind of studies to use our scarce research resources? Epidemiology is very expensive and takes a very long time to get results. Any flaw in the study design sets us back by ten or more years.

Well I agree in so much as there’s no point in throwing more money at this. We have plenty of data. The jury is not out. The questions have been answered. It’s time to consider spending money on things we don’t know.

Would we be we better off using the available funding for the human studies examining acute effects of cell phone radiation on physiology? This would, of course, include studies of the known molecular events leading to initiation and development of cancer. We still do not know if cell phone radiation triggers any such events in living humans.

We’ve actually done that too.

And as far as molecular events that lead to initiation and development of cancer, those are not observed with microwaves. No mechanism by which that could happen has ever been discovered, despite more than a century of study of RF fields and electromagnetic radiation.

Performing physiological studies on volunteer will provide information whether any known carcinogenic events are triggered by cell phone radiation. Depending on the result, we could act immediately by imposing preventive measures based on scientific evidence.

Yes, we have done that. We’ve done it on humans. We’ve done it on animals. We’ve done it on live tissue cultures. We’ve done it on chemical systems that mimic what goes on in cells.

To provide such information, epidemiology will still need tens of years before it is able to perform effective studies, assuming that studies will be designed without any major flaws. Volunteer studies examining physiology and pro-carcinogenetic events would provide information much faster.

It’s been done. At some point it becomes time to give up on the existence of something which has been studied for so long and has not been determined to exist.

In this time of scarce resources, we need to make choices how to obtain, most reliably and expeditiously, information about the possible effect of cell phone radiation on brain cancer.

Based on the experience of the last 10-15 years, epidemiology does not seem to be the method of choice.

Well, compared to an assclown with an ax to grind and a desire to be in the newspaper, it actually does pretty well.

The solution to this problem has been the radioisotope thermal generator.   An RTG is a simple device, consisting of a strong particle-emitting isotope that produces heat and a thermoelectric generator which converts that heat into electricity.   The heat can also be used to keep vital components of the probe warm.  Unlike nuclear reactors, radioisotope thermal generators are extremely simple, have no minimum critical mass, produce little gamma and almost no neutron emissions, which could blind scientific instruments, and therefore require little or no shielding.  Modern RTG’s can provide hundreds of watts of reliable electrical power for years on end in a small, durable package.

The choice of isotope for space missions has always been, and continues to be plutonium-238. Plutonium-238 is a powerful alpha emitter which produces enormous amounts of heat energy.  Plutonium-238 produces only a small amount of low energy gamma emissions, making it easy to shield.  It’s easily prepared into ceramic oxide pellets that are chemically stable and have good thermal transfer.   With an 88 year half-life, plutonium-238 is short lived enough to be a good energy producer yet long lived enough to allow for missions of many decades.

All radioisotope thermal generators used for deep space missions have used plutonium-238.   RTG’s were also used to power the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Packages left by astronauts on the moon.    The RTG used for the Mars Science Laboratory provides 110 watts of electricity and uses about 4.5 kilograms of plutonium-238.  Larger RTG’s have been built for deep space probes, which provide up to 300 watts of power and use 7.8 kilograms of plutonium-238.  Some spacecraft have used multiple RTG’s, for example, Cassini was equipped with three RTG’s which provided a total of 900 watts of power to the spacecraft.

There are other isotopes that can also be used to provide power for RTG’s, but none are as desirable as Pu-238.   Strontium-90, a high energy beta emitter, which can be extracted from spent fuel, also produced significant amounts of heat, but would require substantially more shielding and produces less power per gram of material.  Isotopes of Curium have been studied as well, but also provide much less power and require greater shielding.  Americium-241 has also been considered, but at least four times as much material would be needed to produce the same amount of power, and greater shielding would also be required. Still, Am-241 is regarded as being the second most well suited fuel for RTG use.

Worldwide production of Am-241 is only a few kilograms per year, with US production capacity standing at only 500 to 750 milligrams annually.   Most of this material is already used to fill demand for smoke detectors and moisture gauges.  In order for the US to have a viable chance of using Am-241 as an RTG fuel, production would have to be ramped up significantly.

At one time, plutonium-238 was relatively cheap and easily available.  The United States had large stocks of the material and used it for numerous space missions.  Yet since the early 1990’s, that has not been the case.  Since then, only Russia has had the capacity to produce plutonium-238 and the price has skyrocketed.   US missions have been entirely dependent on plutonium-238 purchased from Russia at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Yet now even this limited supply is threatened, as Russia has begun to signal that it will no longer be able to provide the quantities of Pu-238 that the US (or potentially other nations) would require for continued space exploration.

Production of Plutonium-238:

The plutonium that can be extracted from light water spent fuel contains significant amounts of plutonium-238, but it’s combined with other isotopes of plutonium, making it unusable.  Separating out the plutonium-238 would require a complex plutonium enrichment system, which is far less practical than simply preparing the plutonium-238 on its own.

To produce plutonium-238, the first thing that is required is neptunium-237.  Neptunium-237 is produced as a byproduct of the reprocessing of spent fuel.   When a nucleus of uranium-235 absorbs a neutron, it will usually fission.  However, in a thermal spectrum reactor, some of the uranium-235 (about 18%) will absorb a neutron and not fission.  Instead, the uranium-235 becomes uranium-236.  Uranium-236 has a low neutron cross-section, so most of the uranium-236 generated in a reactor will just remain uranium-236, but a small amount of it does absorb a neutron and become uranium-237.  Uranium-237 has a very short half-life of only six days, decaying to neptunium-237.  Another source of neptunium-237 in spent fuel is the alpha decay or americium-241.

Spent fuel contains about .7 grams of np-237 for every one hundred kilograms of fuel.  That might not seem like much, but fuel reprocessing operations routinely go through hundreds of tons of fuel.   Because Np-237 is the only isotope of neptunium present in spent fuel in any significant quantity, it does not require any enrichment.  Instead, simply chemically separating the neptunium out yields nearly 100% neptunium-237.

After removing the neptunium-237, it is fabricated into targets which are irradiated with neutrons in a high flux reactor.   The targets are then removed and processed to separate out the plutonium-238 that is produced.  The plutonium-238 is then fabricated into RTG fuel tablets.

The end of US production:

The United States ended the practice of spent fuel reprocessing in 1977 when it was banned by the Carter Administration because of “proliferation concerns.”  Since then, the ban has been lifted, but as all reprocessing operations were shut down in the 1970’s and little support can be found for restarting the practice, the US still has no capacity to reprocess spent fuel.  After 1977, some material from plutonium production reactors continued, which yielded some neptunium-237, but that also ended in 1992, with the end of the cold war.

Today, the United States reprocesses no fuel at all and therefore cannot produce any neptunium-237.  There may still be some of the material remaining, though it’s doubtful that very much is left.   It should still be possible to obtain Np-237, purchasing it from countries with major spent fuel reprocessing programs, such as Russia, France or Japan.   However, this depends entirely on the willingness of such nations to provide it and may be expensive, since additional steps beyond normal reprocessing are required to produce the highly concentrated neptunium necessary for plutonium-238 production.

Getting enough Np-237, however, is not the biggest problem that the United States faces in producing Pu-238, however.   The US has a shortage of suitable reactors where the neptunium could be irradiated to produce the final plutonium-238 product.  Irradiating the targets requires a reactor with a very high neutron flux and the ability to receive materials for irradiation.  During the Cold War, the United States operated reactors at the Hanford and Savannah River sites primarily for the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.  These same reactors could be used to irradiate materials for the production of medical and industrial isotopes along with materials like plutonium-238.  Therefore, up until the late 1980’s, the US had ample capacity for plutonium-238 production.   In the early 1990’s, the United States shut down all such reactors over “proliferation concerns.”   Russia, on the other hand, converted theirs to the full time production of peaceful isotopes, which is why they have been the world source for plutonium-238.

There are other reactors in the United States that could potentially produce plutonium-238, but not many of them.   The US has seen an unfortunate reduction in the number of research and irradiation reactors available.  Many, such as the Fast Flux Test Facility were shut down due to “proliferation concerns.”  Others like the High Flux Beam Reactor were closed after celebrities lobbied heavily against them.  Many simply were closed due to age and have not been replaced, given the lack of construction of new research reactors in the US in recent years.

There are only two reactors in operation that might be usable for producing plutonium-238.  One is the High Flux Isotope Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  However, the HFIR is already running at near full capacity for basic materials research and producing specialty isotopes.  It’s the only source of the vital isotope Cf-252 in the United States.  It also hosts a recently installed cold neutron source.   Because of this, the HFIR does not have enough available capacity to produce Pu-238.  That leaves one reactor: the Advanced Test Reactor.   The ATR is located at the Idaho National Laboratory.  It’s the only source in the US for production of cobalt-60, an isotope critical to medicine and industry.  It’s also one of only a few reactors that can be used to simulate extended fuel irradiation in a light water reactor, making it critical to fuel studies.  It’s not entirely clear to what extent producing Pu-238 at the Advanced Test Reactor might limit its capacity for other important functions.

The Advanced Test Reactor has been the focus of recent efforts to restart US Pu-238 production.   Several bills and proposals to begin production at the site have been floated, but funding has not been provided.  Most recently, a funding request for the relatively small amount of fifteen million dollars by the DOE was shot down by Congress.  No explanation was given, but it seems no US legislators are interested in restarting plutonoum-238 production, quite possibly because nobody’s spent any money lobbying for it and some have spent money lobbying against it.

Restarting production in the US may prove more difficult than simply finding a suitable reactor.   Producing the final Plutonium-238 tablets used for providing heat to RTG’s requires that the irradiated targets be dissolved, the plutionium-238 processed out and fabricated into the final RTG fuel.   The material is very hot, both in terms of radioactivity and literally.  Handling and processing it requires special facilities such as hot cells and plutonium chemical separation facilities.  The United States has limited capabilities in this area, with most of the facilities capable of fabricating special nuclear materials shut down over “proliferation concerns.”

That said, the US should have enough capacity for processing such materials to make at least a modest Pu-238 production program possible, if only funding is provided and the effort to do so is undertaken.   Ideally, enough would be made to allow for its use on spacecraft without extreme conservation measures taken, but that seems to be politically unlikely due to “proliferation concerns.”

In the end, we are left with a few options for the US space program, not all of them very appealing:

1. Restart domestic production of plutonium-238
2. Continue to rely on the limited Russian capacity to produce the material and hope they do not cut production or sales, as they seem to be indicating will happen.  Perhaps this could be avoided by paying an even more exorbitant amount to Russia for the material.  Continue with only limited deep space flights due to this limited source.
3. Hope that some other country steps up to the plate and starts making plutonium-238.  There’s a good chance that a country like China might start domestic production in the coming years, as they become more ambitious in their space program.  Whether they’ll share with the US is another issue.
4. Rely on another isotope that will result in less energy per kilogram, require greater shielding and therefore dramatically reduce spacecraft capabilities and increase launch expense.
5. Rely exclusively on solar power for space exploration.  Space exploration will therefore be limited to the inner solar system, out to about the orbit of mars and a little bit further, even out to Jupiter, although this will require very large solar arrays and will be restricted in capability due to very limited power capacities.   Beyond Jupiter, exploration by space probes will be impossible and will have to cease entirely.  And while exploration of the inner solar system will still be possible, landers that require significant amounts of continuous power will not be possible, thus making the Mars Science Laboratory the last of its kind.

Personally, I vote for choice 1.

Shooting down an ICBM has always been an extremely challenging problem.  There is very little time to react to the missile and they travel at extreme speed.   The distances involved are enormous and because an interceptor must also travel at extreme speed, it can easily shoot right past the target.  This is made even more difficult by the fact that modern missiles have penetration aids and decoys that are hard to distinguish from the actual warhead.  Some also have the ability to maneuver and change course, making it difficult to plot an interception point.  The earliest systems addressed this in a simplistic, though likely effective way:  They would try to destroy the incoming warhead with a massive nuclear explosion.  For example, the Spartan missile carried a five megaton radiation-enhanced warhead that could destroy incoming missiles at a distance of 50 kilometers.   Another missile, the Sprint, used a much smaller explosive and was intended as a last line of defense for warheads that were entering their terminal phase.

Such systems, however, quickly fell from favor for a number of reasons.   For one, the massive blasts associated with them could have some catastrophic effects on the ionosphere and satellites in the area.  While this may have been considered preferable to absorbing an attack with nuclear missiles, it was still a major concern.   The use of high power nuclear explosives was also considered politically impalpable and the prospect of hundreds of nuclear-armed interceptors alarmed the Soviet Union.   The Soviets responded by designing new warheads that were radiation hardened and could withstand blasts up to as close as a few hundred meters.   They also threatened to build up their arsenal of nuclear missiles to include a large enough number to simply overwhelm any defense system

In the end, the US and Soviets both signed treaties to limit such weapons.   The US system, known as Safeguard, was only operational for a few months before being shutdown.   A similar Soviet system was dramatically scaled back and eventually had its nuclear warheads replaced with conventional explosives.

Today there are some interceptor systems that use missiles to intercept ICBM’s, although their effectiveness is somewhat limited.   One of the most notable is the US Aegis anti ballistic missile system. It’s quite effective against single warhead missiles that lack penetration aids and advanced features, but the effectiveness against a barrage of modern ICBM’s is questionable.

A separate approach developed in the 1980’s and focused on the use of directed energy weapons, especially lasers.   These would have a number of advantages over interceptor missiles.  They would be able to engage the target almost instantly and could track a fast moving and maneuvering target in ways that a physical interceptor never could.  The Strategic Defense Initiative was a program initiated by the Regan administration in the early 1980’s.   It studied a number of methods of intercepting missiles and warheads but focused especially on the use of high power lasers.   President Regan would say that one reason for pushing the program was the realization that even a single nuclear missile, perhaps launched by error, could not be stopped and would inevitably trigger a nuclear war.   Therefore, the ability to shoot down a missile quickly and effectively would be an important capability to help preserve world peace.

Whatever the motivation, the Strategic Defense Initiative had decidedly mixed results.  Huge amounts of money were expended and great strides were made in the development of high power lasers and remote sensing systems.   High speed interceptors were developed which eventually were incorporated into THAAD and the Aegis system.   High powered chemical lasers were developed and demonstrated to be capable of blinding satellites and tracking missiles, but showed limited potential against actual missile threats.   A few tests were conducted that showed the lasers could destroy the bodies of missiles, but this was generally limited to fairly thin-walled liquid fueled missiles, which were largely obsolete by the time.

The YAL-1:

After the close of the program in the early 1990’s, some attempts were made to find applications for the technology.   One was the YAL-1.  The YAL-1 is an attempt to make one of the huge chemical lasers developed for SDI into a viable weapon.   The mission of the YAL-1 is to shoot down ballistic missiles during the boost phase. This is a very short period of time during which the missile is just leaving the launch site on course for its target. It would be the ideal time to shoot down a missile, since it would avoid contamination of friendly areas with any materials on the missile and provide the quickest response to the threat.

The YAL-1 is a heavily modified Boeing 747-400, which has been used to house the massive laser.   The system is much more complicated than just cutting off the nose of a 747 and sticking a big laser in it, of course.   It involves a very precise system of tracking lasers, steering optics, sensors and support systems as well as the laser itself.   Engaging a target involves the use of a complex array of targeting optics and tracking lasers, which follow and illuminate the target.  Once acquired and tracked, the primary laser is fired through a stabilized turret containing adaptive optics which compensate for beam distortion caused by the atmosphere.

The laser used is itself a complex piece of equipment. A chemical oxygen iodine laser, it gets its power from a chemical reaction that produces an excited laser medium. The laser is fed by a combination of chlorine, iodine, hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide. These highly toxic and reactive chemicals are stored on the aircraft in corosion-resistant tanks. The byproducts of the reaction are discharged by a specialized exhaust system.

Now I have to admit, a massive flying laser is pretty damn cool and I’d love to have one to shoot at various things with, but the program has not been cheap. It was started in the mid 1990’s and didn’t actually reach the point of being able to test fire the laser in flight until earlier this year. During that time, it has cost tax payers more than 5.2 billion dollars.

Worse, it has a number of major problems that may well doom the plane from using its laser to do anything more than obliterate taxpayer money.
The Effectiveness Is, At Best, Questionable – Despite what you may see in sci-fi films, lasers are not the ultimate in destructive weaponry.   A laser of the type in the YAL-1 only heats the surface of a missile and attempts to weaken the skin to the point where the physical stresses on the missile fail.   This is much easier with older liquid fueled missiles, which often have thin aluminum tanks which could rupture relatively easily.  Solid fueled missiles are much tougher.   A design goal of the YAL-1 has been to engage solid fueled missiles at a range of 300 km, but it’s not clear if it can achieve this.Even if it does, it’s possible to make a missile resistant to laser weapons.  Ablative coatings or shields can prevent the heat from compromising the missile’s structure, and using a highly polished material around the tanks can be a very effective means of simply reflecting most of the laser beam away.  Other relatively simple counter measures could be employed by a savy enemy.  For example, they could launch a barrage of several decoy missiles, perhaps only having small first-stage engines and no warhead, simply to draw fire from the YAL-1 and depleted the limited reserves of laser chemicals stored on-board.

It Has Limited Range – 300 kilometers is not a huge distance, assuming it can even work at that distance.   In order to be effective, the YAL-1 would have to be orbiting in the area in the immediate vicinity of the launcher.  Even in the best circumstances, it will need to be a few hundred kilometers from the missile launch.   If it were to defend against missiles from Iran, for example, it would have to fly within Iran’s airspace.That pretty much means that the airspace around the launcher would have to already be under the control of the US Air Force and that overflying the area was already permitted.  If that is the case, then why even bother with the YAL-1?   The easier and preferred method of preventing missile launches is to destroy the launchers on the ground before they get a chance to fire.  While they can sometimes be camouflaged, a system of good reconciles and rapid strike aircraft can be very effective in making sure none ever get the chance to launch.

We Only Have One and That’s Not Enough -If you want to be able to effectively suppress missiles being fired from an area, then you will need to blanket that area on a consistent basis.  In other words, you need at least one and ideally several YAL-1 aircraft constantly orbiting.   If you ever give the enemy a chance to launch while the aircraft is not patrolling, that is when they’ll fire their missiles.   It’s rather difficult to hide the presence of something as big and unstealthy as a Boeing 747.   Like all aircraft, the YAL-1 has limited endurance.  It can remain aloft for a while using in-flight refueling, but eventually the crew will need more food, the engines will need to be inspected and the aircraft will need to land.   If it fires the laser at all, this could happen even faster.   The on-board chemical tanks only have enough material for about 20 shots at most, and it must land to have the laser system refueled.

Realistically, to have a viable force to actually suppress missiles being fired from even a small region of the world, at least ten of these aircraft would be required.  That is in addition to the other aircraft needed to keep the big 747 fueled and secure.  Each plane is estimated to cost about one hundred million US dollars to operate each year and has a capital cost of about one and a half billion dollars.   In other words, the project cost is going to be at least fifteen billion dollars and cost over a billion dollars annually to operate.

To add to the problem, the facilities, chemicals and equipment needed to service the YAL-1 is unique to only this aircraft and would not be available at most air bases.  It would either have to be brought to the area of operation or the aircraft would have to fly all the way back to the United States every time it needed to be reloaded with chemicals or serviced.

It Has Limited Capabilities Beyond Shooting Down Ballistic Missiles – If you are going to spend such an enormous amount of money on a weapons system, it would seem logical to want to be able to use it in more than the most narrow of circumstances.  Most ballistic missile interceptors are designed to also have the capability to engage aircraft or even satellites.   Few aircraft in the US Air Force inventory are good for only one very narrow and relatively rare mission.   Unfortunately, that would seem to be the case with the YAL-1.  It could, at least in principle, be used against enemy fighter or bomber aircraft, although the effectiveness is unknown and the range would be considerably less than many existing and highly effective surface to air or air to air missiles.

It’s  not considered to be a very good platform for attacking ground targets.   The thicker atmosphere at low altitudes tends to absorb the infrared laser light, severely limiting range and effectiveness.The laser could be modified to engage ground targets, but range would be reduced because more energy is absorbed by the atmosphere at lower altitudes.   And while some targets would be susceptible, hardened structures like bunkers or concert structures would be all but impervious to a laser weapon.   It  would also be many times more expensive than attacks using more conventional methods like guided bombs.  Since the YAL-1 was not intended to engage ground targets, there would need to be some modification to the tracking systems of the aircraft.

The Technology May Already Be On the Verge Of Obsolescence – Chemical lasers like the one used by the YAL-1 remain of interest for military purposes because they can generate a huge amount of laser energy from reserves of chemicals, without the need for large amounts of electrical power.   However, in recent years, advancements in battery technology and solid state lasers have started to challenge the capabilities of chemical laser systems.  Chemical lasers are limited to the number of firings by the chemical reserves on hand.  Refueling of the laser can be complex due to the precautions needed when handling the highly reactive chemicals involved.  They also require complex systems for chemical storage and delivery.

The availability of low cost, light weight lithium ion batteries and highly efficient solid state lasers is beginning to make it possible to achieve sufficient power from lasers that avoid the problems inherent to chemical lasers.  Already smaller solid state laser systems are appearing on the battlefield.  These systems are powered by generators with battery banks used to provide the brief pulses of extremely high power needed for the lasers.    For the time being, chemical lasers still seem to have the edge for super high power applications like the YAL-1, but solid state laser systems are progressing rapidly and may become the choice for applications of this power level in the near future.  In such an application, an APU and battery bank would take the place of the huge and hazardous chemical tanks.

Now, the big question:  What do we do with this thing?

Developing and building the YAL-1 has taken a huge amount of national treasure.   It is undoubtedly one of the most unique aircraft in the world, with capabilities no other has and technology that represents the cutting edge of laser weaponry.  Considering how much has been put into this thing, there must be something useful that can be done with it.

It could certainly be used for some research applications.  Testing a laser of this wavelength at various altitudes and conditions, determining the ability of various weapons to survive attack by a high energy laser is another application.  It might even be useful for certain atmospheric and meteorological research or in using lasers as part of a space propulsion system.  However, most of these could be done much more easily and at a lower cost in the laboratory or on the ground.  The amount of money spent would hardly be worth it if the YAL-1 only sees use as a very limited application scientific experiment platform.

As a weapon or defensive system, the YAL-1, realistic uses are harder to think of.   A fleet of ten of these is just not going to happen given the cost.  It’s possible one or two more might be built, if a viable use could be found for such a small fleet.

About the best I can think of would be to retain the anti-ballistic capability, but with the understanding that it will be pretty limited in coverage and to make the modifications necessary for engage targets on the ground.  For ground targeting, the YAL-1 could be useful for destroying targets where extreme levels of precision are required, far beyond what could be achieved with even the best guided bombs and missiles.  This might work for targeted assassinations of enemy leaders or if a vital target like a communications exchange is located right near a hospital or school.

But damn, that’s a lot of money for a weapon with no real deterrent value and little chance we’ll ever use.

Fission was recognized as a potential energy source after the possibility of a fission chain reaction was realized.  A chain reaction occurs when neutrons produced by nuclear fission strike other fissile nuclei, releasing more energy in a self-sustaining reaction.   In 1942, an experiment at the University of Chicago proved that nuclear fission could indeed produce such a chain reaction.   The first artificial fission reactor was created by piling large amounts of uranium together with ultra-pure graphite blocks.  The graphite slowed neutrons, making them easier to absorb by the uranium nuclei, resulting in the fission chain reaction.  In 1945, the first artificial fission chain reaction to occur without the aid of a moderator when the first nuclear weapon detonated in the Trinity test.  The Trinity device used plutonium as the fissile material, an element produced in nuclear reactors at the Hanford site.   Plutonium is too short-lived to be found in large quantities in nature.  Another bomb, fueled by uranium was the result of years of painstaking isotope separation, which increased the amount of fissile uranium-235 available to far beyond what is found in natural uranium samples.

For many years, it was believed that such fission reactions were always limited to these artificial circumstances.   Nuclear fission, it was thought, was the result of painstaking efforts by mankind to gather up the necessary materials, enrich beyond their natural concentrations and either bring them together rapidly in large quantities or place them in the special conditions inside a reactor, where neutron moderators make it possible to sustain nuclear fission.

In 1940, Russian scientists observed the phenomena of spontaneous fission, where heavy elements like uranium split on their own without the need for a neutron to cause the event.  It was also known that uranium atoms could split as the result of a neutron generated by cosmic rays.   However, such events are uncommon and produce little energy.   They are distinct from the chain reactions that had only been observed in human-created nuclear reactors.

All this changed in 1972, when an unusual discrepancy in the concentration of uranium-235 from a mine in Gabon Africa was detected.  Chemical analysis of a unique uranium deposit  indicated that the formation had sustained a fission chain reaction at one time.   The possibility of a natural nuclear reactor of this type had been suggested as early as 1956, but the Gabon discovery was the first time that such an event was confirmed to have happened.  Further investigation of the site identified at least sixteen regions of the deposit where the concentration of uranium and lighter elements clearly indicated that significant amounts of nuclear fission had occurred.

The reactor at Gabon operated about 1.7 billion years ago, producing chain reactions for at least hundreds of thousands of years.   It was remarkably similar to modern, artificial nuclear reactors.   Fission occurred when water seeped into cracks and pores in the deposits of extremely high grade uranium ore.   The water acted as a moderator, causing the chain reaction.   In modern times, water can only be used as a moderator in reactors where the uranium has been slightly enriched to contain more uranium-235 than found in nature, but because uranium-235 has a half-life of about seven hundred million years, there was a great deal more when the Gabon reactor was critical.

Exactly how long the Gabon reactor was critical or how much energy was released is not known.   Scientists have estimated that it probably generated about 100 kW of power and likely operated intermittently due to the buildup of neutron poisons and variations in the water levels in the rock.   It also generated some amount of plutonium-239 and other heavy isotopes, which would have added to the available fissile fuel.

There has been some debate about just how common reactors like that found in Gabon may have been.   While the Gabon deposit is the only one that is known to have sustained nuclear fission, that certainly does not mean it was the only one.  In fact, there were almost certainly others, possibly many others.  The geological record is incomplete for the period of time that the Gabon reactor was critical.  The vast majority of geological formations from over a billion years ago have long been obliterated by erosion, subduction, volcanic activity and other forces that continuously shape the earth’s crust.    Even if these reactors were once common on earth, we would not expect to find the evidence and the fact that at least one still exists intact at all may be sheer luck.

What is known is that deposits of uranium in concentrations high enough to potentially sustain such reactions are fairly common, even today, and while they don’t have the necessary isotopic concentrations to produce a fission chain reaction, they would have in earth’s early history.   The further back one goes, the higher the concentration of uranium-235 would be and thus the more easily a fission reactor could have come together.  Debate continues about the time scale when such reactors could have functioned, with some arguing that such naturally occurring uranium concentrations would require high levels of oxygen in order for the necessary geochemical processes to occur.

Yet the lack of a complete geological record ultimately makes it impossible to know for certain.   Reactors may have been very commonplace billions of years ago and they may have existed for some time after the period the Gabon reactor was dated to.   It’s remotely possible that a combination of plutonium produced within such reactors and the presence of better moderating materials, such as naturally-occurring beryllium allowed these formations to produce fission chain reactions even more recently than would have been possible with the Gabon reactor.

All that can be said is that there was a period of time in Earth’s distant history when natural nuclear reactors were possible and existed and they may very well have been fairly commonplace.   This itself is a huge revelation.

A reactor at the center of the earth?

Upon learning of the natural reactor discovered at Gabon, nuclear chemist J. Marvin Herndon hypothesized that nuclear fission might actually be far more central to the formation and conditions of earth than had been previously though.   Herndon suggested that if sufficient uranium existed in the core of the earth, it could result in a massive fast fission reactor, which would be capable of producing enough fuel through breeding to sustain fission for billions of years.

Herndon’s assertions have not generally been accepted by the mainstream geological community.   Direct evidence of such a reactor is relatively limited, although the levels of helium isotopes measured in volcanic samples have been intriguingly close to those that the hypothesis predicts. None the less, if true, the georeactor hypothesis would be an elegant explanation for a number of observed phenomena.   It would explain the source of apparently excessive heat in the earth’s core and mantel, which has traditionally been attributed exclusively to nuclear decay.   It also could explain the mysterious phenomena of magnetic pole reversal, which could have been caused by periods when the reactor stopped due to the buildup of neutron poisons, only to start again once they had decayed away.

There is, however, some other data which appears to dispute the possibility of a reactor at earth’s core.  It such a reactor did exist, the bulk of the earth would prevent gamma rays or neutrons from being detectable, but it should still be possible for neutrino detectors to measure the characteristic neutrinos generated from fission reactions in earth’s core.   The data from such detectors does not support the hypothesis that a nuclear fission reactor provides a significant proportion of the heat in the core and mantle of the earth.   Such a reactor could still exist, but it would have to be less than about three terawatts or a greater number of neutrinos should have been detected coming from the earth’s core.  In that case, the reactor would only account for a small portion of the 40 terawatts of observed geothermal activity.

While the neutrino data may seem to indicate that a large nuclear reactor is not currently operating within the earth, it does not rule out the possibility that such a reactor has operated intermittently and that it is currently either not producing a fission chain reaction or is only producing a small one.   Even if that is the case, the residual heat of such a reactor would be very significant.   It is also possible that a redactor existed at one time, perhaps billions of years ago, but has not produced a chain reaction since.   If this is the case, the implications are still enormous for the formation of the earth and the heat and magnetic fields observed to this day.

Implications for earth and beyond:

We really do not know if there is indeed a georeactor or if there ever was.  While the hypothesis is controversial, it cannot be completely discounted and must be considered a possible factor in the structure and formation of the earth.  The implications are quite profound and could rewrite our most basic presumptions of the planets history and formation.

What we can say for sure is that nuclear fission reactors did exist on earth, at least in the crust.  The influence of such reactors must now be considered as an influence on everything from the mineralogy of the earth’s crust to the formation of early life.   The amount of uranium and its daughter products observed in the modern earth may be less than what once existed due to much of the element fissioning away.   Some of the lighter elements that are abundant in the crust may be the byproducts of this fission.  The heat generated by these reactors could have played a major role in shaping the early geology of earth.  It may have even influenced life, possibly heating bodies of water or producing hot springs, where heat-dependent microbes flourished.   It’s even possible that the ionizing radiation generated by the reactors was a factor in the early formation and evolution of organisms.

But even if fission chain reactions did not play a major role in the history of earth, it does not diminish the potential importance on a cosmic scale.   If fission occurred naturally on earth, then we can be certain that occurred naturally elsewhere and continues to occur naturally elsewhere in the universe.   Similar reactors could have existed on other terrestrial planets in our solar system or may have contributed significant amounts of energy to the primordial planets as they formed around the sun.   It has been suggested that fission reactions could also account for the energy observed from the gas giant planets of the solar system.

With more than a billion billion stars in this galaxy alone, there are certainly other places where fission occurs and where it could easily play an important role in how planets form or how life might develop.  As a source of energy, fission could potentially provide the heat necessary for life to exist on planets or planetoids too far from stars to otherwise support life.   It could even mean that otherwise frozen bodies in interstellar space could harbor life.   This alone could vastly change our current ideas of where life might exist beyond earth.

The suggestion that fission could also play a role in the ignition of stars is yet another intriguing, if unorthodox hypothesis that needs to be at least considered.

Whatever role fission plays in the energy balance of the earth and the universe, we now know that it does play some role.  It happens.   It’s a fundamental reaction and a source of energy in nature.  It must be considered in cosmic and geological models as a potential influence.  Uranium and other heavy elements are formed in supernova and are found across the universe.   The distribution of these elements now needs to also be considered as an important factor in which kinds of reactions can occur in which areas.

The more practical side:

The artificial nature of fission has always been used as an argument against it.   It has been claimed that it produces materials that are not normally encountered and have properties that are different from any pre-existing substance and that the uniqueness of the reaction and its byproducts makes it unpredictable.   It has also been argued that since the sun and other stars are powered by fusion, nuclear fusion is therefore a more perfect, cleaner energy source that we have always lived with, while fission does not have the same kind of appeal.

We now know that this is simply not true.   Fission can and does happen on its own, without human intervention and has so for billions of years.   Fission chain reactions and the byproducts of fission are not alien to earth and their existence did not halt life, but may have facilitated it.  They can exist in the environment without causing catastrophe and always have.   Fission is not unusual and is certainly not a creation of man.   It is a basic reaction, as fundamental as fusion or fire.

We live in a nuclear powered universe.  The energy we experience may have come from nuclear fusion, fission, decay, from the reactions of cosmic rays or even from the subatomic reactions that occurred moments after the big bang.   Nuclear reactions generate all energy, liberating it from the forces that bind all mater together.  These reactions will happen with or without our intervention.

We would be fools to not realize this and use nuclear energy to our own advantage.

If chemtrail conspiracy theorists are to believed, then large jet aircraft, possibly the same aircraft that carry passengers are being used to spray unknown quantities of chemicals of some type at high altitude.  While it’s rather difficult to judge the altitude of an aircraft by sight alone, based on what has been claimed to be chemtrails it’s fairly clear that the aircraft were flying at normal jet altitudes, well above tropospheric weather.   If they were indeed passenger aircraft then the altitude is generally above thirty thousand feet.

Some commonly claimed materials:

Jet Fuel or other hydrocarbons – This is actually done on occasion, as passenger jets do occasionally have to preform fuel dumps.   These are not done as a matter of routine but rather happen when a plane is heavily loaded with fuel for a long flight but has to land shortly after takeoff due to an emergency such as a mechanical failure or a passenger medical emergency.  The fuel disperses rapidly.  Studies have been done on exactly what happens to fuel dumped at altitude and have concluded that at least 98% of it evaporates before it ever reaches ground level. If any does reach the ground (which it usually does not) it is a very minute amount which is spread over an enormous geographic area.   The quantity is basically unnoticeable and will itself evaporate relatively quickly.

The fuel vapors will not last long in the atmosphere.  Hydrocarbons tend to photodegrade and generally decompose in the atmosphere and will eventually oxidize entirely.   In the short term, these vapors may contribute, at least locally to smog, but they would  makeup a relatively small proportion of human generated air pollution.

Aluminum – Atomized aluminum or some aluminum compound like aluminum oxide would disperse quite a bit before any amount reached the ground.  It would basically behave as atmospheric dust, some remaining suspended for some time in the high winds at altitude but most eventually falling from suspension.  Aluminum is one of the most common elements in the crust of the earth and therefore one of the primary components of atmospheric dust.  Adding a little more aluminum would have little effect on the total amount in the earth’s atmospheric dust and any that settled to the ground would join the enormous amounts of aluminum present in most soil.

Aluminum is generally regarded as being non-toxic and in all but the most extreme circumstances presents no substantial health danger.

Mercury – If ejected from aircraft, mercury would either evaporate or form very small droplets which would remain suspended at least initially.   Due to the high weight of mercury it would not stay in the atmosphere for a very long time but would precipitate out.   By the time the mercury reached the ground, it would be extremely dispersed and would not reach toxic levels in any given location.  However, it would accumulate in water especially in the worlds oceans.

Spraying mercury out of aircraft wouldn’t do a whole lot to increase the atmospheric mercury levels or the oceanic mercury levels, however.  Unfortunately, we already spew many many tons of mercury into the atmosphere and it has resulted in increased atmospheric and oceanic mercury levels and occasionally can be shown to bioacumulate in some species.   This happens because of the burning of coal which is a very effective way of ejecting mercury into the atmosphere.   In areas directly downwind from coal plants, mercury levels are elevated, especially after the coal burner has operated for a many years or decades.

Dumping mercury from an aircraft would at least result in more dilution before it reached the ground and thus would not expose a given area to as acute a level of mercury.   All in all, it would do what coal burners already do, although to a much smaller extent.

Barium – One of the most commonly claimed components of chemtrails is barium.  However, chemtrail conspiracy theorists don’t seem to have much idea what form it is supposedly being discharged in.  Barium is an alkaline earth metal, but in its elemental form it is highly reactive especially to oxygen.  If barium were discharged into the air in an atomized form, it would react violently to form barium oxide and barium peroxide.  Both of these compounds are also reactive and are powerful oxidizers.  While it is unlikely that either would reach the ground in significant concentrations, if they did, they would react readily with most organic material.

If barium compounds were released in the atmosphere, it’s more realistic to expect that they would be m0re stable barium salts.   The most common of these is barium sulfate.   Barium sulfate is non-toxic and not reactive.   It is so safe that it is a very common radiocontrast agent that is often swallowed to allow x-ray examination of the digestive tract.   It is also fairly common in the surface geology of earth, so adding a tiny bit more would not change very much.

Other barium salts vary in toxicity and reactivity from very low to very high.  Most soluble barium compounds are fairly toxic.  Barium carbonate, for example, has been used as a rat poison.   These barium compounds are also found in nature, in soil, water and atmospheric dust and are generally not of concern as long as the concentrations are fairly low.  According to the CDC, respiratory precautions become necessary when the concentrations of soluble barium compounds in the air exceed .5 miligrams per cubic meter.

Such high concentrations are would not result from dumping barium into the air at altitude.   By the time the compound reached the ground, it would be dispersed over a minimum of dozens of square kilometers.  Some chemtrail theorists cite measurements of soluble barium compounds in air samples that have been as high as 50.8 nanograms per cubic meter.   This is a tiny amount, and orders of magnitude bellow what is considered the safe exposure level.  It is entirely consistent with the levels expected to exist from soil kicked up by wind and other sources of atmospheric dust.   Atmospheric barium is also produced by some human activities, such as flares and fireworks, where barium compounds are used to produce a green color.   The levels produced by such activities have been subject to study and while they do cause a very modest localized increase in detectable barium compounds, the levels are nowhere near what would be considered hazardous.

Sulfur Dioxide – Aircraft do already release tiny amounts of sulfur dioxide, because sulfur is present in hydrocarbon fuels. Aviation fuel tends to be relatively highly refined and conform to standards for low sulfur levels. In the case of Jet-A fuel, the maximum allowable sulfur concentration is less than .3% by weight. This results in a small but significant amount of sulfur dioxide in the engine exhaust.

It has been suggested that aircraft could spray sulfur dioxide as a means of reducing global warming.  Indeed, sulfur dioxide does reflect sunlight, but it also causes acid rain, so intentionally depositing it into the atmosphere seems to be a rather flawed idea.  Still, there is quite a bit of the stuff in the atmosphere, both as a result of natural sources like volcanos as well as man-made sources.  The largest, by far, is coal burning, which releases hundreds of thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

It would take an enormous effort by a huge number of aircraft to increase the total emitted noticeably, and although it would deposit the gas at a higher altitude (at least initially) than coal exhaust, it wouldn’t change atmospheric distribution much in the long run.  In any event, the total amount that could be placed in the upper atmosphere by thousands of aircraft would be less than can be produced by a single large volcanic eruption, as happens every so often.

Cloud Seeding Chemicals - Cloud seeding is typically accomplished by using hydroscpic materials, such as salts, by using cold materials like liquid propane or dry ice or by using silver iodine, a chemical which has a structure similar to ice and can be used to induce the formation of ice crystals.  These chemicals are sometimes delivered by aircraft but are also commonly delivered by rockets or by ground-based misters and flares.

The best evidence indicates that these chemicals can indeed have some localized effect on cloud structure and precipitation.   Adding large amounts of seed material to saturated, supercooled clouds increases the rate of ice and water droplet formation and can temporarily increase the altitude of the cloud, causing additional cooling and resulting in precipitation.   The effect, however, is entirely temporary and will only affect the cloud formation which is seeded and not the overall weather of a region.

While cloud seeding is sometimes practiced, it is done in a manner that does not even remotely resemble the so-called “chemtrail” reports.  For one, cloud seeding is only effective when the chemicals are applied to clouds that are already fairly saturated and contain at least some supercooled water droplets.   If cloud seeding chemicals are applied to a “dry” sky or to areas that do not have dense, cold clouds, they will have no effect at all.  If the proported chem trails really did contain seeding material, it would be extremely wasteful as these aircraft normally are reported in relatively clear skies.

The altitudes of the aircraft are also entirely wrong for cloud seeding.  While it can be difficult to judge the exact altitude of an aircraft, most “chemtrail” reports cite jet aircraft that appear to be flying at normal altitude.  The type of clouds that can be most effectively seeded are at relatively low altitudes.   Jet aircraft typically fly at altitudes far above tropospheric weather and thus, even if the appropriate cloud formations did exist, they would be too high to directly seed them.  Therefore, any attempt to seed clouds from these aircraft would be entirely ineffective.

Bacteria - If sprayed out the back of an aircraft at altitude, bacteria would be introduced to a very harsh environment.   The spraying itself would eject the bacteria into air currents moving at near supersonic speeds and into extremely low temperatures.   Many forms of bacteria are capable of surviving freezing and rethawing, but the tolerance for being frozen varies depending on the type of bacteria and the circumstances of the freezing.   Being frozen after being ejected from an aircraft is an especially rapid and violent form of freezing.  The bacteria would be subjected to an extreme temperature change and being tumbled with tiny ice crystals.   It would be expected that most of the bacteria would be destroyed if ejected in a liquid form in this manner.

The only bacteria that might be candidates for being ejected from an aircraft would be those that form tough endospores.   They also count not be ejected as a liquid, mixed with water, but would have to be dried and preserved in a powder-like form.   Ejecting the powdered bacteria presents other problems.   Atomized solids tend to accumulate static charges which cause them to clump and not properly disperse.  However, the problem is not insurmountable, assuming enough effort were put into electrostatic control and dispersal equipment.

There are very few bacteria that really fit the bill for being tough enough to be dispersed into the air in the endospore phase and have a good chance of surviving for any period of time.   One reason that anthrax has been the focus of much biological warfare research is that it is one of the very few pathogenic bacteria that can be spread by air and is tough enough to reliably survive rapid dispersal.  It also can be cultured in large quantities relatively easily.

Even a bacteria like anthrax would have difficulty in the especially rough conditions of being sprayed out of the back of a jet aircraft. If the bacteria were to come into contact with droplets of liquid water as it fell, it could come out of the endospore phase and thus become far more fragile.

An even greater danger would be ultraviolet light. UV light is an effective way of destroying bacteria and at high altitudes they would be above most of the atmosphere and much of the ozone layer. At these altitudes, UV light is especially intense. The bacteria would likely remain aloft for some time, due to their small size and the high speed winds at altitude. This would give them ample time to be exposed to intense ultraviolet light.

Ultimately some of the bacteria may well survive and eventually they would find their way to the ground.  Just like other forms of atmospheric dust, the bacteria would either reach low levels on their own or be brought down by precipitation.   By the time they reached the ground, the bacteria would be extremely dispersed, with a relatively small amount of bacterial dispersed over as much as hundreds of miles.

This would be of little concern.   The world is not sterile as is and the soil is already full of bacteria, including potentially pathogenic bacteria (for this reason, licking random things outdoors is not recommended).  The bacteria would join a huge population of bacteria of every type that lives in the soil and air of the earth.  Even anthrax can be found in soil in many locations.  Inhaling an few bacteria is not likely to cause infection, it would have to be a fairly large amount.  That would never happen.

To date, there are no known biological warfare programs that ever considered spreading bacteria by spraying it out the back of high altitude jet aircraft.  All credible biological warfare research and testing as focused on more direct methods of exposing populations or enemy forces to bacteria, such as contaminating water supplies or using small ground-level aerosol producing bomblets.

Viruses – Many of the rules that apply to bacteria also apply to viruses, although viruses are vastly varied in their tolerance for various environments.  Many viruses are extremely fragile when outside of their host organism.  Viruses also are much more difficult to produce in large quantities since they cannot be cultured on their own – they require another organism’s cells to replicate.

Assuming a virus could be found that could be produced in large quantities and was able to survive the temperature extremes, ultraviolet light and other factors associated with being sprayed from a high altitude aircraft, it would still be a too dispersed to be likely to cause much harm and  would be, at best, a highly inefficient way of dosing people on the ground.

Antibiotics – Because antibiotics are complex organic compounds, it could be expected that some portion of those discharged into the upper atmosphere would decompose or otherwise be destroyed by ultraviolet light or oxidation before ever reaching the ground.  Since the antibiotics would be greatly dispersed, it’s unlikely that there would be much in the way of noticeable effects on the microorganisms in the region.  Antibiotics have to be present in fairly high concentrations for them to be effective in killing or inhibiting the reproduction of microbes.

Discharging even fairly large amounts of antibiotics into the environment in such a low density manner would not do very much to alter the concentrations in the region.  It is important to remember that antibiotics have been common in the biosphere for at least millions of years.   Most antibiotic compounds are derived directly from compounds produced by fungi, bacteria and other microbes.  For example, the antibiotic Gentamicin is composed of compounds produced by widely found in soil and water and Penicillin is produced by a common fungus that is responsible for bread mold. There are some fully synthetic antibiotics, but they are not inherently more powerful than the naturally occurring variety.

Antibiotics are selective and only toxic to certain microbes. These compounds are not toxic to humans or animals and would not have any noticeable effects on such organisms, especially in the concentrations that might reach ground level from high altitude discharges. Since these compounds are present in minute amounts in the environment, humans are always being exposed to very low concentrations of antibiotic compounds and always have been.

Human Blood – This is an especially ridiculous claim, given the amount of blood that would be needed to create a reasonably sized trail of blood in the air. It would take all the blood in the bodies of more than 24,000 full grown humans to fill the tanks of a KC-135.   That assumes all the bodies were drained.  More than three times as many would be needed for live donors of the blood.

Not only that, but spraying blood would be a huge problem for the nozzles, pumps and other equipment.   At the very least, the blood would have to have a lot of anticoagulants added.

The blood would disperse quite and the cells and fluid would probably begin to separate.  It would tend to freeze very rapidly and this would destroy most of the cells, as blood cannot be frozen without the addition of protectionists.  The ice crystals formed tend to break apart the cell walls of blood cells.  Any biological material that did eventually reach the ground would biodegrade pretty quickly.

Any pathogens present in the blood would not be harmful in the concentrations that may survive reaching ground level.

Defoliants or Herbicides  - There is a good deal of historical data for the  dispersal of defoliants and herbicides from aircraft.  Aircraft have been used for dispersing such agents in agricultural contexts and as a means of reducing foliage where enemy forces could take cover during military conflicts.

During the Vietnam War, the United States undertook an extensive program to disperse defoliants as a means of reducing the area where enemy forces could hide.  This included the application of so-called “rainbow herbicides,” so called because each were assigned a color code to distinguish the type of chemical.   The best known of these was Agent Orange, a mixture which was generally safe for humans if formulated correctly, but which was widely contaminated by dioxin compounds due to poor quality control by manufacturers, resulting in detrimental effects on humans who were exposed.

Application of the compounds from too high an altitude would have been ineffective.  The material would have dispersed widely, resulting in an uncontrolled dispersal pattern of very low concentrations.  The compounds would have remained suspended in the air for some period of time, with much of the material breaking down, and when it finally did reach the ground, concentrations would be far too low to have any noticeable effects on vegetation.  In Vietnam, aircraft dispersing herbicides flew at the  extremely low altitude of about 150 feet.   Dispersing the herbicide also required that the wind speed be low or the chemicals would get scattered.

This low altitude spraying is also what caused the concentrations of dioxin to be high enough at ground level to cause human health issues, as well as the fact that many thousands of tons were used over a relatively small area.  If large enough quantities of dioxins were dumped at high altitude, it would increase the regional concentrations, at least slightly, but it would be an extremely inefficient way of doing so if that were the goal.

The aircraft used were typically prop-driven, slow moving aircraft that could spray the herbicide at such low levels and at low speeds.   Helicopters were also used.  Modern application of herbicides, insecticides and other such material by crop dusters also occurs at low levels, even lower in many circumstances.

Insecticides, Herbicides, Fertilizers – As mentioned above, agricultural chemicals are sometimes delivered by air.  It is an efficient method of providing large scale coverage when only low volumes of chemicals are required.  Crop dusting is most commonly done to deliver insecticides.  The practice may be used outside of the agricultural sector to combat mosquito and other pest insects.

As with herbicides, accomplishing this requires the aircraft to fly at extreme low altitudes.  Crop dusters may fly as ten feet above the fields being dusted.  Helicopters have increasingly been used for this.  Fixed wing airplanes used for crop dusting are designed for slow speeds and high maneuverability at low altitudes.  In fact, the altitudes at which crop dusters operate are so low, they have actually been known to collide with trucks and other objects on the ground.

If applied at higher altitudes, chemicals would be scattered and dispersed to a level where they would not be effective. Insecticides and other complex organic chemicals would at least partially break down before reaching ground levels.  Phosphates, nitrates and other nutrients would just be scattered into the atmospheric dust, which already contains such compounds.

Chaff - This is material that the military occasionally discharges into the atmosphere during combat and training excises. Chaff is intended to distract or obscure radar by providing false returns from reflective material.  Traditionally, chaff has been composed primarily of strips of metallic foil, but more modern chaff is often composed of thin fibers with a metallic coating.  Chaff may be dropped in large amounts over a wide area to obscure aircraft movements or may be deployed in bursts by an aircraft attempting to evade radar-based defenses such as surface to air missiles.

When deployed, chafe tends to remain in the air for a relatively short period of time.  It is therefore necessary that the material be dropped repeatedly over the same area.  However, the exact period of time it is aloft depends on altitude and wind patterns.   A common way of dispersing chaff is to have it packed into small containers with a explosive charge that blows it out in a burst.  An aircraft could be equipped with several of these containers for use in evading radar-based defenses.  It may also be dispersed by flares which aid in evading infrared-seeking missiles while dispersing chaff to confound radar.

Chaff does eventually make its way to the ground and is fairly harmless once it does, although it has caused problems when it has been blown into substations or other electrical infrastructure.  During its time in the air, chaff does occasionally show up on weather radar or other radar systems.  The image to the right shows chaff returns from a military training exercise on a regional weather radar screen.

The length of the fibers or strips used depends on the frequency of the radar which is being targeted.  On the battlefield, a variety of lengths are used to help obscure a wide range of possible radar frequencies.  However, the chaff used during training over inhabited areas is restricted to sizes that minimize the possible effects on air traffic control radar.

Conclusion:
There have been biological warfare programs, but none were ever based on the idea of spraying biological agents at high altitudes by jet aircraft.
There have been chemical warfare programs, but none were ever based on the idea of spraying chemical agents at high altitudes by jet aircraft.
There have been weather modification programs, but none were ever based on the idea of spraying weather modification agents at high altitudes by jet aircraft.
There have been aircraft-based herbicide and insecticide programs, but none ever used high altitude jet aircraft.

In all cases, this would be a poor way of getting significant concentrations of the materials to ground levels or would not have any significant effects on weather.

The AC Gilbert set was certainly the most elaborate and complete atomic energy set sold, but it was not the only one. The American Basic Science Club produced a similar lab set around 1960, and Chemcraft produced a lab set in the late 1940’s to early 1950’s. In the 1950’s, some Chemcraft chemistry sets also included radioactive materials and experiments that could be done with radiation.

I have always thought that these sets were an incredibly good idea and a really excellent way to acquaint young people with the basics of radioactivity and, importantly, demonstrate that radiation is common and not something to be feared. These lab sets were extremely safe. The amount of radioactive materials present in the experimental sources was microscopic and not at all dangerous. The uranium ore or uranium compounds included are not a radiological hazard and are only a toxicity hazard if they are ground up and snorted or otherwise inhaled, and even then, are less toxic than an equivalent quantity of something like lead.

There’s really no better way to get a kid acquainted with science than to actually do some hands-on activities. They improve understanding and retention and allow them to participate directly in making exciting observations. Anyone lucky enough to have had one of these labs as a child probably grew up with a healthy understanding (and not fear) of radioactivity.

Sadly, the world has changed since the early 1950’s, and today most people seem to run around with rampant radiophobia. If something is “radioactive” (which nearly everything is) then it’s seen as being of the highest danger. Nothing is believed to be more environmentally destructive, more dangerous to health, more disastrous, more hazardous and more terrifying than radiation. The idea that at one time children were allowed to learn with materials that produce radiation significantly above background levels fills some with horror and others laugh at just how stupid everyone must have been fifty years ago.

Here’s some of the things that have been said about the AC Gilbert Atomic Lab:

From the Daily Grind:

World’s Most Dangerous Toys: Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab
If you thought choking hazards in toys were bad then spare a thought for American kids in the early 50′s.

Introducing the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory. This toy lab set was produced by Alfred Carlton Gilbert between 1950 and 1951 and sold for $49.50US (which is equivalent to about $380 – $400US dollars today). So if you were lucky enough to have well off parents back in the day you may well have been ‘lucky’ enough to get your hands on this radioactive fun set.

From Liveleak:

Very bad toys: Atomic Energy Lab usa ca. 1960
t’s unclear what effects the Uranium-bearing ores might have had on those few lucky children who received the set, but exposure to the same isotope
U-238 has been linked to Gulf War syndrome, cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma, among other serious ailments. Even more uncertain is the longterm impact of being raised by the kind of nerds who would give their kid an Atomic Energy Lab.

From Cracked

The 8 Most Wildly Irresponsible Vintage Toys
#1. Atomic Energy Lab

As a kid, did you ever swallow or at least put in your mouth a small piece of a toy or play set? Did you grow an extra arm because of it? No? Then you probably didn’t have the Atomic Energy Lab.

You see, there was a different approach to nuclear power in the ’50s and early ’60s — atomic energy was our friend and the way of the future, and it would never do anything to hurt us. However, it’s still hard to believe that anyone would entrust kids with radioactive material (even in small doses).

Yet, the Atomic Energy Lab kit produced by the American Basic Science Club came with real samples of uranium (which is radioactive) and radium (which is a million times more radioactive than uranium). Since the mere presence of radioactive material in a children’s product clearly wasn’t insane enough, some of the experiments detailed in the manual also required kids to handle blocks of dry ice. Dry ice, by the way, has a temperature of minus 109.3 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s recommended that it only be handled while wearing gloves (none were included).

Okay, they’ve got a point about the dry ice, although it’s reasonably safe to handle with basic precautions. Still, I’m downright offended by the way that people completely ignorant of what radiation is or the dangers can sit there and smugly dismiss the idea of a radiation experiment set as being insane. It’s often ranked the most dangerous toy of all time, but in fact, it’s not dangerous at all for any normal 12 year old to learn from a microscopic amount of a radioisotope or a little bit of uranium ore, which they may well have sitting in their backyard anyway.

I’ll go one further:  Not only do I think this was a great idea and a very positive learning experience, I also think that there has never been a better time for something like a radiation and nuclear energy lab set!  Having a set that had a good variety of experiments would be fairly expensive but not unaffordable.  It would be targeted at ages 12 to adult and could also be something science departments at schools might be interested in.

I’m seriously considering doing it!  I’ll take the flack for selling kids a horrible cancer-causing evil material if I have to, because somebody has got to do it, and if I get enough interest I may very well start putting some kits together.

Things to include:

1. A Geiger counter - this is undoubtedly the most important part of the lab, but also one of the most problematic.  The cost could easily drive the price of the set way too high if a high quality Geiger counter is used. Detecting alpha particles would be great as a way of teaching of the different types of radiation but most inexpensive Geiger-Muller tubes can only detect gamma and high energy beta. Detecting alpha particles requires a very thin window, usually made of mica. That tends to drive the price up, so alpha detection may need to be omitted. Ideally the Geiger counter should connect to a computer to expand the types of experiments possible and allow data logging. This may drive the price up too high, however.
2. A set of shielding materials – One of the most fundamental lessons is understanding the nature of shielding, so a series of materials would be provided.  These would include Mylar, thin plastic, thicker plastic, metal sheets and lead foil, possibly coated in plastic to relieve fears of lead poisoning.
3. A spinthescope or scintillation screen material – This would provide one alternative for detecting alpha particles that the geiger counter can’t.  It also is a fun and interesting experiment to view the radiation-created flashes of light in a darkened room.
4. A cloud chamber - An absolute must for any basic nuclear energy lab kit.   Simple cloud chamber kits are already available
5. An electroscope – To demonstrate the ionizing effects of radiation and the earliest types of detectors
6. High power rare earth magnets - to demonstrate that particle radiation can be effected by magnetic fields.
7. A guide to identifying radioactive minerals – basically a book with types of uranium and thorium ore shown with their geographic distribution and general characteristics shown.
8. An experiment guidebook – A list of the different experiments possible

Included radioactive sources:

1. A sample or multiple samples of uranium ore
2. Uranium marbles - They’re cheap and easy enough to obtain and provide a safe base level for some experiments
3. License Exempt Sealed Sources – The company Spectrum Techniques manufactures samples of various radioactive substances, including thalium-204, strontium-90, cesium-137, lead-210 and polonium-210 that are available in either needle sources (used primarily for cloud chambers) or sealed in plastic discs.   The sources are approved for sale and possession without a license because the actual amount of material is tiny.   They run from about fifty to eighty US dollars each.  Since Po-210 has a very short halflife, including it with a cloud chamber or other product presents a problem, so Spectrum Techniques offers a coupon that can be included with such products and then mailed in to receive the sample once the consumer gets the product.

Possible Experiments:

1. Measuring radiation – Basic measurements with the Geiger counter, measuring various sources.
2. Measuring radiation in your environment – Use the Geiger counter to measure the baseline background in various areas and record how it changes by time of day.  Look for radioactive items.   What common items emit radiation and how much?    Go on a hunt in an antique store, your kitchen or somewhere else and see what you can find.
3. Prospecting - Using the Geiger counter and the guide to minerals, what types of ore can you find?
4. Shielding Experiment – Observe how various types of radiation can be shielded and attenuated.  Use the shielding to help determine the type of radiation being measured.
5. Cloud Chamber Experiments – Observe particle paths in the cloud chamber using various sources.  Also see how magnets can alter the paths of particles.
6. Spinthescope Experiments – Observe alpha radiation with the spinthescope and also use it to help determine what kind of radiation is being measured.
7. Find a hidden source – Have a friend hide one of the radioactive sources in a room and use the Geiger counter to find it.

Of course these experiments would have more descriptions and some of them might even be designed to dispel myths, for example, those who live near a nuclear power plant would be encouraged to measure radiation at various distances and plot the levels.  Also, cell phones could be on the list of items to examine to show they do not give off ionizing radiation.

Cost:

I’d like to keep the kit affordable, ideally, about 300 US dollars as the top end of what it should cost, but realistically, it may turn out to be more.  I’d consider 500 USD to be the absolute maximum that could be charged without making the set far too expensive for most people to afford.    I’m more than happy to put such a kit together at almost no profit.   To be perfectly fair, I think it’s reasonable that I would make a small amount of money (perhaps $25 or so) over the cost of the materials, because I’m going to incur other miscellaneous expenses like printer toner, paper, phone calls and my time spent putting such a kit together.   However, my primary goal is not to make money off of this so much as to produce an educational experiment kit. Most of the items included would not cost much.

The marbles, ore and shielding material could be acquired for under $50 and the cloud chamber for not much more.   United Nuclear sells a spinthariscope for $35.  It would probably be possible to get it a bit cheaper if such an item was purchased in bulk. Other expenses would include the packaging and instructions.   The cost before the sealed sources and Geiger counter is therefore going to be about $100.

The sealed sources are going to be the first big expense.   A complete set that includes a beta emitter, a gamma emitter and an alpha emitter is going to cost about $150.   I’m a little split on whether to include Po-210.  On one hand it’s the only exclusive alpha emitter that could be included, but on the other, it’s rather short lived.   The alternative would be to include lead-210 in equilibrium with polonium-210, which would produce both beta and alpha particles.   Adding another gamma emitter to demonstrate the differences in energy levels would be great too, but for a real complete set of radioisotopes, it starts to look more like $175-$200.  It’s possible it could be less if they are bought in bulk. Therefore, the kit is already reaching the $300 mark before the most important component, the Geiger counter is added.

Choosing exactly what Geiger counter to include will be a challenge.   I can definitely acquire Geiger counters that fit all the necessary criteria and are inexpensive, but generally those are units I’d get surplus or second hand, and thus are each different.   That won’t work here.  What is needed is a standard Geiger counter that will be the same for each Set.

The Russian Company Quartex makes a series of Geiger-Muller detectors that are fairly cheap and very simple to use.  Unfortunately, these units have some major drawbacks.  For one thing, they only measure gamma radiation and hard beta radiation.  That might be acceptable if not for the fact that they also only give readings in dose equivalent, not in counts per minute.  Since the point of the set is understanding how radiation is detected and measured, the more basic unit of CPM is preferable.

Still, it is a complete radiation detector in a nice, small and simple handheld unit.   It may be worth talking to the company to find out if it would be possible to make the one small modification of adding a counts per minute or counts per second reading.

Another option would be to build a GM detector-counter.  The Electronics Goldmine has a Geiger-Muller driver kit, which includes the high voltage supply and and detection circuitry for $30.  That price would be tough to beat by acquiring the components individually, and it has the big advantage of having a per-fabricated circuit board, which would be expensive to have manufactured and time consuming to fabricate individually.   The unit still needs an enclosure, battery holder and switch, but that should be obtainable for about ten US dollars.  The kit does not include a meter movement, so that will need to be added too.  An analog meter would need to have some kind of range switch (to allow for ranges such as 0-100 cpm, 0-1000 etc), which would complicate construction a bit.   There is a digital meter adapter available for about $60, which would work nicely and also adds the ability to hook the unit up to a PC.   The most expensive part of the counter will be the tube.  A suitable, although very small tube could be bought for about $60 each.   This tube would be sensitive to alpha, but given the small size, it would not work very well for general survey work.    All in all, the cost of this geiger counter, including shipping and expenses like solder and wire looks to be about $175, resulting in a total cost of the set of close to $500.

Another option would be to use the venerable CDV-700 as the basis for the detector.   The CDV-700 is a Geiger counter manufactured for the US government during the Cold War.  It was standard issue for fallout shelters. Tens of thousands were manufactured.   Production ended in the 1970’s and since then, many have been sold off as surplus.   It’s about the cheapest Geiger counter that can be purchased, often available for about $50 from a surplus dealer and sometimes less if bought in bulk.  It comes with a small check-source mounted on the side.   This is often depleted uranium but occasionally may be a sealed radium source.  It would definitely be a nice bonus to have an extra source included.

Unfortunately, the CDV-700 has a number of major drawbacks.   For one thing, it will be important to find the right version of the unit.  It was produced by a number of manufacturers and went through a few design changes over the course of its production.   Some early models use high voltage batteries, so these should be avoided as the batteries are no longer widely available.  Another problem is that many CDV-700’s sold surplus do not work, as they have spent years in storage in damp bomb shelters and were not maintained.   Repair is usually fairly easy, as long as they are in good physical shape and not rusted out or otherwise physically damaged.

Assuming the counter is in good condition, it will still need a few modifications.   For one, the headphone connector is a rather obscure fitting known as a “Single button microphone plug.”  These are not found on many devices anymore and would only allow the original headphones to be used.   Replacing it with a more modern 1/8 or 1/4 inch plug will both allow for modern headphones to be used and allow the unit to be easily hooked up to the sound card on a computer so that it can be calibrated and data logged using available Geiger counter software.   It would also be worthwhile to replace some of the more failure-prone electronics with modern versions that are also more efficient and produce less RF noise.   Finally, a reasonably easy addition would be to add a small amplified speaker so that headphones would not be required for listening.  A speaker with a switch or knob would require drilling in the case, but would not be terribly expensive.  Since the meter would need to be taken apart anyway, it would be worthwhile to paint it to make it look more like a scientific instrument and less like a piece of emergency equipment. All in all, about fifty dollars invested in the internals would produce a very reasonable meter.

That does still leave one problem, however: the probe.   The CDV-700 comes with a Geiger-Muller tube that was originally intended for use after a nuclear war.  It only detects gamma radiation and relatively high energy beta particles.  Even as a gamma detector, it’s not terribly sensitive and thus leaves some to be desired for surveying relatively low background levels.  The probe on the CDV-700 is permanently attached to the unit, but that is relatively easily solved by disconnecting it and adding a BNC connector to the meter and to the end of the probe attachment, thus allowing the original probe or another probe to be used.

The next problem is finding a suitable alpha-sensitive probe to include.   This site has a surplus alpha-sensitive end window tube for only 37.95 plus shipping.  It would be fairly easy to make a probe out of it by using a small piece of PVC pipe with one end open to hold the probe and a BNC connector and cable to connect it to the modified CDV-700.   The only question is whether the tube is available in large enough quantity to make a reasonable number of lab sets.  If not, there may be other probes that can be acquired as surplus.

This approach seems to end up being the most favorable, as it would provide two probes for different types of use and would also give the option to add more probes in the future, possibly even including scintillation probes or other types of detectors.

In the end, the CDV-700 option with modifications and an additional probe seems to be the best one.

So while the $300 price tag seems unrealistic, it appears that a $500 price should be possible for a very well equipped set with an excellent Geiger counter, expandability, a good assortment of sources and a wide range of possible experiments.

Other considerations:

Many of the readers of this blog are from outside the United States.  Unfortunately that could present some problems for shipping radioactive sources, even those small enough not to require a license.   Simply being of very low quantity is not enough to make the sources legal – they generally must also be inspected and approved by the local regulatory body for radioactive substances, although this varies from country to country.   I’m told that shipping to Canada should be just fine and some countries in Europe are probably okay, although each would have to be individually verified.

Other countries may allow the sources but have restrictions on just who can import and sell them.  Spectrum Techniques has a worldwide network of affiliates and distributors.  In some cases, it may be necessary to sell the set without the actual sources and instead have them shipped separately from a domestic distributor in the country of the purchaser.

Interested? It’s expensive, admittedly. Perhaps I could come up with a partial lab or one that could be bought in pieces. I’m still looking into the possibilities. I’m not going to say that I’m definitely going to go for it, but I might. If I get enough interest I may go for it and start putting some of these lab sets together.

Muller was also an early proponent in the establishment of the linear non-threshold hypothesis for radiation exposure. Despite a lack of conclusive supporting evidence, LNT has become the mainstay for radiation policy and is accepted as fact by many government agencies. The simplistic model basically states that radiation always causes damage with the potential for cancer and that the increase in risk is directly proportional to the exposure level. Thus, there is no “safe” level and all radiation should be avoided when possible, though the danger is small if the exposure is small.

Despite the fact that, even by LNT predictions, the level of exposure from living near a nuclear power plant presents a miniscule increase in risk (less than living next to a coal burner), the model has been used very effectively to argue that nuclear energy is always unacceptable, because the tiny amounts of radiation involved still present a risk. (Don’t ask me how they can make the case that nuclear is worse than coal or gas, or for that matter, having a granite counter top which involve more exposure. I still can’t figure that out.) The model has also resulted in extreme fear of medical radiation, resulting in calls for limiting of potentially life saving imaging and cancer treatment procedures.

While it has always been known that Muller did not have conclusive evidence to prove his claims of an LNT dose-risk relationship, evidence now indicates he may have had evidence that actually refuted it.

Via UMass Amherst News and Information:

AMHERST, Mass. – University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental toxicologist Edward Calabrese, whose career research shows that low doses of some chemicals and radiation are benign or even helpful, says he has uncovered evidence that one of the fathers of radiation genetics, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller, knowingly lied when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe level of radiation exposure.

Calabrese’s interpretation of this history is supported by letters and other materials he has retrieved, many from formerly classified files. He published key excerpts this month in Archives of Toxicology and Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis.

Muller was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery that X-rays induce genetic mutations. This helped him call attention to his long-time concern over the dangers of atomic testing. Muller’s intentions were good, Calabrese points out, but his decision not to mention key scientific evidence against his position has had a far-reaching impact on our approach to regulating radiation and chemical exposure.

Calabrese uncovered correspondence from November 1946 between Muller and Curt Stern at the University of Rochester about a major experiment that had recently evaluated fruit fly germ cell mutations in Stern’s laboratory. It failed to support the linear dose-response model at low exposure levels, but in Muller’s speech in Oslo a few weeks later he insisted there was “no escape from the conclusion that there is no threshold.” To Calabrese, this amounts to deliberate concealment and he says Stern raised no objection.

Calabrese adds, “This isn’t an academic debate, it’s really practical, because all of our rules about chemical and low-level radiation are based on the premises that Muller and the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) committee adopted at that time. Now, after all these years, it’s very hard when people have been frightened to death by this dogma to persuade them that we don’t need to be scared by certain low-dose exposures.”

Within a year after Muller and his group persuaded the NAS to accept the linear model for gonadal mutations, the practice was extrapolated to somatic cells and cancer. Twenty years later, NAS adopted the linear approach for chemicals. Soon thereafter, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it would use the linear model for risk assessment, Calabrese points out.

Some can accept that even the most distinguished scientists have human failings, he acknowledges. But his view is that “the regulatory research community needs to hear about this. The implications of my findings are that we should revisit our exposure regulations because our regulatory history is founded on a deception. We have seen literally hundreds of thousands of cleanup decisions based on a model that was fraudulently derived. I think we should probably have drastically different exposure standards today, and far less fear.”

Calabrese believes, “The die was cast by Muller and regulations adopted since then have gone unchallenged. I think he got his beliefs and his science confused, and he couldn’t admit that the science was unresolved. So he went ahead and expressed an opinion about how to handle the public health situation.”

Muller may well have had Nobel intentions in withholding this information, but the results show why it is so dangerous for a scientist to abandon objective scientific observation in favor of cherry-picking data to make a point. Like many in his day, Muller was terrified by the thought of an all-out nuclear war and saw the nuclear testing that was being undertaken by the United States and Soviet Union as dangerous to both humans and the environment. By championing LNT in the 1940’s and 1950’s, even when doing so meant withholding data, Muller was making a powerful argument against the use or testing of nuclear weapons.

In 1946, nuclear weapons were fairly new, but their devastating effects had been made clear at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US was about to begin a the first test series at Bikini Atoll, and it had become clear that the Soviet Union would eventually have the bomb, even as the United States worked to build its stockpile and improve weapon yields.   A clear doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons had yet to be established, and many saw them as being the next weapon for use in modern warfare.  There was also limited regulation on the testing of weapons and many of the early atmospheric tests did indeed result in levels of radiation exposure that could result in harm.

The belief that even a small amount of fallout was harmful may well have helped to eventually drive nuclear tests underground and may have played a roll in the eventual withdrawal of “battlefield nukes” and policies that could have seen nuclear weapons used on a small scale in regional conflicts. The lives of some in the Marshall Islands (who received doses which are undoubtedly high enough to increase cancer risk) may even have been saved by the fear of fallout that eventually stopped atmospheric nuclear testing. But it also has resulted in many cancer patients not getting the level of treatment most beneficial, and lives have been lost because of this. It has resulted in nuclear energy being kept from making the kind of impact on health and climate it can and it has lead to a culture of radiophobia.

In the end, the increase in caution with nuclear testing undoubtedly resulted in fewer lives saved than have since been lost due to radiophobia, which has resulted  in ineffective cancer treatment, the under-utilization of lifesaving medical imaging, the lack of universal food irradiation and the extreme restraints placed on nuclear energy.

Perhaps, Muller would have acted differently if he could have seen the consequences of his dishonesty as they exist today.  Regardless of his intention, what he did is still unacceptable and worthy of rebuke.  Science is founded on the principle that facts are objectively reported.   Violating this tenet undermines the entire process and corrupts the expansion of human knowledge of nature.

If you want to influence policy through the telling of lies, become a politician.  That’s their job.   It’s not the job of scientists.

And in this case, the same story has gotten a huge amount of coverage, up to 174 articles on Google News as of this posting.

Via News.com.au:

Back up: The future’s close – and it’s really cool
WE could be hooning on Marty McFly-like hoverboards sooner than we thought.

It’s called “quantum trapping” or “quantum levitation” – and it’s real.

This footage shows a magnet, cooled with liquid nitrogen and locked into space.

The display was made by scientist from Tel Aviv at a conference in the US.

Watch as the magnet hovers in place – giving hope to fans of the hit Back to the Future films.

Okay, stepping back for a second. Yes, this is really cool, both figuratively and literally. But it’s not anything new. It’s a great science demonstration that would put any middleschooler in the running for first place at the local science fair, but it’s not new and it’s not groundbreaking.

What is shown here is a superconductor. Superconductors have been around since 1911. They have electrical resistance of zero and this results in some other interesting properties. The first superconductors discovered only displayed the property of superconductivity at extremely low temperatures, requiring liquid helium to get down close to absolute zero.

Type II superconductors, the type which manifest this effect, were discovered in 1954. The effect directly was observed shortly thereafter.

In the 1980’s, “high temperature superconductors” were developed. These still require cooling well bellow normal ambient temperatures, but they can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, rather than liquid helium. The temperatures are much more manageable and some of these materials can even be briefly touched without injury, as shown in the video, although the superconductor itself is probably surrounded by insulation, thus making the surface less warmer than the actual superconducting material.

What is actually being shown is known as the Meisner effect, combined with flux pinning, which it found in Type-II superconductors. Without getting too deeply into it, placing it in the field sets up currents in the superconductor which oppose the field. At the same time, flux pinning causes the magnetic field to become entrapped in the superconductor due to tiny defects in the material. The net result is the superconductor physically resisting reorientation in the field and thus levitating. Flux pinning was the subject of much study involving superconductors in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

More info here. and here.

Superconductors are used in a number of applications, the most familiar being MRI machines, but also in particle accelerators and other scientific applications. In a few instances, superconductors have been used for energy transmission, an application which is likely to expand in the near future.

Meisner levitation, however, has not found many applications beyond being a scientific curiosity. It has been used in a few prototype magnetic levitation transport systems and has been considered for very large magnetic bearings. That is about it, however.

And unfortunately, it would not be very useful for creating a Back to the Future style hoverboard. The primary problem is that it only works in a magnetic field and to keep a human hovering it would need a very strong magnetic field. The magnetic field of the earth is too weak and inconsistent, so the hoverboard would only work at all on a track prepared with powerful magnets. It also might not handle as well as you would want it to. Because it opposes movement against the field, it would not be capable of easily making banking turns or changing in altitude, unless the track it was on was designed to make this happen. It would also resist all turning unless the magnetic field were circular and thus symmetrical in that axis. Moving laterally along the field would be possible, but only along the field lines such that the movement did not change the relationship of the superconductor to the field, which would preclude turning entirely. Also it would be difficult to actually get it out of the magnetic field once you’re done riding it, unless the magnetic field could be somehow turned off. The amount of force needed to make it turn, bank or move across the field would be at least as great as the amount of weight the board could carry.

Making something levitate independent of a strong magnetic field outside it is not possible by any known means, at least not in the manner it is shown in Back to the Future. The only way of making something actually hoover is by using thrust. It could be provided by rocket engines, jet engines or ducted fans, but regardless, the only way a board could hover is by shooting something out the bottom. Sadly this is unlikely to be viable for a “hooverboard” because doing so would require a huge amount of energy, thus depleting fuel rapidly. It would also make the hoverboard very loud and disruptive to the environment, blowing around everything in sight and, if jets or rocket motors were used, potentially melting the pavement under the board.

There is one work-around for the problem – at least to some extent.  Putting a rubber skirt around the bottom of the hoverboard can contain and thus allow it to float on a semi-contained cushion of compressed air, reducing the need for fuel and avoiding much of the disturbances caused by all that air rushing out from under it.   This is basically how a modern hovercraft works.  Actually, it has been done and hoverboard-like devices based on skirted hovercraft do exist.

Sorry, but in my opinion, it’s not even remotely the same.  You’re not free floating or anything, but sliding around on a big rubber bag.  It’s nowhere near as cool.

First, some background on the lobotomy:

The lobotomy may well be the most notorious and misunderstood medical procedure ever to have been developed.   It’s the butt of many jokes and is portrayed widely in the media as a savage operation preformed on those who were unruly as a means of turning them into dribbling vegetables, incapable of resisting and placid in all respects.  This is partially true, but is an overly simplistic portrayal of what the lobotomy really was and how it was used.

To understand the use of the lobotomy one must first realize the environment it was developed in.  Prior to the mid 20th century, there was very little that could be done for the severely mentally ill. Psychotherapy existed and was useful in helping those with problems like anxiety, phobias and depression better manage their symptoms, but this could do little for the truly insane. For those who suffered from severe delusions, violent episodes, severe depression with suicidal tendencies, extreme bipolarism, there was no effective therapy.

Such individuals were placed in mental institutions, where they were often forced to live the entirety of their lives.   Often miserable places, institutions provided little more than warehousing for many individuals.   Mental institutions were enormous, becoming huge communities onto themselves.  Attempts were made to make life more pleasant by providing  classes and recreation, but the enormous expense of caring for the populations made that difficult to do on a large scale.   The worst cases were often left restrained or locked in padded cells.  With so many completely crippled by mental disease, conditions could easily degrade to the point where wards became filthy and filled with the screams of insane patients.

The origins of psycosurgury can be traced back to the 1880’s, when Gottlieb Burckhardt, a Swiss neurosurgeon began to experiment with operations on the brains of the most severely insane. Small sections of brain were removed in the hope that it might calm the continual mania of the patients operated on. The results were not encouraging, but research continued into the 20th century. It was known that traumatic brain injury, brain tumors or their removal could alter a person’s personality, but only the most basic understanding of the regions of the brain associated with various aspects of thought and emotion existed.

The lobotomy was developed in 1935 by Portuguese doctor António Egas Moniz, who intitially called the procedure the leukotomy. Moniz had become aware of experiments carried out on apes in which portions of the brain were intentionally removed or disconnected. Operations that removed the frontal lobes had a major effect on the learning capacity of the animals, but also made them more placid and less prone to expressions of frustration and emotional outbursts. He believed that doing so on humans might allow those with the most violent psychiatric episodes to lead more normal lives, or at least be more manageable. Early experiments involved injecting alcohol into the nerves that connected the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. This was later replaced by simply cutting the connections.

The belief at the time was that mental illness was caused by areas of the brain becoming too active or the brain being overstimulated and going haywire with out of control signals. It was thought that there was simply too much emotional activity that that cutting away the overly active portions of the brain would relieve this. While this belief is not always entirely false, it’s overly simplistic and does not apply to most cases of mental illness.  While there are portions of the brain that are associated with certain functions or aspects of personality, it is far too complex for a single region to be defined as the source of something like delusions, violent episodes or depression.

Still, the procedure did appear to have some validity. Many of those who received the operation did indeed become calmer and more easy to manage. Contrary to popular belief, it did not necessarily render the individual incapable of speech or basic function, although this did sometimes happen. It seems that overall, the results were highly variable. This is likely attributable to the simplicity and crudeness of the surgery. It involved drilling holes in the head of patients and cutting the pathways by inserting instruments. Exactly what kind of effects this had on the brain could vary quite a bit, especially since the individuals it was preformed on had all manner of conditions to begin with.

Early observations considered the outcome of the procedure to be result in a 33% to 33% to 33% success rate. In other words, roughly one third of patients could be considered to have improved from the operation. One third could be considered to be worse than before the operation and one third were roughly the same. This is hardly a stellar success rate, but given the lack of options for the worst cases of mental disease, it may have seemed worth the risk. There certainly were a few cases of individuals who seemed to gain extensive relief with few complications, but these were relatively rare.

A few individuals died during the procedure.  Others were left completely incapacitated and severely disabled.  Many, however, did retain their basic abilities to communicate and do simple tasks.   Some lost the ability to walk or talk but subsequently relearned it.   A number of reports indicated that the patients became very child-like and lost the ability to comprehend complex concepts.  Lack of emotional responses or social capacity was also reported.   Another effect was the loss of inhibitions.  Many seemed to have no fear or anxiety, even in circumstances where it would be appropriate.  Apathy and social disconnection were common.  Many patients began to overeat and put on large amounts of weight.  Some developed complications ranging from incontinence to lack of balance to sleep disorders.

The psychiatric community accepted the procedure with varying levels of enthusiasm. It gained rapid acceptance across the world, but many remained uneasy about the implications and ethical considerations. It was used primarily on the worst of the worst cases, at least initially. Directors of mental hospitals welcomed anything that could make it easier to manage their overcrowded wards, resulting in an expansion of use that raised questions about whether it was really being used as a last resort. Overall, the procedure was never without controversy, but given the lack of alternatives, it often was considered about the only thing that could be done to at least try to relieve severe mental illness.

Walter Freeman, the great lobotomist

Nobody did more to advance the expansion of lobotomy than Dr. Walter Freeman. Freeman was an American neurologist who, in the early 1930’s, became interested psycosurgury as a means of relieving the epidemic of mental illness he witnessed in state-run asylums. In 1935, he heard of the leucotomy procedure and became immediately interested in its potential. Freeman learned about the technique from Moniz, who became something of a mentor to Freeman. Yet his enthusiasm would far surpass that of even Moniz.

In 1936, Freeman brought the procedure to the United States, when he preformed his first lobotomy on Alice Hood Hammatt of Kansas. Freeman believed the leucotomy was the answer to nearly all mental illness. He claimed the procedure showed marked improvement in at least sixty percent of cases, although this finding is very much in doubt given the reports of others. In the next few years he preformed hundreds of the operations, assisted by his assistant James Watt. With the help of Watts, Freeman modified the procedure to remove even more of the white matter connecting the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. He renamed the procedure the lobotomy and began his long career in promoting lobotomy across the United States and world.

While Freeman was fairly successful in selling his procedure to mental hospital administrators and in getting patients to undergo the surgery, he recognized that the complexity and expense of brain surgery was a major barrier. Drilling into the head of a patient and cutting portions of the brain required a skilled surgeon, a sterile operating room and properly administered anesthesia. To make the procedure truly commonplace, Freeman would need to make it much simpler and faster. Ideally, he wanted to find a way to make the lobotomy possible as an outpatient procedure preformed in a doctor’s office.

So was born the “transorbital lobotomy,” an especially crude procedure that Freeman would champion for the remainder of his medical career. Freeman preformed the first of these operations in 1946. The transorbital lobotomy was preformed through the eyesockets and left the patient with no outward signs of the surgery except for severely black eyes. The instrument used was likened to an icepick, which was inserted along the top of the eyeball and then broken through the thin bone on the top of the eyesocket with a hammer. It was then moved back and forth to sever the connection with the frontal lobes. The whole procedure could be done in minutes. Freeman took an additional shortcut by omitting standard anesthesia in favor of electroshock. A few shocks of electricity to the head of the patient would send them into spasms and then into a brief period of unconsciousness. This was more than enough time to preform the lobotomy.

Freeman toured the United States promoting the lobotomy, and especially the transorbital lobotomy at hospitals and medical meetings. He preformed a total of 3,400 lobotomies and suggested the procedure for everything from depression to migraine headaches. He toured in a car he dubbed the lobotomobile. Freeman took photographs of nearly all his procedures, he produced instructional films on the benefits and techniques of lobotomy. He held workshops to teach doctors how to preform his procedure. Yet his showmanship and the rapid fashion in which he preformed the operation made many of his colleges very uneasy.

Many of his procedures were preformed on individuals who did not seem to suffer from any major mental disease. His most notorious was that of Rosemary Kennedy, sister of President John F. Kennedy. Rosemary was reported to have been difficult and unruly. She may have been mildly retarded or at least learning disabled. Whatever the reason, he father, Joseph Kennedy had no tolerance for a daughter who did not fit the image of perfection he sought to cultivate. In 1941 he sent her to Freeman for a lobotomy, which left her severely incapacitated. She was forced to live out the rest of her life in institutions, unable to care for herself and badly handicapped. She died in 2005, having never recovered from the operation.

Freeman’s techniques and willingness to preform lobotomies so readily on those who did not appear to have any major mental illness lead to increasing criticism throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s. Concerned over the cruelty and crudeness of Freeman’s practices, even his loyal college James Watts left Freeman’s practice in 1950. Freeman’s fall from grace was accelerated in the mid 1950’s, when the drug Thorazine became widely available. The first modern anti-psychotic, it revolutionized mental health care. Thorazine could help control psychotic episodes and calm violent behavior. Unlike the lobotomy, it had minimal dangers of complications. It could also be adjusted to the appropriate level for the patient and its effects were temporary. Discontinuing Thorazine would result in the full reversal of the effects.

It would be followed by other psychoactive drugs, which were embraced by the mental healthcare sector. Finally, an effective treatment other than lobotomy existed and thus began the revolution that would lead to widespread deinstitutionalization. By the late 1950’s most in the medical field considered the lobotomy to be obsolete, crude and unnecessary. Yet Freeman remained a champion of it and continued to promote the lobotomy as a better treatment than drugs. Freeman dismissed Thorazine and similar drugs. He believed they did not treat the underlying problem and considered them temporary, noting that his operation could “cure” patients for life, but drugs needed to be administered continually.

As his promotion of lobotomy became more fanatical he became more marginalized. Yet Freeman continued to preform the procedures until 1967. That year he preformed the operation on Helen Mortensen. It was the third time he had preformed the operation on Mortensen. It’s not clear why he would do so more than once; he may have believed he had not completely severed the connections in the past operations. Whatever the reason, the operation proved disastrous. Mortensen suffered a severe cerebral hemorrhage and died. She was not the first patient to die during the operation. In fact, a large number had lost their lives due to similar complications, but this time, it would not go unnoticed. Freeman lost his medical license and finally stopped preforming lobotomies.

From 1967 until his death in 1972, Freeman toured the country visiting his former patients to collect their stories in support of his claims of the success of the procedure. Despite his enthusiasm for the procedure, Freeman, of course, never had it himself. Yet it seems he may have been more qualified for it than many of his patients. Freeman appears to have had a number of his own daemons. He often took large doses of sleeping pills and suffered a number of personal tragedies that he never overcame. His marriage was unhappy and his wife an alcoholic. Freeman also lost a son when he fell into a river and was swept over a waterfall while our hiking with Freeman. Though he showed signs of depression, he never received any treatment and instead threw himself into his work.

By the 1970’s, the era of the lobotomy was over. Few were preformed anywhere in the world. Today few psycosurguries are preformed and when they are, it is only in the most extreme cases. A modified form of lobotomy is preformed on very rare occasions. It is almost never used for psychiatric conditions but occasionally may be used as a last resort for epilepsy.

There remain an unknown number of individuals who received the procedure decades ago.   As is typical of the lobotomy, their condition varies widely.  Some were robbed of most of the faculties and left profoundly handicapped while others remain mostly coherent.  A few appear to be relatively normal.   However, today those who have had the operation are now seen as having suffered a major setback, being left with a brain injury that only complicates their treatment and worsens their prognosis.

“My Lobotomy” – An Absolute Must Read on the Subject

Anyone who has interest in the lobotomy, the evolution of mental healthcare of simply wants to read a fascinating, if heartbreaking tail should consider the book “My Lobotomy.”  It’s really one of the most unique and memorable books I’ve ever read.  The book was written by Howard Dully, who, in 1960 was one of the youngest of Freeman’s patients to receive a lobotomy at only twelve years old.

Freeman had diagnosed Dully with schizophrenia, though this is highly suspect given that he only actually interviewed Howard a few times. In fact, Howard seems to have suffered from little or no mental disease at all. He was an energetic kid, prone to playing practical jokes on others and not always one to sit quietly in class. He was punished often at home for relatively small infractions, such as stealing cookies from the cookie jar in the kitchen.

Howard’s mother died of cancer in 1954, and his father remarried a woman who seems to have hated young Howard. It may have been because she favored her biological children or because Howard was larger than most and thus could seem threatening, but whatever the reason, the didn’t like Howard. She punished him severely and frequently. She attempted to get rid of him by passing him off to the state social services system with inflated claims that he threatened her other children. She insisted he was disturbed and had him sent to a school for special needs children and to a mental hospital. Howard’s father worked multiple jobs and was of little help in defending his son, usually caving to his wife’s hatred of Howard.

Howard’s step-mother went to numerous psychiatrists, but most told her there was no problem with Howard and some suggested she needed help. Then she found Walter Feeman. Freeman mentioned the lobotomy as a possibility, but even he was apprehensive about it. It took her a few months to convince Freeman that Howard was out of control and in desperate need of a lobotomy. At twelve years old and with little understanding of what was being done, Howard had the procedure preformed.

The photograph to the right shows the actual procedure with Freeman holding the instrument in Howard Dully’s brain.

Unfortunately, even after the procedure Howard’s step-mother seems to have continued to hate him and consider him unruly. He was thrown out of the house, forced into institutions and ended up an alcoholic, living on the street and dabbling in petty crime like check fraud to get by. With no family support and having never learned how to live a normal life, Howard Dully spent many years in this condition. He eventually managed to pull his life together. He sobered up, got a degree in information technology and then became a certified bus driving instructor. Though it took years, Dully managed to establish a stable, productive life.

In many ways, Howard Dully was lucky. That might sound like a very strange thing to say given what was done to him, but the results could have been much worse.   Howard Dully is not profoundly disabled.   He can drive, take care of himself and lead a generally normal life.  He’s not spaced out all the time and does not lack emotions.  He’s articulate and even and has a sharp, if dry sense of humor.   He has no problem bonding to others, understanding the feelings of his peers or experiencing normal social interactions.  He can do math, remember things and seems to have otherwise normal cognition, being of better than average intelligence.

In that sense, the results of the procedure could have been far worse and were for many.  It’s unclear why Dully managed to recover so well from the procedure.  It’s possible that his young age aided him.   In younger individuals, neural plasticity allows the brain to better compensate for injuries than in older individuals.  It’s quite likely that Howard Dully managed to regain most of what he lost by reconfiguring the connections in his brain to compensate for the injury.

In 2005, Dully was featured on the NPR program All Things Considered. The program centered around Dully and documented the effects of the lobotomy on him and others. As part of the program, Dully was given unprecedented access to the records of Walter Freeman, which had been stored at George Washington University. He was finally able to see his case file and read what Freeman had been told that lead to the decision to preform the lobotomy. He also interviewed others who had been lobotomized as well as the son of Dr. Walter Freeman.  The program was one of the highest rated NPR radio documentaries of all time.  The program is available online here.

In 2007, Dully co-authored his memoir with Charles Fleming. (as is commonly done by those with little prior writing experience).

The book is shocking and revealing. It provides unique insight into how the lobotomy was used and also into the world of Walter Freeman. There are a few things that really surprised me. Based on his notes and accounts, Freeman does not come off as an unsympathetic doctor. However misguided he may have been, he took genuine interest in the lives of his patients and was concerned for their welfare.  Freeman was, in fact, a very complex character.  Those who knew him almost universally described him as a genius, yet he seemed oblivious to the harm he caused.

There are also accounts of some of the more odd encounters with Freeman, such as one in which Howard and two other young people were presented on stage by Freeman as examples of the success of his procedure. The audience was shocked by their young ages and booed Freeman, who lost his temper and began to defend his procedure by citing the Christmas cards he got from his patients.

From NPR (And Very Much Worth Listening to):
‘My Lobotomy’: Howard Dully’s Journey
Howard Dully Talks about ‘My Lobotomy’

You can buy the book here. It’s well worth the read.

Other Links:
Psycosurgery.org
Rosemary Kennedy: the importance of a historical footnote
Walter Freeman – Father of the Lobotomy
Walter Freeman’s Lobotomies: Oral Histories (recollections of physicians assistant and others)
The Lobotomist(PBS Documentary On Freeman)
Walter Freeman’s Photographs (A look at the photographs Freeman took, including before and after)
Guide to the Walter Freeman and James Watts Papers (George Washington University)

Freeman’s own film on the transorbital lobotomy (part 1) – warning, graphic
Freeman’s own film on the transorbital lobotomy (part 2) – warning, graphic

Kevorkian was most prolific in his activities between 1991 and 1998.  During that time he traveled around the United States aiding individuals in taking their own lives.   Kevorkian designed the equipment used, which included an IV drug machine and a carbon monoxide respirator.   He attached patients to the machines but did not take the final step of pushing the plunger or opening the valve.  That was done by the patients, and to some extent, insulated him from being easily prosecuted.   Still, he was in and out of court many times during the 1990’s.   He lost his license to practice medicine and was repeatedly ordered to stop his activities.

Kevorkian loved the attention that the controversy generated.   His court dates became media circuses and he never passed up an interview.  Kevorkian would always say that he was fighting for the right of a person to control their own destiny, die with dignity and relieve their own suffering.   However, many of his antics were not exactly dignified.

In 1998, Kevorkian appeared on the news program 60 Minutes and showed a videotape of the assisted suicide of Thomas Youk, a 52 year old ALS sufferer.   Youk expressed his desire to die and gave his full consent to the procedure to end his life.   In this video Kevorkian did something he had never publicly admitted to before, he pushed the plunger that delivered the lethal drugs himself.   Kevorkian also directly dared authorities to convict him of murder for his actions.   This time he bluffed a bit too hard.  They did and he was sentenced to ten to twenty five years in prison.  Kevorkian was finally paroled in 2007.   Since then he spent a bit less time in the media spotlight.   As a condition of his parole he agreed to no longer preform any kind of suicide service or provide any advice on the matter.

With the recent death of Kevorkian, there has been a lot of talk about his life and accomplishments.   A large number of individuals who identify with atheism, humanism, libertarianism and other related movements have been quick to praise Kevorkian.  Those who believe that a person should have the right to die often cast him as a hero, fighting for a basic human liberty and for the merciful release from pain and suffering.   This is not new.  During his life, Kevorkian was portrayed as a hero by a number of groups and activists.  In 2010, Al Pacino portrayed Kevorkian in the television movie “You Don’t Know Jack,” which showed Kevorkian as a compassionate activist fighting to legalize dying by choice.   Kurt Vonnegut’s collection of short stories published under the title “God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian,” was more of a spoof than a tribute, but Kevorkian seems to have enjoyed the attention anyway.

Sorry, but I can’t agree. I find the man despicable.

Before I explain why I find Kevorkian so despicable, let me make it clear that it’s not because I don’t support the right of the informed to choose to end their life and it’s not because I think that any doctor who would engage in assisting them in doing so is doing something wrong.   As a general follower of libertarianism, I can’t see much justification for making it illegal for someone to end their own life in such circumstances as terminal illness.  Of course, doing so does raise the very concerning possibility that a person might somehow be coerced or pressured into doing so, and as such euthanasia protocol must have multiple checks and procedures to assure that anyone who ultimately chooses to end their life has made the decision in a sound state of mind, without coercion and has had time to consider the implications and alternatives.

Kevorkian, by most accounts, didn’t seem to think much of such safety measures.   However, ultimately, that’s not what I find the most unsettling about Kevorkian.   Rather, it’s the very attitude that the man demonstrated and the way he portrayed his work and himself.

The intentional taking of one’s life in these circumstances is never anything less than a tragic event.   While it may mean an end to suffering, it is ultimately the culmination of the most agonizing decision anyone will have to make.  When an individual has reached this stage it means that there is no longer any hope of continuing life in any meaningful capacity.   They have found their self in such excruciating pain or physical degeneration that none of the joys of life can make existence worthwhile.   All that they are and were is coming to and end because it is the only escape from their condition.   For the loved ones of the person dying, the death represents the climax of their struggle with seeing someone they care about suffer and finally die.   Loved ones are likely to have complex and conflicting emotions, which will not end with the life of the patient.  For those closest, it only begins the second phase of their grieving and coming to terms with the loss.

A physician may well consider it their duty to offer assistance in making the process as quick and painless as possible.   They may even feel they are doing a good service to those involved.   Yet any reasonable doctor (or reasonable person) will approach this with an appropriately somber and respectful tone and will view the taking of their patients life as the most serious and tragic of the duties they are called to preform.    There’s nothing joyous about watching a terminally ill person fade into death.

But Kevorkian didn’t seem to view his work as somber at all.  In fact, his attitude toward his role in ending life seemed to be a combination of flamboyant self-promotion and some kind of morbid power lust.   Kevorkian didn’t just help sick people die, he delighted in it.   The prospect of another patient willing to die made Kevorkian beam like a kid being handed a great big lollipop.   His compulsion to take part in the taking of human life was worse than just morbid.

Kevorkian complete disregard for the most basic ethical responsibilities.

There are certain things which are nearly universally agreed upon by those who advocate legalized euthanasia.  In jurisdictions where euthanasia is legal (such as in the Netherlands), these are, in one way or another, accounted for in the legal requirements before a physician can in any way assist a person in dying.

A few of the basic requirements include the following:

• The patient must be of sound mind and should receive counseling and evaluation to assure that they are.
• The request must be the decision of the patient.  It cannot be the result of any kind of pressure or coercion from others.  Any doctor involved is obligated to make sure that the patient is fully aware that they do not need to go through with it and that should taken steps necessary to make sure they have every opportunity to alert their care givers if they are being pressured.
• The patient must be legitimately terminally ill and experiencing suffering that will not subside.   It is important that this is confirmed by second opinions.   The possibility that they have been misdiagnosed and in fact have a treatable or short term condition must be eliminated and this needs to be verified.
• The patient must be made aware of their other options.  Various forms of pain management and assisted living should be brought to their attention and evaluated.
• The patient must have ample time to consider their decision.   It should never be made in a state of shock or as a sudden, rash decision.   Obviously, it is something which one can’t change their mind about after the fact.
• The process must be well documented, reviewed and witnessed.   For the protection of the patient, there must be absolute verification that everything was done properly, that they did indeed want to die and made the decision on their own, with proper councilmen and complete awareness of the alternatives.

These requirements may well result in a cumbersome process that can take weeks before the death actually occurs, but they are an unavoidable consequence of the extreme gravity of the decision and the deep ethical obligation of a doctor to always consider the best interests of those being treated. Kevorkian himself publicly endorsed stringent standards for those who requested euthanasia. He stated that such individuals should always have their mental health evaluated.

However, in practice, Jack Kevorkian largely ignored those rules. In 1997, an extensive investigation of patients Kevorkian helped die by the Detroit Free Press uncovered some disturbing evidence of just how lax Kevorkian’s standards had become.

An article on the investigation concluded:

In fact, at least 60 percent of Kevorkian’s suicide patients were not terminal. At least 17 could have lived indefinitely and, in 13 cases, the people had no complaints of pain.

Many friends and relatives of the people who committed suicide with Kevorkian weren’t even aware he had a written set of standards. But they believe he is willing to suspend almost any rule to accommodate people who really want to die.

…

Examining the Kevorkian suicides, the Free Press found that in clear violation of his own written standards:

KEVORKIAN HAS FAILED to consult psychiatrists, even when dealing with depressed people.

In a 1992 article setting out his rules for physician- assisted suicides, Kevorkian wrote it is always mandatory to bring in a psychiatrist because a person’s “mental state is . . . of paramount importance.” But the Free Press found at least 19 cases in which Kevorkian did not contact psychiatrists.

In at least five of those cases, the people who died had histories of depression.

KEVORKIAN HAS FAILED to observe minimum waiting periods before helping people to die.

He has stated that after signing a formal request, a person must always wait at least 24 hours before getting help to commit suicide. But the Free Press found at least 17 instances in which Kevorkian’s first meeting with the person was also his last. In at least five of these, less than three hours passed from the signing of the request to the moment of death. In one case, the waiting period was one hour.

KEVORKIAN HAS FAILED to consult with pain specialists and other medical experts, even when the need was clearly indicated.

Kevorkian has endorsed a written rule requiring that a pain expert be consulted in any case where “pain is a major factor” in a suicidal patient’s complaints. But out of 33 cases in which people came to Kevorkian complaining of chronic pain, he failed to consult a pain specialist in at least 17.

KEVORKIAN HAS FAILED to discover financial or family problems that may have contributed to a patient’s wish to die.

He has written that skilled help is “necessary to detect personal or family disputes, to clarify financial problems” and help people with their wills and funeral arrangements. But his questioning in these areas is cursory at best. In one recent case, he failed to uncover multiple allegations of spousal abuse and debts of more than $320,000.

Kevorkian outlined these and other rules in a 1992 article he wrote for the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry. Fieger has described the article as a codification of the guidelines Kevorkian lives by.

It’s very difficult to know exactly what standards were followed in all cases. Kevorkian did not keep much in the way of documentation, leaving disturbing questions in a number of cases as to whether the patient actually wanted to die and came to the decision without outside manipulation. Kevorkian and his supporters always claimed the lack of documentation and the fact that he rarely consulted other doctors or mental health care providers was because he was forced to operate in an oppressive and persecutory climate, where such measures would have resulted in his work being ended. However, even in circumstances where Kevorkian did not need to fear criminal liability. (such as in Oregon, where assisted suicide was legalized in 1994.)

In at least some cases, Kevorkian did make audio or video of his “counseling” sessions with patients. However, a review of these recordings found his methods to have a very disturbing level of persuasion toward commission of suicide. Kevorkian rarely, if ever, mentioned alternatives of asked his patients to consider the positive aspects of their life.

As the Free Press Reports:

Kaplan, who is studying Kevorkian’s methods, has reviewed 14 videotapes made by Kevorkian of conversations with 12 people wishing to die.

“There are aspects of counseling in some of them,” Kaplan said. “But in many of these tapes, it’s difficult to see.”

Kevorkian did ask Hugh Gale, a 70-year-old Roseville man suffering with emphysema, to make a list of things he enjoyed so he would have reasons for living. And there are numerous cases where Kevorkian has told people they are not ready to die and has put them off for days, weeks or even months.

But in many cases Kevorkian’s conversations with his patients focused on negatives — the things they couldn’t do, rather than potential reasons to live.

Kaplan, head of the Suicide Research Center at Chicago’s Columbia-Michael Reese Hospital and a psychology teacher at Wayne State University, cited a taped session with Janet Adkins, the 54-year-old Portland, Ore., woman who was Kevorkian’s first suicide. Three days earlier, the Alzheimer’s disease patient had beaten her son at tennis.

Rather than her tennis ability, the conversation focused on memory lapses that made it hard for Adkins to keep score on the court.

The 1997 Free Press Report Also found strong evidence that many of those Kevorkian helped die may have been suffering from little more than depression, a treatable condition which often does result in suicidal thoughts and an illogically negative outlook on life.

From terminal illness to no physical illness: He has assisted in the deaths of elderly, terminally ill and desperately suffering men and women, such as Merian Frederick, who died Oct. 22, 1993, at age 72, unable to speak, eat or swallow because of the fatal, paralyzing nerve disease ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

But Kevorkian also helped end the life of at least one woman, 39-year-old Rebecca Badger, who was a mentally troubled drug abuser and had no physical disease. An autopsy showed she was mistakenly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

From years of counseling to minutes: Kevorkian has had at least three cases in which more than a year went by between his first contact with the suicide candidate and the moment of death.

By his own admission, Kevorkian had, in at least a few cases, been contacted by a patient, agreed to consider their request, met them and attended to their death all in a matter of two days.  That is hardly enough time to actually get to know the situation of a person and their state of mind.   Kevorkian’s supporters have always insisted that he declined to assist in the death of anyone he evaluated as mentally unstable or merely depressed, but there are very few accounts of anyone actually being declined by Kevorkian for these reasons.

Kevorkian’s first (admitted) assisted suicide, Janet Adkins, was in some ways one of the most disturbing.   Adkins was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, but was only showing the earliest stages of the disease.   Alzheimer gets progressively worse, but the rate of decline varies considerably.   Mental facilities diminish over time as does memory and general awareness.   For someone in such a condition, it’s critical that great care is taken to assure that they are still in a state where they understand their condition and are giving informed consent.   Kevorkian didn’t seem to make any effort toward this.   In fact the opposite seems true. According to a number of reports, Adkins psychiatrist, Dr. Murray Raskind, had warned Kevorkian that her condition made it impossible for her to make such a decision. That did not stop Kevorkian, however. He carried out the assisted suicide the very day that Adkins received the final diagnosis of Alzhimer’s, hardly enough time to get past the initial shock and begin to digest the implications.

Kevorkian never responded to the scathing report of the Detroit Free Press.  That report, though perhaps the most disturbing was not alone.

According to the Economist:

Over 130 people died painlessly with the help of these machines and the doctor who invented them. The first was Janet Adkins, a former college instructor on disability, who resolved to kill herself the day she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and did so, with Dr Kevorkian in attendance, in his rusty van in a Michigan campsite. Those who followed her seemed unremarkable: a bus driver, a doctor, a supervisor at a pillow factory and so on, all terminally ill, or so they believed. Studies of those who sought out Dr Kevorkian, however, suggest that though many had a worsening illness, cancer perhaps or a neurological disease, it was not usually terminal. Autopsies showed five people had no disease at all. Those who came to him were more likely to be women than men, often unmarried and typically ill-at-ease when talking to doctors. Little over a third were in pain. Some presumably suffered from no more than hypochondria or depression.

The families of those who Kevorkian helped die have also not been universally supportive of his actions. While it is true that some of the families were grateful for Kevorkian’s services and saw them as merciful and necessary, others saw Kevorkian as little more than a murderer who preyed on those in a weak enough state of mind to be persuaded to take their own life with Kevorkian’s machines and assistance. One confronted him during his unsuccessful campaign for congress in 2009. In most cases, Kevorkian had limited or no contact at all with the friends and family of the individual who he helped die.   He spoke of the need to consult family members to verify the state of mind and wishes of the patient, but did not consistently follow through with this.

A History of Kevorkian’s two great loves: Death and himself

One thing that Kevorkian can never be accused of is being overly modest. The greater the controversy and the media coverage the more his ego seemed to grow. He beamed in interviews as he showed off his death machines and talked about how he battled for the most fundamental of human rights. He compared himself to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He said those who opposed him were no better than Nazis. He call doctors who opposed his methods or believed he was taking his mission too far “hypocritic oafs”. He basked in the light of the cameras and seemed to enjoy his nickname “Doctor Death.”

Despite talking a great deal about the duties and responsibilities of a physician, Kevorkian never actually worked directly with patients prior to his assisted suicide campaign. After graduating from the University of Michigan medical school in 1956, Kevorkian worked in a number of hospitals as a pathologist.   The only patients Kevorkian ever actually came in contact with were already dead, as Kevorkian was tasked with preforming autopsies.

Yet for Kevorkian, death was far more than just a part of his career. In fact, he seems to have had an unhealthy obsession with death that went far beyond accepting it as a part of life that the medical professions must face.

Kevorkian earned his nickname “Doctor Death” long before his euthanasia campaign.   His strange and morbid experiments with death date to the earliest days of his residency.   In 1955, Kevorkian embarked on what would be the first in a series of unusual experiments and projects when he began photographing the eyes of patients at the University of Michigan medical center at the time of death and shortly thereafter.

It’s not entirely clear what the medical and scientific value of these experiments was.  Kevorkian claimed that observing the pattern of blood in the cornia could be used to determine time of death and to determine which individuals may have experienced cardiac arrest recently enough to be candidates for resuscitation versus those who were no longer viable.   Both his techniques and his apparent enthusiasm for the subject made his colleges uneasy.   Kevorkian would later admit “my number one reason was because it was interesting, And my second reason was because it was a taboo subject.”

Kevorkian made his “death rounds” (as jokingly called them) for several months, photographing the eyes of patients shortly before and after death, but it was not until 1956 that he got his wish. Kevorkian caught a sick woman in the final throws of death, he taped her eyelids open and stuck his camera in her eye. As she convulsed, Kevorkian got the condition of her cornea before, during and after death. A paper was published, but no apparent useful science came of it.

This was only the first in a string of notorious publications and experiments conducted by Kevorkian.  One topic that most doctors won’t touch is execution and capital punishment. It’s seen as going against the basic purpose of the medical profession. Regardless of their personal opinions on capital punishment, most doctors simply won’t involve themselves in the matter or discuss it publicly, as it is a professional taboo. Yet Kevorkian was fascinated by executions. In 1960 he made the proposed that condemned prisoners could be used for medical experiments, a suggestion that shocked his peers in the medical field. Although Kevorkian suggested that prisoners consent to the procedures, the ethical issues it presented. The incident resulted in Kevorkian losing his job at the University of Michigan medical center.

In 1961, Kevorkian once again generated controversy when he began conducting experiments at Pontiac General Hospital in the use of blood harvested from cadavers for transfusion to the living. The concept may well have had value as a means of increasing supplies for blood banks, but Kevorkian’s methods and attitude toward the experiments turned stomachs.  Many doctors that worked alongside Kevorkian questioned the motives and value of Kevorkian’s experiments. One stated “Most of us just sort of changed the subject when he got on it. We thought it was inappropriate. We had plenty of blood. We didn’t need to deal with cadavers.”

As time went on, Kevorkian became bolder with his experiments. When he first began the transfusion experiments in 1961, a strict procedure was used to assure the blood was screened for pathogens and that the body of the donor was free of infectious disease. By 1964, his experiments had evolved to become far more gruesome and less restrained.   As Kevorkian stated “We actually transfused blood from immediately dead people—from their heart through a special syringe—into the recipient.” Indeed, Kevorkian had begun experiments in which he transfused the blood directly from the corpse of an 18 year old accident victim into a living person. The death had just occurred and no toxicology tests or disease screenings had taken place when Kevorkian stuck a needle into the dead girl’s heart and began to siphon her blood into a living subject.

Kevorkian’s early experiments in which blood was drawn from corpses for transfusion to live subjects had at least not been a completely unknown procedure.   During the Second World War, Soviet doctors had used cadaver blood for transfusions.  However, direct corpse to human transfusion with no incubation, additives or testing was beyond what even the Soviets were willing to try.

Kevorkian claimed that the reason for these bizarre and goulish experiments was that such techniques could be used on the battlefield, allowing medics to transfuse blood from recently dead soldiers into their injured comrades to save their lives.   It’s questionable whether or not such a procedure would actually be reasonable, even for a war zone.  Moreover, the safety of the procedure was not entirely established.   Kevorkian insisted in research papers that the results were positive and that the need for anticoagulant additives typically needed for transfusion.  If all transfusions went well, it’s only by luck, because Kevorkian openly admits that he began the transfusion experiments on human patients without first attempting them on laboratory animals – something which is virtually unheard of in modern medicine.

Not only were his experiments morbid, dangerous and downright unethical, but his methods of promoting his ideas were tailored to increase their shock value. When Kevorkian attempted to pitch his idea in Military Medicine, he didn’t just describe the procedure, but also included photos of a staged battlefield transfusion between a dead and a wounded soldier. The Pentagon declined Kevorkian’s idea.

After being asked to leave Pontiac General Hospital in 1966, Kevorkian would work briefly at a number of hospitals, preforming freelance pathological work before eventually becoming chief of pathology at Saratoga General Hospital in Detroit in 1970. By most accounts, Kevorkian was not a very good fit for the position. He made his colleges uncomfortable. Kevorkian was a loaner with eclectic interests. He dabbled in painting and music composition and even wrote a diet book.

In 1976 he took a hiatus from the medical world, moved to California and began to set his sights on making movies. Somehow he managed to get the funding to produce a single low-budget feature film. The film was never exhibited and Kevorkian refused to discuss the shelved film project thereafter. Before long he had run out of money and started to work odd jobs in medicine and pathology again.

This was not Kevorkian’s only creative work, however. He was also a fairly accomplished painter and dabbled in music composition. His paintings, like so much else in his life, were intended to shock and showed a disturbing fascination with violence and death. Several of his paintings are shown to the right. Some might say that his paintings were intended to be humanistic by forcing viewers to consider the great pain and suffering caused by war, disease and genocide. However, given the rest of Kevorkian’s life, it seems likely that their significance was far darker.

By 1979 he had returned to his early fascination with photographing the eyes of the dying, but no scientific studies came of it.  From there, Kevorkian bounced between several hospitals and other jobs into the 1980’s.   He frequently wrote of death, assisted suicide and unorthodox ideas for the use of corpses or executions.  He wrote histories of medical experiments on the condemned and other topics that most in the medical world found disturbing.   In 1987 he traveled to Amsterdam in an attempt to become part of the accepted Dutch practice of Euthanasia.   Yet dutch doctors rejected him, considering many of his ideas offensive and believing he ultimately hurt the cause.

After returning to the United States, Kevorkian began his career as a suicide provider.   He placed an ad in the paper which read:

DEATH COUNSELING

IS SOMEONE IN YOUR FAMILY TERMINALLY ILL?

Does he or she wish to die – and with dignity?

CALL PHYSICIAN CONSULTANT

It was not until 1990 that Kevorkian went from being a consultant to a provider of suicide supplies. Unless, of course, he had done it earlier than he admits, which is a distinct possibility.

Many predicted that when Kevorkian’s life ended it would be by his own hand, using one of his death machines and perhaps being turned into some kind of media event. It was not. Early in 2011, Kevorkian was diagnosed with liver cancer. This would seem to make him a perfect candidate for his own brand of “mercy” but he never attempted to end his life. On May 18 was admitted to William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan on May 18 2011 due to Kidney problems.    He hung on for more than two weeks in intensive care, but his condition worsened and on June 3, he died of thrombosis, a complication of his condition.  He was 83.   As far as we know, there were no cameras shoved in his eye at the moment of death to capture images of the dying Kevorkian’s cornea.

And good riddance to him. Despite being the public face of the debate over legalized euthanasia as a means of decreasing suffering and giving people the freedom to choose their own fate and die with dignity, the man appears to have been little more than a sociopath who got his jollies over watching other people die.