Environmental pollution
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Environmental pollution · Oct 2018
ReviewFrom Muller to mechanism: How LNT became the default model for cancer risk assessment.
This paper summarizes the historical and scientific foundations of the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) cancer risk assessment model. The story of cancer risk assessment is an extraordinary one as it was based on an initial incorrect gene mutation interpretation of Muller, the application of this incorrect assumption in the derivation of the LNT single-hit model, and a series of actions by leading radiation geneticists during the 1946-1956 period, including a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) I Genetics Panel (Anonymous, 1956), to sustain the LNT belief via a series of deliberate obfuscations, deceptions and misrepresentations that provided the basis of modern cancer risk assessment policy and practices. ⋯ Thus, cancer risk assessment has a poorly appreciated, complex and seriously flawed history that has undermined policies and practices of regulatory agencies in the U. S. and worldwide to the present time.