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• Saturday, December 2, 2006 07:41 PM

  gederer, crumley, et al

  I think you fellows should back off a little; your dogmatic certainty is unbecoming.

  Almost anything that one can find about the absorption of Po210 in the gut indicates that it is very inefficiently transported across membranes when it is in the form of dissolved solids or salts. Most of the research on contamination (studies on rats, etc.), deals with inhalation, not ingestion, just as Large says.

  I think you guys are just getting a rush from feeling that you have caught an "expert" with his pants down. That is understandable. But it strikes me as unlikely in the extreme that someone with Large's resume would be guilty of errors as egregious as those he is being charged here with making.

  The crucial fact here might be whether or not Salon is in error when it reports that Large ". . . spent some 20 years as a research fellow with the British government's Atomic Energy Authority before starting his own firm, Large & Associates, where, among other things, he was responsible for risk analysis during the salvage of the sunken Russian nuclear submarine Kursk." If this is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt that it is), then I think it would be fair to assume that the man knows what he is talking about.

  I don't personally claim expertise in the area of radio-nuclide dosing, and dosimetry. That is an arcane field of very specialized knowledge. (I do know something of radio-dosimetry, which knowldge was absorbed in my early years as an analytical spectroscopist; experience that includes high-energy X-Ray and other techniques.) I am only suggesting here-- humbly, I hope-- that, lacking such expertise as Large plainly possesses, the posters should be a little more conservative in their criticisms.

  Given that there is considerable doubt as to whether you guys actually know what you seem to want to claim to know, maybe you should be a little more conservative, a little less certain .

  "A little learning is a dangerous thing, drink deeply from the Empyrean Spring . . ."

  —wmsberry Read wmsberry's other letters
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