Dr. Linus Pauling AGING AND DEATH

I don't know too much about this. Three or four years ego I got
interested in the question of wheat causes veople to get old , or what
is physiological age. When infants are born there is a good chance that
they will die early in life; then their death rate becomes quite low -
the death ratefrom ommexmt one to ten - the number per thousand that die
each year; cancer is the principal cause of death in this region. It
gets lower still in the teens and twenties, for Americans; then it starts
going up.

I got interested in aging because of my interest in mental diseases.
One child in 600 that is born is a Mongoloid. He is mentally deficient
and has other various stigmata; his epicanthal folds are sort of odd that
give him km a kind of Mongolian appearance. He usually has missing

the paims of
‘phylanges and an odd pattern of lihes in/his hands, and his ears are funny;

andxbinxsnss and he is mentally deficient. And sometimes people have said
that these mongoloids age more rapidly than other people and they look
like little old men. Well, nobody knew then what caused mongolism; and

I thought that we ought to chetk up on their physiological age and see

if they really do age more rapidly than other people. I talked about

this with people who work with me; we began cheeking up to find out how
you determine one's physiological age. If we think that peovle are older
than their years or younger than their years ~ physiologically ~ what does
that mean. The way to tell how o1d4 a verson is to look at him, I've
discovered. There is no way of taking a sample of blood and putting it

in an apparatus and having it reveal a physiological age of 33.7 years,

or anything like that. Nobody knows how to determine physiological age.

For children, you can take an X-ray picture of their wrists, and you

can see the ends of the bones, hwere the bones are being depositied by
Dr. Pauling 2

cartillage; and from the amount of material that has been devosited you
can get a pretty good idea of how old the child is. After he gets to be
20 - from that time on, this method just doesn't work.

Of course, one characteristic thing about getting old is that you
die more often (laughter). If it were an 'all or none! process for indi-
viduals, then this would be a good way. At age 30, say, you have a certain
pretty small chance of dying. At ages 40, 45, 50, the chances are larger.
The death rate ver thousand people at age 35 is greater than at age 30;
age 40 greater than age 35 and so on.

There was an Englishman named Gumperts, over a hundredyears ago, who
made a very interesting discovery. He plotted these specific death rates
and found that they lie on an exponential curve 5 tke this. This means
that here you have a certain death rate - say 1/1000; out here it is 2/1000;
here 4/1000; 8/1000; 16/1000; 32/1000; 64/1000, and so on. And the nature
of an exponential curve is such that these intervals are equal. For
populations of human beings, these intervals are 8+ years: you get twice
as old every 83 years ~ twice the chance of dying every 84 years. That
is the nar{ebp of the Gumpert's curve,

If you take differentd populations of human beings - those with a
small life expectancy and those with a large life expectancy ~ and for
these different populations, the BE Gumpert's time constant is 83 years —
about 12 per cent of life expectancy of human beings at birth. If you
take animals; for instance, a population of mice, and watch them. As
they begin to get old, they die off more and more rapidly; and if you
plot their curves, you find that their age specific death rate goes up -
doubles itself every 12 per cent of their mean life expectancy. This
makes it possible to carry out experif¢mants with animals and then get
information about man.

If you take a batch of mice and irradiate them with a certain amount
Dr. Pauling 3

of radiation, you find that they die off more rapidly. And if you take
other animals and irradiate them, they die off more rapidly. The same
amount of radiation causes the same fractional shortening of their life
expectancy ~ shifts their Gumpert's curves.

This isn't a very good way of drawing a Gumpert's curve: I will draw
another Gumpert's curve here. The logarithm of = “age specific death
rate... Now, when you plot an exponential curve in this logarithmic
way, you get a straight line like this; and every Gs years it increases by
wim 3/10, which is the logarithm of 2; so an increase of 3/10 means a
doubling of the death rate. Here, I have put down the Gumert's curve
for Americans living in the United States now, and there £ tot of inter~
esting /you can gay about it. If we assume that this keeps on going, we
can calculate that if you start out, say, with 100 million, how many would
be left at age 117? It turns out about one; you would expect about one
American out of 100 million to live to be 117. You remember that last
year there was a veteran of the Civil War who lived to be 116 or 117,
and he was the only one which indicates that you can extrapolate . .. (laughter).

If you had 300 million as the population of the world, you would get
one that lived to be 125. I guess the stories about Methuselah have been
exaggerated somewhat.

That is the Gumpert's curve for the United States. This corresponds
to a mmm maan life expectancy of about 70 years. This curve which apolies
to parts of Africa, Northern Rhodesia, for example, with a life expectancy
of about 30 years, which represents a considerable extreme in the other
direction. When you go to other countries - England, Norway, Sweden,
Denmark, you get greater life expenctancy; the Gumpert's curves are shifted
over in this direction. This is the result of the better system of mmita
medical practice in these countries (laughter). This curve down here

represents a life expectancy of about 17 years
Dr. Pauling Ty

“7
which is the curve for the Papacos Indians in Arizona; this is the minimum
so far as I know. We can ask why this is so. Well, we can say that it
is probably largely due to the poor state of medical practice among the
Papacos Indians: and it is probably partly due to poor nutrition.

Well,here we have the extremes. If you plot the curve for the
American Negro population, it is shifted about ebvexut five years relative
to the American white population in the United states - probably poor
medical practice involved there. It is pretty interesting.

You can do other things: you can plot the curve for women and the
curve for men. The curve for women is about five years shifted to a
longer life relative to the curve for men. They die off from not quite
the same diseases, but nearly the same, and the incidence of these diseases
at age of 75 for women is about the same as at at 70 for men.

You can plot the urban population and the rural population. People
in the country live five years longer than people in the city. Probably
a considerable part of this is a result of smog. Some of it may be the
result of the strain of city life. But I think it is probably largely smog
that is responsible,

There are some other interesting things that can be done. Gumpert's
curves have been gatnered by collecting the evidence for all sorts of
popiiadions. If we take the American population of cigarette smokers:
the non-smokers have a Gumpert's curve like this; the cigarette smokers
have a curve which down here starts out the same; pretty soon some Giffere
ence, then deviating a little more. These are one~pack-a-—day smokers.
Then you have the two-nacks-a-day. The Gumert's curve for people who
have smoked one pack a day for 20 years and then stopped is about the same
as that for the half-pack-a-day smokers. It seems to be a pretty much an
addative effect. Thisshift is 8 years and this is 16 years. So, the

life expectancy is decreased by 8 years for people who smoke one pack a day
Dr. Pauling foo

and by 16 years for people who smoke two packs a day. These people don't
die of cancer of the lumg - not all of them. WNon-smokers who live in the
country never die of cancer of the lung - practically never — the indidence
is very low. Non-smokers, generally, have a very low incidence ~ about

one in 300, including city people die of cancer of the lung. Of the
two-pack-a-day cigarette smokers, one-fourth of them die of cancer of the
lung. So this is pretty important, but of the cigarette smokers in general
who have an increased incidence of disease, the increase incidence of death
over non-smokers is four times as great for death by heart disease as it

is for death by lung cancer. So coronary heart disease, caused by /snekine ©
kills off more people than lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking.

I have thought recently - here I am 59 years old and beginning to feel
it - this is what happens, /yuu see the Gumpert's curve; this reflects
something that is going on in the cell, and nobody knows what it is. I've
wondered if it could be that proteins get denatured, that sort of precipie
tate out in a sort of gum that settles down in ‘he bottom of the cell and
gets mixed up with the gears and interferes with its working. I tried to
get Professor Mettleson interested in this idea. I thought it would be a
good idea if he could do some work on aging along with his work on
nucleic acid; mucleic acid is probably involved too. Nobody really knows
what happens in the cell. One thing you find if you look in the cells of
an old person is that many of the chromosomes are damaged. Of course, in
cancer tissue, too, you find damaged chromosomes ~ damage by whatever causes
damage -— perhaps high energy radiation. Well, whatever it is that hapvoens
to people, they do get old; and as they get old they begin to feel sort of
'ont', They are not full of vim and vigor as they were when they were

young; their life isn't so happy as it was in their youth ~— golden youth.

As a matter of fact, you know, I don't think young people are hapny. They
Dr. Pauling 6

are really miserablg; they haven't got adjusted to the world yet: they
don't know whether they are doing the right things or not. A lot of secrets
are kept from them by the old people who won't tell them the truth, hoping
that they will keep out of mischief if they don't know mimk what the truth is.
But after awhile, they get through this troublesome period; they get
married and those problems get pretty well resolved, that is, if they are
not sick and their back doesn't hurt like mine has been hurting lately -

I don't kmow what's wrong with it. So there is a period when you are in
excellent health and spirit; then you begin to get old, and after awhile,
you die of course. You begin to ask, "Shouldn't I begin to smoke a pack

of cigarettes a day so that I would cut off this last ek years, or

two packs a day and cut off the last 16 years = "B've lived a wonderful

life and I wouldn't have that terrible veriod of misery. The fact is

that this isn't what hapvens when you smoke one pack or two pecks of
cigarettes per day. What mappexxkx happens is that you begin to get olds
the siudge comes down in the cells of your body. If you smoke two packs

a day when you are 50 years old, you feel as bad as a non-smoker who is

66 does. So you just lose the 8 years or the 16 years out of the best

years of your life instead of cutting off the unsatisfactory years at

the end. So this isn't the solution, then, to smoke cigarettes.

It is interesting that Je igesettes really does increase the physiol=
ogical age. I saw in the paper the other day that some people in the
California Department of Public Health in Sacramento - Doctors Beakley,
Drake, and Breslow, "The relationship of the amount of cigarette smoking
to coronary heart disease mortality rates in men." They gathered the
mortality rates of cigarette smokers = one-pack~a-day, two-packs-a~day,
and non-smokers, and plotted just this - not the total cause of death «=

but just coronary heart disease, and got just the same Gumpert'!s curves =
Dr. Pauling ”

8 and 16 years shift for coronary disease. And they point out that the
increased incidence of coronary disease cause§Sfour times as many deaths
for smokers as the increased incidence of cancer causes. They quote some
mays named Peglan and Kaiser who said, "Smoking is now the most danger ous
érug addiction. #

Cigarette smokers also die more rapidly from other diseases than do
other people. They have undergone a general aging process. I might say
evidence about cigar smoking and pipe smoking is also pretty good. And this
evidence is that perhaps you cut a year off your life expectancy — not
& or 16 years.

There is also evidence about drinking;it is that you increase your life
expectancy (loud laughter) - if you drink a little. But the... . for
drinking is the question of the amount of alcohol ingested... . a large
quadratic term with negative sines. The curve moves out in a favorable
direction, then turns around and comes back - for the larger amount of
alcohol ingested.

ed

I have been interestsmg in various questions about aging and death,
and I asked — I read in a journal - what was it? - not a very reliable one ~
Readers Digest (loud laughter) ~ that automobile accidents are the principal
cause of the decrease in life expectancy of Americans. And I thought that
this was a very interesting statement. After awhile, I got around to
saying, "I wonder if it is true." So I made a calculation to find out.
forty thousand people are killed each year in automobile accidents: this
has stayed pretty constant for a number of years. There are about 120
million people in America, 40,QQ over 180 million; we will multiply by 70
because the average person lives 70 years. 70 X 40,00 would be 7 X 4oo0p00
which is 2,800,000. And 2,800,000 divided by 180,000,000 is oh - So

>

one person in 64 is killed in an automobile accident; this is the expectancy
Dr. Peuling 8

when one is born, but of course, the averege age at death ig 22 years.
Old people get killed once in a while, but it is mainly young ones who
get killed in automobile accidents. So eBRE since they have about 70
years mean life expectancy, they lose 50 years off their life expectancy.
So if 50 years is lost for each one killed (writes) this comes out 0.8
years. So the average decrease in life expectancy from automobile accia
dents is eight-tenths of a year. This isn't the principal cause of a
decreuse in life expectancy.

Cancer is very importent; it is a great scourge. We know that many
people die of cancer; in fact, 20 per cent of Americans die of cancer.
And the distribution of cancer deaths corresponds pretty well to a
Gumpert's curve. After we pass the childhood years when there is a rather
high incidence of cancer - principal cause of death in children — the 20

per cent - that means that the death rate would be decreased by 20 per cent

_ if cancer were eliminated. This would really be wonderful. Senator

Newberger had an attack of cancer, was operated on; and I judge siikxtie
that the operation was successful; he died of heart disease just a couple

of months ago. But he became very mach interested in cancer. He had been
interested already and his personal experience made him still more inter
ested. He said, "Let's appropriate 500 million dollars for a giant attack
on the cancer problem and see if our scientists can eliminate the cancer, "|
Suppose that this could be done, how much longer would we live? Each

year the death rate would be 80 oer cent of what it is now, and you take the
logarithm of .8. The logarithm of .5 corresponds to BS years; the logarithm
of .8 would be — well, I could even figure that out: the log of .5 is

log .3 - log and a half of 2; and the log of .8 wold be 1 ~ the log of 2 7
+ + + + . So it is log .1 - a tenth of the log of 2. And that means that

a third of the 83 years, which means that it could solve the cancer problem
Dr. Pauling 9

and Americans could live 2.8 years longer. They might die of something
else - cardte-vascular disease - but they mam might live 2.8 years longer.
It would be worth the $500 million, I think, or even more if it could
be done.
Cigarettes interest me. Last year, Americans smoked 5x iett cigsrettes.
The cigarette companies have made bigger profits than they ever had before,
They cost $6,376,000,000 - about 13% of the national income; § x 1012 4
10 cigarettes per day per adult American - half a pack a day per adult
American. So, the average American smokes half 9 pack of cigarettes per
day, and the Gumperts curve - that means minus four years. Smoking cigarettes
causing causes Americans to die four years earlier than they would if they
didn't smoke cigarettes, It would probably take more than $500 million to
win out over the tobacco companies, but it would be a greater victory than
winning out over cancer,
Here we have a situation that I think is a satisfactory one in that
you nave the opportunity of individual choice. There are other circumstances
in which you don't have this opportunity - like the smog. You could, of
course, move out into the desert, but the desert has been looking pretty
bad to me. Up and around Bakersfield, the oil refineries there have been
polluting the atmosphere terribly. You get as much smog sometimes as you
have in the Los Angeles basin. But, anyhow, with cigarettes you have the
opportinity of making the choice. Half of the American people are
cigarette smokers and half are non-smokers; and the non-smokers don't
have their life expectancy decreased at all - only a little bit as they
inhale the smoke of the cigarette smokers; but the smokers have their life
exvectancy decreased by eight years. If we were to conquer both the
cancer problem and the cigarette problem, then the life expectancy of the
Americans would be increased by 6.8 years. Even though the deaths from

in some part (20%)
cigarette smoking are largely due/to cancer, this is still true,
Dr. Pauling 10

As the cigarette smokers would live 2.8 years longerse, there would be an
increased incidence of death from other diseases. These savings are truly
additive despite an apparent overlapping in the effect.

Well, we can ask: whet about other causes in decreases in life expectancy?
I have checked up on a number of them. You have a category of disease called
cardio-vascular renal disease. This is a very broad category of disease - a
complex of a great many diseases - which causes about 60 per cent of deaths
of Americans. There is death by coronary heart disease and by cerebral
thrombosis, or hemorrhage, or by rupture of the hepatic artery or some other
artery, or by kidney disease. All these diseases are linked together, and
they are the principal cause of death allright ~ 60 per cent of the deaths.
If they were all to be conquered, people would live 10 years longer, but it
is a complex of disease and if you split it up into the different kinds, no
one of them is equivalent to cigarette smoking. But cigarette smoking
is something that can be eliminated whereas we just know enough to conquer
these other diseases.

I checked up on somef other things; I thought of high-energy radietion ~
cosmic rays or natural radioactivity -— background radiation. Cosmic rays
produce about 20 per cent and natural radioactivity ~ radium, potassium),
Carbon, - about 80 per cent of the background radiation. Altogether,
this amountsto about one tenth of a Rantgen per year - 7 rontgzens.

We know that high energy radiation of all kinds causes gene mutations

which causes defective children to be born. Several per cent of the children
born have congenital defects, many of them due to gene defects, and many of
them, without doubt, caused by high energy radiation - 10 or 20 ver cent,

I think, of all gene mutations, dther non-gene defects caused also to the
developing embryo.

Very interesting results have been obtained by Doctors Stewart, Webb,

and Hewett in England in their study of deaths in children by cancer,
Dr. Pauling 11

These children are between zero and 10 or 11 years of age. These chil-
dren die off at the rate of about one in a thousand, or one in 1209, of
cancer, Dr. Stewart, Webb and Hewett checked up on all the families thet
they could find. There were a few per cent that they couldn't track down
but they got most of them, and on a controlled population of children who
hadn't died of cancer. They checked on a number of murammennees circum
stances - as many as seemed reasonable ~ in the life of these children, and
they ruled all factors out except one. The one factor that was significant —
the one differenee between those children who had died and those that hadn't
died ~ was whether or not the child had been subjected to radiation when
the mother had an X-ray made of the pelvic region in the period of develop
ment of the infant. It turns out that exposure to 2 rentgens,(which is the
amount you get in 20 years) doubles the chance that the child will die of
cancer. So that changes st, fin 1200 to 1 in 600. There is no doubt that
the fetus cen be damaged by even small amounts of radiation. There has
been done a lot xs of work on animals and on Hiroshima—Nagasaki survivors
es to how much decrease in life expectancy you get. It turns out to be

for human beings 10 days per rantgen. Professor Hardin Jones whose name

is up there is Professor of Biovhysics and Physiology in the Bonner
Laboratory in Berkeley ~ BEX University of California. I have learned a
great deal about these matters by reading his papers and even by hearing
him talk; in fact, I was stinmlated into taking an interest in this field
through hearing him give a seminar in the physics department here about
three years ago. He has just recently presented the evidence for this +10
caysper rontgen for human beings. Three years ago, he said that the value
was between — 1 day and —20 days. Now he has got it to 10 days with
considerable reliability. That means that in 70 years background radia~

tion gives you about 77 Rontgens, and that would be, then, minug 70 cays.

This doesn't mean that everybody dies 70 days earlier, but what it doeg
Dr. Favling 12

mean is that some people will have cancer produced by cosmic rays and
natural radioactivity and will die 10, 20, or 30 years earlier; and other
people will not be affected at all. Or some people might have an increased
incidence of death from heart disease or hardening of the arteries, or
damaging the various cells of the human body as they pass through them.

There is nothing mich that we can do about this radiation; it exists
everywhere, a little more in some places than others, but it is hardly
worth while to move your place of residence because of this, not nearly
so worth while as it would be to move from the city to the country, say,
where you could add five years to life expectancy if you move there early
enough ~ or if you stop smoking cigarettes.

We heave medical X-rays. It ig estimated that Americans receive
about .015 Rontgen »er year, on the average, from medical X-rays, and
this would mean minus 105 days - decrease in life expectancy. Probably
quite a number of leukemia, bone cancer and other forms of cancer are
caused by medical X-rays. Now, much of the irradiation of medical X-rays
is, of course, important, necessary. Much of our medical progress has
resulted from the use of medical X-rays fxmm for diagnosis and therapeutic
purposes. IJ am thoroughly in favor of this, The only thing I am
against is the misuse of medical X-rays. I know that there were, two
years ago in Pasadena, obstretricians who required that every pregnant
woman coming under their care have an X-ray picture made of the pelvic
region. This causes damage. FProbably one pregnant woman in 20 nas} jacti fin
cation for having such an X-ray exposure. That means that 19 children ont
of 20 are born with an X-ray insult that will double the Chance that they
will die of cancer before they have passed the tenth year of their life —

if they are similar to the British population, which we know they are,

I felt very strongly about this and on a couple of occasions I
ir. Pauling 13

talked about /to eroups of vhysicians. The other day I talked in Los

Angeles to a group of physicians, telling him that I think it is wrong

for medical X-rays to be misused. I think it is wrong for for dentists

to say, "Send the children around every six months for X-ray pictures of

tier jaw." I saw a statement just today mf by Carl Morgan, the head of

the health division of the Argonne National Laboratories saying that dental

xe X-ray pictures may give an exposure of 300 Rontgens to the jaw. The

figures he gives are from 1.5 Rontgen and 300 Rontgen - 1.5 for good technique:

300 for poor technique. There are dentists who do say: send children around

every six months; this is, of course, wrong. Sometimes the dentist will say,

"But I have sometimes found a cavity under a filling that wouldn't have

been detected if X-ray pictures hadn't been taken.™ It would have been

much better to have waited until the cavity made itself evident later on.
The other day when I talked about this, some of the doctors got me to

one side and said, "you just don't understand the situation: we have to

take these X-ray pictures; we know that there isn't sound medical justifi~

cation for it, but we have to take them to protect ourselves against

malpractice suits." And I said, "You shock me terribly. This means that

doctors place financial considerations ~— the chance that they will lose

money in malpractice suits - above the welfare of their patients. And

here I have been brogght up to think that the doctors are serving humanity,

that they have taken the Hippocratic oath. In fact, I have just read a

statement by Dr. Lewis M. Orb, who is jaurk shocked that Congress is consid-

ering the Forand Bill providing medical care through federal aid, providing

medical care for old people. He said that the inability for the aged to

pay does not prevent them from obtaining medical care. He said, "The prime

concern of the medical profession is and always has been to serve humanity

regardless of reward or financiel gain." The Cedillacs just come along by

themselves.
Dr, Pauling 14

Well, there is no doubt that financial considerations are involved
in misuse of medical X-rays, and these doctors verified this. In fact,
they were responsible for making it clear to me by their discussion.

This is moderately important. It may very well be that Americans = unless
something is done about it ~ as Americans become more prosperous and more
of them are able to have X-ray pictures of the pelvic regions, the death
rate of all of our children will be doubled.

Another matter that interests me is airplane travel. I didn't complete
my calculations on this but I have a piece of information of some interest.
In 1959, there were 0.67 deaths per 100 million passenger miles on the
American commercial planes, and in 1958, 0.34. The average of these is
0.50 per 100 million passenger miles, and so we can take that as a starting
point. I don't know just how many passenger miles were flown, so I can't
say just how much decrease in life expectancy for the average American
there is, but I was interested. My wife and I travelled 70,900 miles in
the period between June and December of last year. I thought it was inter-
esting to figure out - post-opposterioria it was — how much decrease in
Life expectancy there would have been for before we started on the 70,000
miles. Well, you can calculate it out. Assuming that I have 20 years
and she has 40 years additional life expectancy - that is an average of
30 years - it turns out, using this 0.5 xX 107°, that it is four days.

But, of course, we came through, so that it is zero now that we have come
through. That was the calculation of probability before we started on
the 70,000 miles of going through Africa, Japan, Australia and so om...

We might ask that if you are going to go on an airvlane, how much do

you lose in life expenctancy per hour of traveling - in a jet at 500 miles

per hour. Well, this turns out to be pretty simple. One hour of 500 miles
Dr. Pauling 15

an hour turns out to be minus one hour in life expectency. (Laughter)

It differs from cigarette smoking. It is easy enough to figure out -

you see, you take one pack a day for 40 years, 8 years decrease in life
expectancy and you multiply this out and it worke out easily enough.

You have 14.8 minutes decrease in life expectancy for smoking one cigarette.
I haven't really carried out a thorough study on this, but I estimate that
it @™ takes about 4.9 minutes to smoke a cigarette. So, it is three times
as dangerous to smoke a cigarette on a time basis as to fly in an airplane.
If you fly in an airplane and don't smoke cigarettes, you are three times

as safe as you would be in staying at home and smoking them, and you are
four times as safe as you would be flying in an airplane and smoke cigarettes.

This, I think, is a very interesting figure, that for all young people ~
whatever time they put in smoking cigarettes, they are losing three times that
much times from their life. This is well worth knowing. I think the
tobacco companies know it but you wouldn't believe it by reading the state.
ments made by the scientists who work for the tobacco companies.

I am going to mention fallout es a cause of decrease in life expectancy,
and the statement that I shall make now represents a larger effect of fallo ut
than is represented in statements that I have made before regarding the
effect of fallout in causing death by lung cancer, leukemia and bone cancer,

There is good evidence that exposure to irradiation causes physiological
aging and increases in incidence of death by all causes - high energy
Tadiation - so fallout radioactivity probably does this too. There is good
evidence that 10 to 20 per cent of gene mutations are caused by natural
background radiation that strike the genes or chromosomes and damage them;
or damage some other molecules which then attack the genes or chromosomes.

Geneticists generally say 10 per cent but I think there is pretty good

evidence now that this figure is low and that it should be, say, 20 per cent,
Dr. Fauling 16

There is good evidence that diseases such as leukemia and bone cancer

and cancer of the thyroid have an incidence as the result of radiation of
about 10 per cent of cases caused by background radiation. And it is

likely ~- from this minus 10 days ver Rontgen = it is likely that all diseases
increase in incidence about 10 per cent from background radiation. So we
can calculate from fallout what the effect would be.

Fallout is estimated to be about 5 per cent of background radiation;
that would be three and one half days - not very dangerous, you see. It
isn't like cigarette smoking in that you can't take it or leave it - you
have to take it.

I remember the cartoon by the great cartoonist in Washington ~ Herd Luck —
in which he said that... . . had volunteered for all of us as guinea pigs.

I don't like even this three and a half days. ‘ett, That is a hundredth of

a year. That would mean that if it were of such a nature that it caused a
catastropic effect on a certain number of people, it might be that one nerson
in e hundred would have one year cut off his life expectancy; or more likely,
one in a thousand will have 10 years cut off his life expectancy because
of fallout racioactivity anc cause him to come down with cancer. So for
certain individuals the effect of fallout might be a serious one, and for
others, note

Now, I haven't come yet to what may be the princival decrease in life
expectancy for Americans. I just received today a very interesting volume
put out by the United States Government Printing Office; Hearings mdsian
before the Special Sub-Committee on Radiation of the Adjunct Committee
on Atomic Energy of the Congress of the United States, on biological and
environmental effects of nuclear war, June 22 to 26, 1959. A lot of

stuff in this book was not reported in the press when these thines were

carried out. There is some testimony by Professor Hardin Jones, for
Dr. Pauling 1?

example. I think it was suggested that the veople who presented testi-~
mony here discussed the problem of nuclear war on the somewhat standardized
basis. It was suggested that they discuss an attack on the United States
involving a total of 4,000 megatons, of which half is fission and half
fusion.-. This would be equivalent to 200 20—megaton bombs. That is about
2s big as they are made because there is not much use to make them bigger,
One of them is enough for any city. They have been exploded - tested. On
the first of March, 1954, we exploded the first 20-megaton bomb. It was
Called the b.. . bomb, at Bikini. It was pretty powerful; it had the
energy for explosion of 20 megatons. A megaton is a million tons of TNT -
equivalent. During the second world war, there were used altogether about
three million tons of high explosives throughout the whole of the war. So
that bomb was seven times as powerful as the whole of the second world war.
And it is assumed that there ts be an attack with 200 20—megaton bombs.
This is whet is described as a small nuclear attack on the United States.
In the studies made by the scientists in the Rand Corporation and
other such people, large nuclear attacks have also been postulated and
Giscussed. I have estimated that we have 100,000 nuclear bombs and that
Russia has 50,000, and nobody has criticised this estimate. I think it
is probably about right. Some of them are little ones like the
Hircehima-Nagesaki bombs and some of them are big ones. You can discuss
a small nuclear attack in this way; The area of the United States is
about 3,000,000 square miles, and I will divice it up into regions of
about 100 miles square, and leave out a third of it in the mounteoins, say,
It has become customary to talk about regions of regions 10,000 miles
square; for example, this could be Los Angeles, Here would be the central
part - Los Angeles, 15 miles diameter - Pasadena over here; Glendale over

When
here, tf one of these bombs explodes, it smashes the city flat over an
Dr. Pauling 18

area abcut 20 miles in diameter, and there the blast fire and immediate
radiation effects are such that evervbcody is killed. Actually the destruc-
tion would be over an area somewhat larger because frame houses are set
fire to 15 or 20 miles away. But it is also customary to take an area of
400 square miles in which you get complete destruction. These 200 bombs =
if they exploded over the 200 biggest cities in the United States — would
wipe out half the population. And then you get the effect of the radio=
active fallout. The radioactive would be spread around - not uniformly -
there would be more of it close up. If the wind were blowing, it would
spread out in that direction; but it is customary to assume that it would
pollute about 10,000 square miles. If it were uniformly distributed over
the 10,000 square miles, the people in the first few hours would receive
20 times the amount of radiation necessary to cause them to die ina

few days of acute radiation sickness, Some people around the periphery
might well survive ~ might survive if they got under ground and stayed
there several weeks. This is why some pneovle say that verhans 95 ver cent
of American people might be killed in such an attack - the Russian people
too — because here you have about four ver cent of the area that is just
devastated, and the remainder - tre people would be killed - elmost all of
them, but not for some time. There would be time for them to eet their
rockets or even to get into their planes and go over and drop their

bombs so that complete destruction could be brought on the enemy too.

What would possibly happen, of course, ~ if there were to be a nuclear War =
is that almost everybody in the United Stetes would be killed and almost
everybody in Russia and almost everybody in England and elsewhere in
Europe where there are H-bomb bases now and rockets with nuclear wer heads,
There would be damage done to the people dumm in the southern hemisphere,

but I think that life would survive in Australia and New Zealand and South
Dr. Feuling 19

Africa; I hate to think of the South Africans being the ones who would
cone through.

Here I have this report, and in agreement with what other people have
said, Professor Jones has said that you could expect 5 to 20 per cent of
Americans to survive a small nuclear attack. Much bigger ones have been
discussed by the Rand Corporation people; and 5 to 20 ver cent would
survive, They would be people, in general, who have received quite a lot
of radiation, probably nearly as much as they could stend without dying.
He estimates that they would receive 300 Rontgens in the first week and
then another 100 Rontgens during the succeeding months during the first
year. If we multiply that by minus 10 days, we set 4,011 years minus
11 years in life expectancy by the aging effect of this. He also points
out that in tne whole of the Northeastern United States they would receive
xs an estimated 3,500 Rontgens from the Strontium 90 in their bones, and
this would cause probably 50 ner cent of them to develov bone cancer.

And I haven't taken that into consideration. There would be so many bombs
there.that I don't think there would be many survivors.

Now, if there would be a nuclear war, we can figure out what the
decrease in life expectancy would be. I will assume that 90 per cent of
the people would be killed, and since there is no selection on the basis
of age, these would be people varying in age between zero and 70 or 80
years old. So I multivly that by 35 and this gives the decrease in life
expectancy for those who are killed. And those who survive will have a
decrease in life expectancy of 11 years. (I am not sure I am doing this
right). Do I multiply by 10 ver cent? Yes. (writes on board). This
gives about 33 years decrease in life expectancy for the average American,
(Q. from audience). No, only the infants would have 70 years cut off their

life; old mekn would have only their remaining year or two. The average
Dr. rauling 20

age of the people that are killed would be 35 years, say; and so they
would have 35 years decrease in life expectancy, the rest of them 33.

Of course, this is the decrease in life expectancy for Americans if there
to be a nuclear war. If everybody were killed, it would be 35 years
decrease in life expectancy.

We might be more interested in the question: What is the decrease in
life expectancy for Americans living now because of the existence of
nuclear stock piles in the world? And this requires that we make an estimate
of the probability of nuclear war. When there is peace in the world, which
is of course a sensible thing, then we don't have a decrease in the years
that we will live. If there is a war, there is a decrease of 33 ver cent.
There are two possibilities - one that there be a nuclear war and one that
there be no nuclear war. The simplest thing to do is to say that in the
absence of information bearing closely on this question, that these have
equal probability. (Writes.) So we multiply -33 by % and we get -16) years
as the decrease in life expectancy for Americans from only the existence
in the world of nuclear weapons. That makes that, then, the principal
cause of the decrease in life expectancy.

Well, I kmow a few other things about aging and death, but I have
finished the whole hour. Would you like to ask a question or two?

Ques: Have you in the vast, or do you now smoke?

Dr. P: When I was about your age or younger, I thought that it was proper,
something wrong if I didn't smoke cigarettes; so I smoked a few cigarettes.
But fortunately I was so poor that I didn't have money enough to buy them,
so 1 got through the danger period as a result of poverty. It was a
fortunate thing; I might well have developed this drug addiction, as the
fellows call it.

Ques: Reading: "Mice live up to 45 per cent longer after they have been

subjected to magnetic fields. In cancerous mice. . + + « . after similar
Ir. Pauling al

treatment, . 1... + + ++ + + + « « » | What does that mean?

Dr. P. I would say that it means that some newspaper reports are not very
reliable. Maybe even some scientists aren't very reliable. I just don't
believe this: it seems highly wnlikely to me.

Ques: What is the effect of coffee drinking?

Dr. P. I haven't seen any statistics on the effects of coffee drinking.

I saw a paper on production of gene mutations in micro-organisms by

caffein. But I thought that it is unlikely that the gonads of human beings
get any appreciable amount of caffein from coffee drinking. Some of the
somatic cells may, and you may get some somatic mutation that would cause
cancer, so I wondered if caffein might not be a carciogenic agent, but it
hasn't been shown to be one so far as I am aware.

Ques: If the people who smoke cigarettes would desist from the vractice,
would they, because of their versonality, be more apt to have heart disease?
Br. P. Well, there has been quite a lot of study made of this. At Berkeley,
during the twenties, there was quite a large population of high school
students who were classified on the basis of 100 charactersand they have
peen investigated . .. —- the cigarette smokers and the non-smokers.

The smokers, even though it is rather a small population, are dying off at
@ greater rete than the non-smokers. This effect shows up with populations
as small as 50. With 50 smokers and 50 non-smokers you get very significant
results. An effort has been made to find some correlation between some one
or another of these 100 characters on which they were graded when they were
in high school and their smoking cigarettes and not smoking cigarettes.

And there is no significant correlation with any one of the 100 characters.