24 February 1958
Mr. Homer Dudley
150 Ashland Road
Summit, New Jersey
Dear Mr. Dudley:
I thank you for your letter of 8 February, with the implied suggestion in it that we do something about the effects of radium in our drinking water.
I agree that this is a serious problem. I estimate (I do not have statistics at hand right now) that 300,000 people per year die in the United States from cancer. Our biologists, and I think others that have studied the question, estimate that about 10 to 20 percent of the cases of cancer are due to background radiation - let us take 10 percent. This means that 30,000 deaths from cancer each year in the United States can be attributed to background radiation. Of the background radiation half is due to radium that gets into the bones. Hence we now have the figure 15,000 deaths per year from the radium that we get from our drinking water.
Your suggestion that we stop drinking the water is of course a facetious one.
Have you considered the possibility that radium could be removed from the drinking water? As an engineer, you may have had experience in these fields. I believe that this is a possibility. I am not at all sure that the job is a practical one, but some people in the House and the Senate have been talking about appropriations of the order of 500 million dollars a year for attack on the cancer problem, and it seems evident that to remove the radium from drinking water is one possibility.
Because of my interest in decreasing the total amount of
human suffering of the world in every possible way, including the control of cancer, I should be interested to know if, as a result of your professional experience, you think that it would be reasonable to try to prevent the 15,000 deaths each year in the United States (perhaps 200,000 per year in the world) that may be attributed to the radium in the drinking water.
Sincerely yours,
Linus Pauling:w
February
24, 1958
