7 October 1963

Mrs. Garner Dodson Wilson

1112 Race Street

Denver, Colorado

Dear Mrs. Wilson:

I have been interested to read your paper. After reading it, I must say that I do not know whether or not a careful study of the problem would lead to any significant conclusions.

I can understand why you have had difficulty in publishing the paper. It seems to me that it is unsatisfactory either as a scientific paper or as a popular article.

It seems to me that your arguments are not clear and your discussion is too superficial. Many of the statements that you make seem to me to be without justification - at any rate, you do not give the justification in the article.

For example, on pages 3 and 4 you say that the higher male mortality in the 15-24 year age interval cannot be entirely explained by higher accident rates, and other causes of death that you mention, for men than for women. I am sure that the higher incidence of death in automobile accidents for males than females in this age range is an important part of the greater male mortality, and I should like to have you quote the figures, in order that I, as a reader, would know how important a part it is. This paragraph of your article, as written, seems to me to be valueless.

I find, in fact, that nearly every sentence in your article is open to criticism, either with respect to its meaning or with respect to your use of language. For example, the first sentence has a plural subject and a singular verb. The second sentence says something different from what you must have intended to say. I am sure that if you were to examine your article carefully, sentence by sentence, and ask yourself what each sentence says, you would see how your writing needs to be improved.

I may give one example of the unreliability of your arguments. On page 13 you make a quantitative statement about the probability of a damaged ovum being fertilized, and, lower on the page, a statement about the probability of a damaged spermatozoon being the one to fertilize an ovum. The information that you give is not sufficient to permit a calculation of these probabilities to be made, as you will find when you try to justify your statements by a calculation.

In your letter you suggest that your principal point is that radioactive fallout might be responsible for the effect that you are discussing. At the top of page 5 you mention that from the early 1940's on into the present man-made radiation was introduced into the atmosphere. In fact, the amount introduced before 1954 was very small compared with the amount introduced since 1954. This fact suggests that you should compare the mortalities for the period since 1954 with earlier periods, instead of using the period 1945-1959.

Moreover, Americans have, during the whole of this century and even during the last decade or two, received far more high-energy radiation from medical x-rays than from radioactive fallout. The effect of radioactive fallout and the effect of medical x-rays on the mortalities would be closely similar, except for the factor of intensity. My estimate is that during the last decade the effect for fallout, for the United States, would he about 3 percent of that of medical x-rays, and, of course, approaching zero for earlier decades. It is accordingly likely that you will not be able to develop any significant argument to support the contention that the numbers in your table 1 are significantly determined by radioactive fallout.

I do not know whether it would be possible to get reliable evidence that the increase in male mortality relative to female mortality during the last sixty years is largely the result of the increased use of medical x-rays, but it might be worthwhile to look into this possibility.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling:hpg