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C-O-N-F-I-D-E-N-T-I-A-L 00-B-3,288,475- 2 -Q. Are there anything on biological indicators at low ranges of radiation doses?A. This is something on which I can speak somewhat as an expert. Although people may claim to have this, I do not think anyone has it, including the Soviets. One can find biological criteria at low doses, whether they have meaning beyond the limited experiment is the big question, you see.Q. Any results presented on cosmic and Van Allen belt radiation effects on test organisms in such areas as lethal, metabolic, developmental and genetic?A. Nothing.Q. Any conclusions presented on determining the relative biologic effective-ness factor of biologic material when exposed to radiation from nuclear testing?A. Again, I can speak with some certitude. There is no conclusion about the relative biological effect of this factor. People will argue about it, but there is no conclusion. The Soviets had some things to say about it, but I was thoroughly confused about their position. There are two ways of thinking about the RBE factor. One is from the viewpoint of theoretical biology which is interested in the why of differences of biological effectiveness, and this becomes one of the parameters of experiment. The other is the question of an empirical number that one can use in handling questions of judgment about radiation exposure in man. With regard to the questions of judgment, I think that most biologists would agree that we do not have any reliable and valuable RBE factors. We have numbers that represent what we might be afraid of, more than anything else.Q. Did the Soviets say anything bearing on physical measurements of radia-tion in space in terms of relative biological effectiveness factor and implications for future manned space flights?A. One of the Soviet delegates, [Yu.I.] Moskalev was a frequent commentator on other people's work and he made a practice of denigrating the reports of these people with respect to radiation lethality. His comment was to the effect that the studies of radiation lethality done usually in small animals were not to the point, were not germane to problems in the human case, and that to be useful these studies should be done in animals closer to man.Q. What is your critique of his argument?A. Well, a mass of work has been done with the smaller animals in various laboratories and we are beginning to get certain generalities about the nature of radiation injury, or at least certain kinds of radiation injury, and therefore I think it is worthwhile to pursue it. As you might imagine, I presented a paper on radiation lethality and was among those to whose work Moskalev objected.Q. Do you think Moskalev's objections were motivated from anything more than a genuine scientific position?A. Who can say? In their published work the Soviets show a lot of attention to effects in the central nervous system--they are very interested in this and US people have tended to ignore this area. So conceivably Moskalev is oriented to CNS work and physiological functions, I do not know. But quite a lot of the Soviet work has a different orientation from western work--at least their published stuff.C-O-N-F-I-D-E-N-T-I-A-LNO DISSEM ABROAD