John Gofman, American physicist, chemist, and biologist (d. 2007)
John William Gofman (21 September 1918 – 15 August 2007) was an American scientist and advocate. He was Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley.
Gofman pioneered the field of clinical lipidology, and in 2007 was honored by the Journal of Clinical Lipidology with the title of "Father of Clinical Lipidology". With Frank T. Lindgren and other research associates, Gofman discovered and described three major classes of plasma lipoproteins, fat molecules that carry cholesterol in the blood. The team he led at the Donner Laboratory went on to demonstrate the role of lipoproteins in the causation of heart disease.
Gofman was instrumental in inducing the health-physics scientific community both to acknowledge the cancer risks of ionizing radiation and to adopt the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model as a means of estimating actual cancer risks from low-level radiation and as the foundation of the international guidelines for radiation protection. However, his conclusions were that the dose-response relationship was not linear, but supra-linear.Gofman's earliest research was in nuclear physics and chemistry, in close connection with the Manhattan Project. He codiscovered several radioisotopes, notably uranium-233 and its fissionability; he was the third person ever to work with plutonium and, having devised an early process for separating plutonium from fission products at J. Robert Oppenheimer's request, he was the first chemist ever to try and isolate milligram quantities of plutonium.In 1963 Gofman established the Biomedical Research Division for the Livermore National Laboratory, where he was on the cutting edge of research into the connection between chromosomal abnormalities and cancer.
Later in life, Gofman took on a role as an advocate warning of dangers involved with nuclear power. From 1971 on, he was Chairman of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "his pioneering work in exposing the health effects of low-level radiation" on the Chernobyl disaster's area population.In his 1996 book Gofman claimed that exposure to medical x-rays was responsible for about 75 percent of breast cancers in the United States. This order of magnitude appears to correlate with the increase in breast-cancer incidence following mammography screening in the US and France.