Nuclear Safety Expert Dies

New York Times
August 26, 2007

John W. Gofman, 88, Scientist and Advocate for Nuclear Safety, Dies
By JEREMY PEARCE

Dr. John W. Gofman, a nuclear chemist and doctor who in the 1960s
heightened public concerns about exposure to low-level radiation and
became a leading voice against commercial nuclear power, died on Aug.
15 at his home in San Francisco. He was 88.

The cause was heart failure, his family said.

The findings were contested by the Atomic Energy Commission, and the
furor made Dr. Gofman a reluctant figurehead of the antinuclear
movement. In 1970, he testified in favor of a legislative bill to ban
commercial nuclear reactors in New York City and told the City
Council that a reactor in urban environs would be "equal in the
opposite direction to all the medical advances put together in the
last 25 years."

Both he and Dr. Tamplin left Livermore in the 1970s, and Dr. Gofman
went on to become an expert witness in radiation-exposure lawsuits
and help found an advocacy group, the Committee for Nuclear
Responsibility, based in San Francisco. In an unsuccessful project,
he and others called for a five-year federal moratorium on new
nuclear power stations, citing problems in the safe storage of
radioactive waste. Yet, for all his efforts as a nuclear gadfly, he
did not oppose the building of nuclear missiles.

"Because we live in a dangerous world," he said in 1993, "I think the
only thing you have is the deterrence value" of such weaponry.

Dr. Gofman's appearance in the nuclear debate surprised some
colleagues, since a thrust of his earlier research had been in
cardiology. In the late 1940s and '50s, he and his collaborators
investigated the body's lipoproteins, which contain both proteins and
fats, and their circulation within the bloodstream. The researchers
described low-density and high-density lipoproteins and their roles
in metabolic disorders and coronary disease.

In his earliest work, while still a graduate student at the
University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Gofman studied nuclear
isotopes and helped to describe several discoveries, including
protactinium-232, uranium-232, protactinium-233 and uranium-233. He
also helped to work out the fissionability of uranium-233.

John William Gofman was born in Cleveland. He graduated from Oberlin
College, and received a doctorate in nuclear and physical chemistry
from Berkeley in 1943. Dr. Gofman went on to earn a medical degree
from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1946.

He joined Berkeley in 1947 and retired as professor emeritus of
molecular and cell biology in 1973.

With Egan O'Connor, he wrote a book, "X-Rays: Health Effects of
Common Exams" (1986). He also wrote "Radiation-Induced Cancer from
Low-Dose Exposure: An Independent Analysis" (1990).

Dr. Gofman's wife, Dr. Helen Fahl Gofman, a pediatrician, died in 2004.