text: Gofman and Tamplin were instrumental in inducing the health physics scientific community both to acknowledge the somatic (i.e. leukemia and cancer) risks of ionizing radiation, at a time when only the genetic risks were considered of significant concern, and to adopt the so-called Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model "as a means of numerically estimating actual cancer risks from low-level radiation", which "was a watershed event in radiation-safety science and politics". The LNT model has since become the foundation of the international guidelines for radiation protection.
  Indeed, it was Gofman and Tamplin's argumented opposition to the Federal Radiation Council (FRC) radiation-safety guidelines who prompted the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), on the recommendation made in December 1969 by Victor Bond, "a prominent health physicist and chairman of the NAS-NRC Subcommittee on Radiobiology of the Committee on Nuclear Science", to gather its first BEIR (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) committee. According to an internal memo cited by Semendeferi, the BEIR I committee was to "thoroughly digest and carefully analyze various pertinent controversial models (Gofman and Tamplin)".
  After two years of study, the BEIR I committee published its famous BEIR I report in November 1972. Although departing from Gofman and Tamplins work on significant aspects, it nevertheless vindicated their arguments to a large extent. Semendeferi notes that "[t]he reports long bibliography cited almost all of Gofman and Tamplin's work. Echoing Gofman and Tamplin, the BEIR I Committee emphasized that the cancer effects of low-level radiation were of much greater concern than leukemia or genetic effects. The current radiation limit was "based on genetic considerations," and the committee concluded that the FRC limit was therefore "unnecessarily high" and could safely be much lower."
  Semendeferi reports that, according to the radiobiologist and environmental health specialist Edward Radford, who was a member of the BEIR I committee and the chairman of the BEIR III committee, "Gofman deserved credit for raising the issue of the somatic ris's of low-level radiation as early as he did", but "never received the recognition he deserved for his contributions to radiation-safety science" because he was "stigmatized as an extreme antinuclear scientist".