Bernard Cohen (physicist) - Scholarly Achievements

Scholarly Achievements

Professor Cohen earned his under-graduate degree from Case-Western Reserve University, Masters from University of Pittsburgh and Ph.D from Carnegie-Mellon University . He has taught at UP (Pitt) since 1958 as Professor of Physics, Adjunct Prof. of Chemistry, Adjunct Prof. of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Adjunct Prof. of Radiation Health at the Graduate School of Public Health; there also as Adjunct Prof. of Environmental and Occupational Health. He was awarded Professor-Emeritus standing in 1994.

From 1965-1978 he was Director of the Scaife Nuclear Laboratory.

A testimony to his conviction on the human safety of background low-level radiation was his offering rewards of up to $10,000 if people provided evidence the inverse association he found between radon (county averages) and lung cancer (county averages) was due to some factor other than failure of the linear-no threshold theory. Puskin, Smith, Field and others have claimed that his findings are due in part to his inability to control for the inverse association between smoking and radon.

When Ralph Nader described plutonium as "the most toxic substance known to mankind", Cohen, then a tenured professor, offered to consume on camera as much plutonium oxide as Nader could consume of caffeine, the stimulant found in coffee and other beverages, which in its pure form has an oral (LD₅₀) of 192 milligrams per kilogram in rats.