Ядролық сынақтардың салдары және АҚШ ғылымкерлерінің зерттеуі

American scientist
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,

In his 1996 book

In 1959, the geneticist Edward B. Lewis computed that children exposed to fallout from nuclear tests may have received very high doses of radioactivity from iodine 131 in cow milk. His estimates prompted the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to request that the AEC produce a report on the risks of short lived isotopes. In 1960, Harold A. Knapp, a mathematician working within the AEC Division of Biology and Medicine's Fallout Studies Branch, authored this report, but since it was finished during an international moratorium on atmospheric nuclear tests, it had no notable impact. Then, in 1962, while the USSR and the USA had resumed nuclear tests and the Limited Test Ban Treaty was being prepared in response to huge international pressure, Knapp took on the task of estimating the radioiodine exposure of Americans before 1958, at a time when milk was not monitored. Knapp conclusions were alarming, and blatantly departed from preceding AEC's reassurances that the public had never been exposed to harmful levels of radioactivity. He "showed that, from just one 1953 test, infants who had been living in a radiation hotspot around St. George, Utah, might well have received I 131 doses anywhere from 150 to 750 times existing annual permissible doses." Beginning in fall 1962, the AEC resorted to diverse pretexts to block the publication of Knapp's findings. In spring 1963, Gofman, was solicited to participate in a so called "Ad Hoc Working Group on Radioiodine and the Environment" assembled by AEC's Division of Operational Safety's director, Gordon Dunning. Gofman reported that "In essence, the message to [this] Committee [ ] was « How can we stop this report a report which will, in effect, make the AEC reports over the past 10 years look untrue? »". In spite of AEC's Headquarters' objections, the committee recommended publication of Knapp's report, which was finally published by the AEC in June 1963, followed by a summary in Nature.

Gofman was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Jewish parents, David and Sarah Gofman, who immigrated to the US from the Russian Empire in about 1905. Gofman died of heart failure at age 88 on August 15, 2007, in his home in San Francisco.