Dr. Alice Stewart dies

["Bjorn Cedervall" <bcradsafers@HOTMAIL.COM>]

The text below came on another distribution list via Sandy Perle. I am sure 

that many Radsafers also will be interested.



Bjorn Cedervall    bcradsafers@hotmail.com

------------------------------------------

Dr Alice Stewart - Epidemiologist who proved links between exposure

to radiation and cancer, and forced the authorities into greater

openness.  Alice Stewart, epidemiologist, was born on October 4,

1906. She died on June 23, 2002, aged 95.



For more than 40 years the epidemiologist Alice Stewart challenged

official estimates of the risks of radiation. Her research in 1956

and 1958 alerted the medical profession to the link between foetal X-

rays and childhood cancer. Two decades later, in her seventies, she

again called for a change in working practices when she published a

study showing that workers at nuclear weapons plants are at greater

health risk than international safety standards admit.



She was born Alice Mary Naish in Sheffield in 1906. Her parents were

both physicians and widely known for their dedication to children's

welfare. Alice took a medical degree at Cambridge, where she formed

an intense relationship with the literary critic William Empson.

Their friendship ended only with his death in 1984. But in 1933 she

married Ludovick Stewart. They had a son and a daughter, but divorced

in the early 1950s.



During the war she studied the health risks of industrial chemicals

in factories and among miners, and in 1946 she was one of the

founders of the British Journal of Industrial Medicine. This first

stage of her career culminated with her election as a Fellow of the

Royal College of Physicians, the youngest woman to achieve this

distinction. She already had a reputation as a brilliant teacher and

clinician.



Shortly after the war, she accepted a position under Professor John

Ryle, at the new department of social medicine at Oxford, and became

a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. Ryle hoped to direct the attention of

the medical profession towards public health, and his ideals greatly

appealed to Stewart, but with his death in 1949 social medicine at

Oxford was demoted, and although she was kept on as a reader, she was

left with "barely enough to light a gas fire".



Then, with a grant of £1,000, she launched her landmark study of the

causes of childhood cancer. Beginning from a hunch that mothers might

remember something that the doctors had forgotten, she devised a

questionnaire for women whose children had died of any form of cancer

between 1953 and 1955. By the time a mere 35 questionnaires had been

returned, the answer was clear: a single diagnostic X-ray, well

within the exposure considered safe, was enough almost to double the

risk of early cancer.



This news was a surprise to Stewart and was not welcome in the

scientific community. Enthusiasm for nuclear technology was at a high

point in the 1950s, and radiography was being used for everything

from treating acne and menstrual disorders to ascertaining shoe fit.

X-rays, as Stewart put it, "were the favourite toy of the medical

profession". The British and American Governments were investing

heavily in the arms race and promoting nuclear energy, and there was

little willingness to recognise that radiation was as dangerous as

Stewart claimed. She never again received a major grant in England.

For the next two decades, however, she and her statistician, George

Kneale, extended, elaborated and refined their database at what

became the Oxford Survey of Childhood Cancer, until in the 1970s

major medical bodies recommended that pregnant women should not be X-

rayed, and the practice ceased.



The Oxford Survey had collected information on hundreds of thousands

of children across Britain over a 30-year period. Stewart and Kneale

had demonstrated that children incubating cancer have greatly

increased susceptibility to infections, and turned up a connection

between inoculations and resistance to cancer which suggests links

between cancer and the immune system. They also had theories about

ultrasound and sudden infant death syndrome that they would have

liked to test - but such funding as they had was cut off. In 1974,

having officially retired and moved from Oxford to Birmingham, where

she had accepted a research appointment, the 68-year- old Stewart

received an unexpected phone call from America. Dr Thomas Mancuso,

who had been at work on a government study of the health of nuclear

workers at Hanford, the weapons complex that produced plutonium for

the Manhattan Project, wanted her to "take a closer look" at his

data.



Mancuso's study had been going on for more than a decade, and was not

expected to turn up anything troubling, since workers' exposure at

Hanford, the oldest and largest nuclear weapons facility in the

world, was well within the safety limits set by international

guidelines. But Stewart and Kneale found that the cancer risk to the

workers was about 20 times higher than was being claimed, a discovery

that put them at odds with the multimillion-dollar Hiroshima and

Nagasaki studies on which international safety guidelines are based.

The American Department of Energy dismissed Mancuso and attempted to

seize the data. But Stewart and Kneale took their work back to

England and, together with Mancuso, published a series of studies

which continued to corroborate a cancer effect considerably higher

than the Hiroshima studies indicated. The Energy Department denied

the scientists further access to the workers' records and kept

research under strict government control. Although the statistical

methods of the study were criticised by the Oxford epidemiologist

Richard Doll (who had been one of the first to prove the link between

smoking and cancer), the Mancuso findings attracted public attention

and provoked congressional investigations in 1978 and 1979. The

accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, while

the British and American Governments were trying to expand nuclear

facilities and weapons production, brought the anti-nuclear movement

back to life, and Stewart became one of its heroes. She found herself

much in demand, called on as an expert witness to testify against the

siting of nuclear facilities and dumps and to testify in compensation

cases by veterans and victims who had lived downwind of various

plants.



In 1986, when she was 80, she received the Right Livelihood Award,

the "alternative Nobel" as it is called, which is awarded in the

Swedish Parliament the day before the Nobel Prize to honour those who

have made contributions to the betterment of society. The

British Embassy, however, refused even to send a car to the airport

to pick her up. In 1992 she was awarded the Ramazzini Prize for

epidemiology. Even in the years when Stewart was making dozens of

public appearances on behalf of activists in Britain and

America, she always insisted that she was a scientist, not an

activist, and that she did not have a political programme. She

published more than 400 papers in scientific journals. However,

although she could deliver her findings in person with exceptional

clarity, her publications were often very hard to decipher.



Also in 1986, Stewart received a $1.4 million grant to study the

effects of low-dose radiation. This came not from a government

agency or academic institute, but from activists, and derived from a

fine imposed upon the Three Mile Island facility. To undertake

the study, Stewart needed access to the nuclear workers' records, but

the American Government refused to release them. It took

several years and several freedom of information suits to get at

them. When in 1992 Stewart was finally granted access to the

records of one third of all workers in nuclear weapons facilities in

the US, the front page of The New York Times called it a blow for

scientific freedom. Stewart continued to publish and present papers

into her nineties. She was a charismatic speaker and a person

of great warmth and generosity. She did not have an easy time as a

lone woman in male-dominated fields, and she suffered keenly

from the loss of funding and her isolation as a result of taking

unpopular stances, but she maintained that obscurity had its

advantages, since it allowed her to take risks that other scientists

could not. "Truth is the daughter of time," she was fond of saying;

and "It helps in this field to be long-lived" - since in such a

political area truth is slow in coming out. She lived long enough to

see  radiation science move in her direction, with each official estimate of 

radiation risk acknowledging greater danger than previous

estimates admitted.



She also lived to see her efforts help to break the American

Department of Energy's hold on radiation health research. She had the

satisfaction of seeing one Secretary of Energy in 1993 open the

record of the Government's management of nuclear operations during

the Cold War, including the records of human experimentation, and

then seeing another in 2000 recommending compensation for nuclear

workers suffering from cancers that may have been incurred at work. A

biography of her, The Woman Who Knew Too Much by Gayle Green, was

published in England and America in 1999. Alice Stewart is survived

by her daughter.



_________________________________________________________________

MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: 

http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx



************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/