The woman who knew too much : Alice Stewart and the secrets of radiation / Gayle Greene ; foreword by Helen Caldicott.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Dr. Alice Stewart is a British epidemiologist who revolutionized the concept of radiation risk. Born in 1906, she is an outstanding scientist with more than 400 peer-reviewed papers to her name and someone who has taken courageous and effective stands on public issues. Yet her controversial work lies at the center of a political storm and so has only relatively recently begun to receive significant attention. For more than forty years, Stewart has warned that low-dose radiation is more dangerous than has been acknowledged. While teaching at Oxford in the 1950s she began research that led to the discovery that fetal x-rays double the child's risk of developing cancer. As a result, doctors no longer x-ray pregnant women. Two decades later--when she was in her seventies--she again astounded the scientific world with a study showing that the U.S. nuclear weapons industry is about twenty times more dangerous than safety regulations permit. The finding put her at the center of the international controversy over radiation risk. In recent years, she has become one of a handful of independent scientists whose work is a lodestone to the anti-nuclear movement. In 1990, the New York Times called her "perhaps the Energy Department's most influential and feared scientific critic." The Woman Who Knew Too Much traces Dr. Stewart's life and career from her early childhood in Sheffield to her medical education at Cambridge to her research positions at Oxford and the University of Birmingham. The book joins a growing number of biographies of pioneering women scientists such as Barbara McClintock, Rosalind Franklin and Lise Meitner and will find a wide range of appreciative readers, including those interested in the history of science and technology and of the history of women in science and medicine. Activists and policy makers will also find the story of Alice Stewart compelling reading. Gayle Greene is Professor of Women's Studies and Literature, Scripps College. She is the author of Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition; Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change and coeditor of Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Visit www.alicestewart.org"> www.alicestewart.org for selections from the book, photos, and reviews.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Alice Stewart led the research effort that identified the cancer-causing effects of X-rays in pregnancy. A medical doctor, she worked at a time when women were still a rarity in the field and not well accepted. During World War II, she became the first assistant to the chair of the newly created Institute of Social Medicine, out of which came the X-ray study and its critical findings. When the chairman died in 1950, the institute was closed rather than continued under Stewart's direction, an indication of the lack of professional esteem for both Stewart and the field of social medicine. Strongly independent, she continued her radiation studies, bringing her in direct confrontation with the nuclear industry. Although persecuted both professionally and financially for her unpopular positions, Stewart, now in her 90s, says that she's had a "marvelous time." While this biography is sometimes chronologically jumbled and a bit feminist in tone (the author is a professor of women's studies and literature), the subject is a fascinating woman truly deserving of further study. Recommended for most libraries.ÄHilary Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In 1956, British physician Alice Stewart discovered that exposing a fetus to a single diagnostic X-ray doubles the risk of an early death from cancer. As this spirited biography demonstrates, Stewart's subsequent dedication to investigating the effects of radiation turned her into a kind of guru to the antinuclear movement. In 1974-1977, her study of U.S. nuclear workers at the Hanford weapons complex in Washington State found that workers had a greater risk of developing cancer if exposed to radiation well below one-tenth of the "safe" level stipulated by international standards. According to Greene, the Atomic Energy Commission attempted to seize Stewart's data, and her funding was cut off. Yet her controversial findings, published in 1977, have momentous implications because, as Stewart explains, "If we are correct, occupational safety standards will have to be changed and it will open the floodgates to claims from workers, veterans and downwinders." Greene, a professor at Scripps College, also sets forth Stewart's provocative, still untested theory that sudden infant death syndrome masks myeloid leukemia. Stewart's varied personal life included conducting an affair with literary critic/poet William Empson, raising two children as a single parent and enduring her son's suicide. Greene calls this a "collaborative memoir," because she lets Stewart, 93, speak for herself whenever possible. Yet Greene also uses this blunt, feisty woman's career to mount a compelling critique of the nuclear industry and the medical establishment. 31 b&w photos. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Claiming radiation to be "unsafe at any dose," Alice Stewart, MD epidemiologist, found exposure to low-level radiation far more serious than most scientists do. She took on the establishment by challenging its long-held belief in the "linear hypothesis." The latter, as its title implies, is an unproven but scientifically accepted theory stating that radiation damage to tissue is directly proportional to the magnitude of the dose received. Universally accepted for extremely high exposures, such as experienced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hypothesis forecasts linearly decreasing damage as radiation doses become less. "Perhaps [she is] the Energy Department's most influential and feared critic," asserted the New York Times in May, 1990. This noncritical memoir by Greene (Scripps College) describes Stewart's lifelong dedication to proving her own hypothesis, one enthusiastically endorsed by those strongly opposed to further development of nuclear energy. Her views also run counter to decades of investigations performed by the National Academy of Sciences and federal regulatory agencies, and to conclusions from research performed under the auspices of the United Nations, World Health Organization, and other such organizations. All levels. J. G. Morse; Colorado School of Mines

Booklist Review

British epidemiologist Stewart has been issuing warnings about the serious health threats associated with low doses of radiation for 40 years. Her investigation began in 1956, when she traced childhood cancers to prenatal X-rays. That discovery led to her even more controversial findings regarding nuclear workers and the inaccuracies of the so-called A-bomb data used to calculate safe radiation dosages. Greene calls her riveting portrait a "collaborative memoir," and, indeed, Stewart's voice is heard almost as frequently as her biographer's as she recounts her unusual life with verve and humor. Greene enthusiastically chronicles Stewart's fascinating family history (her mother was one of England's first women doctors) and demanding private life, and perspicaciously examines the "visions and doggedness" that characterized Stewart's pioneering and invaluable work. Now in her nineties, Stewart combated sexism throughout her career and conducted her labor-intensive research without the support of a university or a research facility. Stewart's story is one of perseverance, ingenuity, compassion, independence, and integrity, a noble tale in the checkered history of science. --Donna Seaman