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Sent: Friday, June 28, 2002 12:29 AM
Subject: Dr Alice Stewart-obituary
TIMES OBITUARIES, June 27, 2002
Dr Alice Stewart
Epidemiologist who proved links between exposure to radiation
and cancer,
and forced the authorities into greater openness
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.
Alice Stewart, epidemiologist, was born on October 4, 1906. She
died on
June 23, 2002, aged 95.
http://www.alicestewart.org/
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