The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation

by Gayle Jacoba Greene

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 http://www.alicestewart.org www.alicestewart.org for selections from the book, photos, and reviews.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Popular Science, History, Biography

321 pages, Hardcover

First published December 7, 1999

Reviews

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant documentary style book. Extremely interesting and I learned so much it is incredible. I certainly hope someone will carry on her work and investigate some of her fascinating theories such as the advent of antibiotics caused a rise in childhood leukemia. In the past, children who were pre-leukemic died of infections, which they were prone to before they had a chance to develop the disease.

Ideas about how a weaker immune system allows cancer to develop demands to be researched! The book is full of such stuff, explained in a very easy to comprehend way. And information is repeated several times which helps.

Also the astounding 50 year cover up by our government regarding the danger of low level radiation in order to develop nuclear weapons. We base all "safe" levels of exposure on information from Hiroshema which alice has shown to be very faulty.

I love books that take my brain to places it's never been before and this book certainly does that!

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basically a biography of a woman who was supported by her family and a select group of friends and colleagues and abused, ignored and tolerated by counterparts who had dominion over her. A doctor who found her life's work mid-career and loved her environment while withstanding resentment and the intellectual ignorance that comes when superiors disagree with your findings. In the end, she remained true to her finding and everybody who ever disagreed with her were forced to admit that she was correct in her findings and her work.

Even she maintained that her findings would not nor could not be verified for 3 to 4 generations into the future. Based on the amount of chronic illness, that seems to be universal today, it would seem that her time predictions might have been a little long.

Empatheticly written from the woman's point of view but as a man I found that Dr. Stewart's experience was common to someone that was not part of the "Good Ole Boy's Club".

A good read that not only informs about radiation and it's consequences but portrays a good person with enormous hurtles that she surmounted. In the end, she won her game of Scrabble.

[DLanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Stewart is the reason that we no longer X-Ray pregnant women due to harm of the unborn child. She was a visionary, and a hero. Her studies of radiation were ground breaking, and she is largely the reason we know what we know today about the dangers of radiation exposure.

[Crosby · Rating 2 out of 5]

The negatives about the book for me were that a lot of space was dedicated to endless gatherings in which participants discussed the possible role of nuclear radiation on human health. Some of the major gatherings could have been used to make the same points without resorting to discussing seemingly every meeting that involved Dr. Stewart. Also, some of the early history involving Dr. Stewart's family was over done. Nevertheless, the section that drew my interest in the book in the first place, that wherein she discovered the negative effect of X-rays on unborn fetuses was fascinating. When I can take excerpts of a book for use in the classes that I teach, I consider the book well worth my time. Dr. Stewart had much going against her when she made her discovery, yet her persistence and insistence that she was correct were inspiring. Today's medical profession takes it for granted that X-rays are not to be used on unborn fetuses. There was a time when that was not so and we have Dr. Stewart to thank for demonstrating that. Even after clearly showing that leukemias and other cancers were associated with fetuses rayed in utero, it still took her years to convince the obgyn physicians to stop using that tool. An interesting observation in the book was a rhetorical question, "What if someone showed that using sonograms is not good for fetuses, would we see the same reluctance that took Dr. Stewart years to overcome?". Several chapters depicting the discovery and the results of her X-ray effect discovery were 4-5 star reading for me, but overall the book bogged to my final rating of two.

[Sherri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story about Alice Stewart, a British doctor and scientist, who discovered the link between prenatal x-rays and childhood cancers. The book is not particularly well written, but I did learn a lot. Stewart's story is inspiring. As a woman, she faced a significant amount of prejudice and ridicule from the male-dominated scientific community, and other groups who found it hard to accept the findings of her research that radiation was harmful even in low doses to unborn fetuses. Even so, she stood by her studies and research and eventually convinced doctors to stop x-raying pregnant women even though it took twenty years to eradicate the practice.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most interesting books that I have ever read. I re-read it, or parts of it on a regular basis. It inspired me to look at ionizing radiation from the health perspective and to eventually write my own book - a primer on ionizing radiation and health called "From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You", published by Between the Lines books. Someone walked off with my copy so I am ordering two more! It is also an excellent piece of feminist literature. I don't know when to say that I finished the book because I keep going back to it for inspiration. http://ionizingradiationandyou.blogsp...

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think, in the right mood, this would be a good book. I certainly think that Alice Stewart is an inspiring figure in science, and the chapter on childhood cancer & X-rays should be read by high school or college students. However, the story drifts into reflections from Stewart and detailed digressions that I didn't find appealing. Be sure you are highly interested before starting this book.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I loved learning about this truly brilliant woman and her contributions to science. But the book itself tended to be redundant, especially in the last half.

Read for the 2016 HOSA Medical Reading competition.

[Elizabeth]

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[Kim Ditter]

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