To: Pdbsongs1@cs.com
From: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
Subject: Re: Fwd: THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH has died (add'l info)
In-Reply-To: <14b.10158262.2a4e852c@cs.com>
Hi,

The full title of the 1999 book by Gayle Greene about Alice Stewart is:

THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH: ALICE STEWART AND THE SECRETS OF RADIATION, by Gayle Greene, forward by Helen Caldicott. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1999. Printed in the U.S.A..

Below are some additional articles and essays about Dr. Stewart:

(1) Letter from Patricia Borchmann
(2) Alice Stewart (article at the Mother's Alert web site)
(3) More notes about Dr. Stewart, Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, and others (with excerpts from the Gayle Greene book)
(4) Contact information for Russell Hoffman

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(1) Letter from Patricia Borchmann:
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At 08:36 PM 6/28/02 , you wrote:

Russell,

Thank you for your email.  The Tribute for THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH was awesome...her history was another sad story I never knew before.  

Patricia Borchmann

The tribute is now posted online here:

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(2) Alice Stewart (article at the Mother's Alert web site): 
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Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 13:16:32 -0400
Reply-To: downwinders@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [downwinders] A-BOMD DATA WRONGLY INTERPRETED- ALICE STEWART

  August 9, 2001  Nagasaki Day, Nuclear War Week

  Mothersalert Home Page:
http://www.mothersalert.org
  USA Space Command, "Vision 2020":
http://www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace  [Down
Recently]


 http://www.mothersalert.org/stewart.html
  Alice Stewart, A Pioneering Heroine,
  discovered that low level radiation caused more
health damage
  than previously thought, and spent a life-time
devoted to clarifying
  and sharing this critical information.....
  Alice Stewart Interview:
  A-Bomb Data Wrongly Interpreted

  The Survivor

  In the 1950s, Alice Stewart found that exposing
pregnant mothers to X-rays doubled the risk of
cancer in their children. Ever since, the
physician and epidemiologist has argued that low
doses of radiation might be harmful. It's a view
that has put her at odds with governments, the
military and the nuclear industry. This week,
Stewart, who is 93, publishes new research
supporting her claims. Michael Bond spoke to the
maverick of radiation epidemiology and found her
in fighting form.

  What new evidence do you have to support your
claims that low-level radiation could be
dangerous?

  Radiation safety standards are derived from
studies of the A-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. These studies were food for people
supporting hormesis, the theory that a little bit
of radiation can be good for you--that it
stimulates the immune system. When it was found
that a small number of the A-bomb survivors were
living longer than they ought to, this was seen as
proof that radiation had done them good. But we
have new data that should put paid to that. We
have proof that the A-bomb data have been wrongly
interpreted. (See "Radiation: how safe is safe?")

  What does your research show?

  It shows that cancer was not the only effect of
the A-bomb radiation. People died from immune
system damage as well. Our paper also shows that
the A-bomb survivors were not a normal, homogenous
population. They were the best athletes--the top
10 per cent--and did not include the young and the
old. This means that we cannot base standards of
radiation safety on such an elite cohort.

  Do you think that the authorities will now
reassess the idea that radiation at low doses is
not harmful?

  I think this new paper will do it. But I don't
think it will lead to an immediate reaction.

  Why do you think your findings always take so
long to be taken seriously? Take your work in the
1950s showing that a fetus exposed to X-rays has a
higher risk of cancer. Or your findings in the
1970s that workers at the Hanford weapons complex
in the US were getting cancer after supposedly
safe levels of exposure.

  The trouble is that I've always had a very small
set-up, with only just enough money to employ
people to do the research. I've never had a
department that's out selling the message to other
people. So it's been a bit slower than usual.

  When it came to my work on X-rays, nobody wanted
to believe it. X-rays were a favourite toy of the
medical profession. But much more than that, it
was just the moment when the nuclear industry was
taking off. If we were right, the industry
couldn't develop properly.

  Your work has tended to attract a lot of
criticism from scientists, one of whom is the
leading epidemiologist Richard Doll. Why do you
think he doesn't like your work?

  I moved to Birmingham University for that
reason. I knew that if I stayed at Oxford I would
always be under the thumb of Doll. But that is the
extraordinary thing. I can have reason to be angry
with him because he was powerful and I was weak.
He can have no reason at all to be angry at me,
and yet he must resent me for some reason.
Something irks him about me, and I'm conceited
enough to think he suspects I'm a better
epidemiologist than him. Now, he will tell you he
has never had any quarrel with me at all.

  Doll has criticised your methodology on the
Hanford Studies. Why?

  He's criticised my methodology from the word go.
I don't know why. He's even criticised the
mathematics of George Kneale, my statistician. But
Doll doesn't know a fraction of the mathematics
that George knows. I don't know what he means when
he says our method is wrong, but he should be
called to account.

  The main objections to my X-rays study was that
the mothers were lay informants --that they
weren't scientists, and they could have made up
stories. We always knew there were weaknesses in
our story. But we'd done our best to check this
through the hospitals where they had their X-rays.

  You've been described as "an avowed opponent of
the nuclear industry". Are you?

  Well, I've never avowed it to anybody. But if by
the nuclear industry you mean the war and energy
industries, then yes I'm against it. If you mean,
do I think we should stop using X-rays, then no,
but you must use them knowing they are a dangerous
toy. I think the medical profession has quite a
lot of uses for it. Take, for example, irradiated
food. If this was going to prolong the life of
food that you could send to a country to save it
from starving, it would be excellent. But what
you've got to be careful of is not to allow
industry to indiscriminately use this radiation
and to find it's going down your back drains.

  I'm automatically against it for war, and you
have to remember that the nuclear military and
energy industries have always been far more
intimately connected than most people realise.

  The discovery that made your name in 1956 was
that a fetus exposed to an X-ray is twice as
likely to develop cancer within 10 years as one
that is not. Did this finding come as a complete
surprise to you?

  Yes. We weren't particularly looking for a link
between cancer and X-rays. We were comparing the
medical records of children who had died from
leukaemia with those of healthy children from the
same regions. And in the questionnaire, we had
asked mothers if they'd been X-rayed. It looked to
me as if there had been something before birth
that produced a little epidemic at a certain age
group that never repeated itself. But the risk was
so small that if we'd tackled it any other way
we'd never have discovered it.

  We were lucky, but it wouldn't have been thought
of by someone who hadn't had some experience of
medicine, and it might have been wrongly
interpreted.  So if you hadn't found the link it
might have been another 20 years before someone
else did?

  No, not 20 years. To this day we would be
thinking X-rays were safe. This is because, as
I've indicated, the A-bomb survivor studies from
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was the only other
study on this, was saying it was safe, and this
would have been considered satisfactory to the
point where everybody would have been quite happy
about X-rays.

  How much do you think being a woman helped or
hindered your career? When you first walked into
the lecture hall as a medical student at Cambridge
in 1925 you were met with 200 male students
stamping their feet at you.

  I'm sure my sex made a tremendous difference.
But thanks to my family--my mother was a
doctor--and thanks to the war, rather than being a
crippling difficulty it actually proved to be
rather a helpful one. I found I was constantly
thinking of things in an unusual way. I didn't
expect to be allowed to get to the top rung, which
is something a man would expect, and so perhaps
that made it easier to stay with a subject that
wasn't very popular.

  Has that bothered you?

  Not at the time, but in retrospect I think it's
the one thing I rather regret . . . that I should
have pressed for something more. But I was stuck,
I could only do one or other of two things: I
could either be fighting the battle for women or I
could be getting on with my job. I couldn't win
both. And I chose to go on with my job. But I
think a braver person might have done something
about it.

  Were you ever bitter about being sidelined?

  No, I think I personally had everything to gain
by it. It's always worked in my favour. An element
of uncertainty is always a good thing. It's been a
constant help. You need some resistance and
criticism to bring out the good work. One of the
reasons it's been so interesting for me is that no
one has ever lost interest in what I've said about
radiation. They may despise me, they may hate me,
but the problem is there and will stay there if
nobody's solved it.

  Most people think about cutting back on work
when they reach seventy. Did you miss out on
anything by carrying on in your nineties?

  I stayed working because I was enjoying it, and
it was all voluntary. It became obvious early on
that we had hit on something that was going to
take more than a lifetime to resolve. It wasn't
just the radiation thing that interested me. I was
really interested in where the other cancers were
coming from. You need to follow it for a long
time.

  Who will carry on your fight in the radiation
debate?

  I've got a voice in the next generation in Steve
Wing and his department at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mind you, they're going
to make life difficult for them, with grants and
everything. People in the nuclear industry will do
their very best to stop it. But I'm a great
believer that in the end, they'll get caught up in
their own machinations and the truth will emerge
from an unexpected quarter.

  Further reading:

  "A bomb survivors: factors that may lead to a
re-assessment of the radiation hazard",
International Journal of Epidemiology, volume 29,
no 4 (4 August 2000) The Woman Who Knew Too Much
by Gayle Greene, University of Michigan Press,
£19.99, ISBN 0472111078

  Radiation: how safe is safe?

  The A-bomb database--a record of the health and
mortality of the survivors of the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki atomic bombs--is considered the gold
standard when assessing the health risks of
radiation. Alice Stewart, however, has spent much
of her career arguing that it cannot be trusted.
Her latest research, published this week in the
International Journal of Epidemiology (vol 29, no
4), strengthens that argument.

   The database is used to compare the mortality
rates of A-bomb survivors with other Japanese
citizens born at the same time. The results have
always been the same: people exposed to low doses
do not have a higher than average risk of cancer.
Stewart says these conclusions are unreliable
because the bomb survivors are not truly
representative of Japanese society.

  In her latest paper, she focuses on the 2600
people who suffered severeradiation injuries even
though most received only a small radiation dose.
In particular, she wanted to compare their
incidence of cancers and other diseases with that
of around 60 000 low-dose survivors who did not
suffer from serious injuries.

  Stewart found the minority group had a much
higher incidence of cancer and heart disease. She
says these findings were reported to the European
Parliament two years ago (see New Scientist, 28
February 1998, p 12) but that the assembly,
curiously, decided not to make them public.

  Stewart's detractors have pointed to a series of
studies showing that certain survivors of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs lived slightly longer
than people who had not been exposed.

  But research published in The Lancet (vol 356, p
303) at the end of last month casts doubt on these
results. Researchers from the Radiation Effects
Research Foundation in Hiroshima examined the
effects of radiation on the 120 000 A-bomb
survivors and found that people who received low
doses did not live longer than average.

[The above was from New Scientist magazine, 05 August 2000.]


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(3) More notes about Dr. Stewart, Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, and others (with excerpts from the Gayle Greene book):
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[This next item is part of a longer letter to a pro-nuker, written in the summer of 2001.  First, the late Dr. Karl Z. Morgan is quoted (I had the honor of interviewing him several times, by phone), followed by an expert from Gayle Greene's book about Alice Stewart, The Woman Who Knew Too Much (Michigan Press) -- rdh ]

"If all members of ICRP and NCRP resigned who worked for the nuclear industry or received research funding from it, both would be ghost organizations with very few if any members."

-- The late Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, known as the "father of Health Physics", former director of health physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in sworn testimony to the Department of Energy, 1989 (printed in 1990).

With the help of a friend, the following section (to the ***** asterisks ***** ) is based on, and the quotes are from: The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation, Gayle Greene (forward by...Dr. Helen Caldicott), pages 122- 125, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1999.  Some of the quotes within this section are from interviews done specifically for the book.  Others reference other primary sources such as publications in scientific journals or interviews published elsewhere.  The author of "the Woman Who Knew Too Much" has meticulously footnoted these sources.

"We had, all of us, a misconception in that we adhered universally to the so-called threshold hypothesis, meaning that if a dose was low enough, cell repair would take place as fast as the damage would accrue.  In other words we believed there was a safe level of radiation.  Now along comes [Dr.] Alice [Stewart] who says that "damage per unit dose" is greater at ... low levels." -- Dr. Karl Z. Morgan.

"He announced in the September 1978 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that he thought the current radiation risk had been underestimated by a factor of ten.  Since he was chairman of the International Commission on Radiation Protection, the commission that sets the standards, and since he had, as he says, "for a quarter of a century supported rapid expansion of the nuclear industry" this caused quite a stir.  "When we first began to assert this, many people thought we were crazy."

Alice herself was shaken by her findings.  "Not even I had thought the effects of such a small dose would be as great as this.  The Oxford survey had upset the medical profession, but I now saw that these findings would upset a more formidable set of authorities.  It came to me all of a sudden that what we were going to say would shock the world.""

She basically came out with studies which showed that the Hanford workers were being killed.  The "Nuclear Mafia" (as I call them) picked on Dr. Stewart and anyone who agreed with her, and made fun of them, and everyone who backed her up lost their funding.  Because what they began to find, which Dr. Morgan published in 1977 in Health Physics, a peer-reviewed journal he edited at the time, was devastating for the industry.

Dr. Stewart, Dr. Mancuso (University of Pittsburgh; a world-renowned epidemiologist), and Dr. George Kneale (a brilliant statistician) had enough evidence from their Hanford studies to publish the results.  Dr. Stewart: "We were finding that there was a six or seven percent increased cancer effect.  It wasn't much of an effect, but the shock was that there was any effect at all, since the cancers were occurring at radiation exposure levels well below the official limit of 5 Rads per year [1977].  It meant that the current standards for nuclear safety might be as much as 25 times too high."

But even a 10-fold decrease in permissible exposure levels would be a huge problem for the industry: "Were we to reduce the maximum permissible exposure by a factor of 10, I seriously doubt that many of our present nuclear power plants would find it feasible to continue in operation."  -- Dr. Karl Z. Morgan.

Dr. Stewart realized it first.  Her Oxford study of childhood cancers was both mind-numbing and ground-breaking in that it showed that if you irradiate pregnant woman, the consequences to their offspring are terrible.  You'll have cancers and leukemias at a high rate.  Because of her, when woman go in for an x-ray, they are asked if they are pregnant.

"For years and years our pre-natal study has been the only evidence that there was anything dangerous with low-dose radiation.  But now at Hanford we were turning up further evidence.  At Hanford we were looking at people being exposed day in and day out to doses only a fraction higher than background radiation and we were finding a cancer effect.  We were finding an effect at levels comparable to those absorbed by the general public.  This meant there was a serious health hazard, not only to workers in the atomic energy industry, but to the general public as well."  [This was all going on in the 70's.]

***** end of excerpts from "The Woman Who Knew Too Much" *****

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(4) Contact information for Russell Hoffman:
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