- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: The University of Michigan Press; New edition edition (28 Feb 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0472087835
- ISBN-13: 978-0472087839
- Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 1.5 x 0.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,103,367 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Synopsis
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 hercontroversial 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 compellingreading.\par\pard\s1\sa100\sb100\li0\plain\fs24 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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book is about a wonderful woman who even in her nineties continues to be an inspiration to many, even though there are many who are unaware of her existence. She is the woman who first identified the risks of carrying out X-rays on pregnant women because of the impact on the developing foetus. In the 1950's it was quite common to Xray to check the position of the unborn baby, and it was her unusual research methods which identified that this was the cause of cancer and leukaemia in young children. I wonder if her speculation about ultra sound examinations being similarly dangerous will come to fruition one day too? I share her concerns.
Her unusual research methods? She asked the mothers! And in doing so she has amassed an enormous amount of data, much of which has already proven very useful, and may yet prove to be even more so.
Anyone with an interest in health, nuclear issues, the effects of radiation, feminism and reading about an amazing woman should read this book!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Pioneering epidemiologist Alice Stewart MD FRCP merits a first rate biography. She was an admirable woman, deeply passionate about her research and its relevance, but there are occasional errors in this account of her life that let it down. For example, it is claimed (see pages 59-60) that soon after the 1939-45 War she took charge of establishing a Pneumoconiosis Research Unit for the British Medical Research Council (MRC) in South Wales and there undertook major studies of this prevalent disease of Welsh coal miners. But official records show that she arrived at the MRC Pneumoconiosis Research Unit nine months after it opened, as a temporary assistant to its founding director, Dr Charles Fletcher, and that she remained on his staff for only about a year(1946-47). She did assist Fletcher with an early survey by the Unit, but was never in charge of one.
It is this kind of inaccuracy that undermines the strengths of the work. Alice Stewart was a highly controversial epidemiologist and her story merits the tightest telling.
It is this kind of inaccuracy that undermines the strengths of the work. Alice Stewart was a highly controversial epidemiologist and her story merits the tightest telling.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Courage and Integrity in Science: A Precious Rarety
20 Feb 2000
Format:Hardcover
Courage and Integrity in Science: A Precious Rarety
The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation by Gayle Greene. Dr. Stewart is a British physician and epidemiologist (born in 1906 into a large family of physicians) who revolutionized the concept of radiation risk. In the 1950s, while surveying childhood mortalities in the British Isles, she finds that then quite common X-ray examinations during pregnancy doubled the risk for childhood cancer. Fueled by the wrath of radiologists, her work has been viciously derided among the medical establishment for more than two decades. In the 1970s, she finds that some workers at nuclear weapons production sites, such as Hanford, WA or Oakridge, TN are dying of radiation induced cancers, showing that presumed "safe" levels of occupational exposures put these workers at a twenty times higher risk than officially admitted. With that finding she places herself on the "enemy list" of an immensely powerful nuclear weapons establishment, including its scientific elite, and at the center of an international controversy over radiation risks. Stewart's fascinating story, a collaborative memoir told by herself and Greene with verve and humor, is one of a woman scientist's ingenuity, independence, perseverance, compassion, and integrity, a fascinating tale in the checkered history of a mostly male-dominated science. Rudi H. Nussbaum, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Environmental Science.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Have your children, your daughters must, read this book.
26 Jan 2000
Format:Hardcover
As Research Director of the Hanford Veterans Cancer Mortality Study I have worked closely with Dr. Alice Stewart. I have learned from her, laughed with her and admired her as the most extraordinary human being I have ever known. But, I never knew her well enough. You must read this book! It will give you a new understanding of the meaning of courage and integrity. More importantly - have your children, especially your daughters, read this book. Thank goodness Gayle Greene has written this eminently readable biography of Alice. It allows us to understand where her drive comes from and how Dr. Stewart can suffer the slings and arrows of the federal scientific pygmies who attack her work. The heart of the story, and a key to Dr. Stewart's personality, can be found in the juxtaposition of the the ending words of Chapter 13 where Professor Greene says "Alice is called in by...radiation victims, her investigations turn up cancer in excess ... the studies are handed over to official bodies...the official studies invoke the A-bomb data to discredit her finds....Time passes." `It's a long, slow business,' she (Dr. Stewart) says." Compare this with one of Dr. Stewart's favorite quotations, "truth is the daughter of time." She has waited, we will wait; but Dr. Helen Caldicott is right "her work may (I say `will') receive the recognition and thanks of the future." When one finishes reading this marvelous book one cannot help but think of George Sand saying "humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation; which is one of the most passionate forms of love." Thank the Good Lord for this stunning creature called Alice Stewart. And thank Gayle Greene for helping us to know her just a bit better.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Fascinating insight into the history of radiation & medicine
13 Feb 2000
Format:Hardcover
The book spans the lifetimes of Dr. Stewart and her parents. It offers a fascinating description of medicine in Britain in the late 19th century, the entry of women into the medical field, and the institutional resistance in the second half of the 20th century to the fact that low levels of radiation are dangerous. Given the recent announcements by the US Government concerning health risks in the nuclear arms industry, this is a timely and fascinating book. Well written and researched.
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