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

The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation
Author: Gayle Jacoba Greene
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book

List Price: $18.95
Buy New: $17.95
You Save: $1.00 (5%)



New (4) Used (10) from $13.78

Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars 4 reviews
Sales Rank: 801373

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.6

ISBN: 0472087835
Dewey Decimal Number: 509
EAN: 9780472087839
ASIN: 0472087835

Publication Date: July 31, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new. Thanks for looking. Same/next day shipping.

Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
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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.\par\pard\s1\sa100\sb100\li0\plain\fs24 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."\par\pard\s1\sa100\sb100\li0\plain\fs24\i1 The Woman Who Knew Too Much\plain\fs24 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.\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 \plain\fs24\i1 Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition; Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change\plain\fs24 and coeditor of \plain\fs24\i1 Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism\plain\fs24 .\par\pard\s1\sa100\sb100\li0\plain\fs24 Visit {\field{\*\fldinst HYPERLINK "http://www.alicestewart.org/"}{\fldrslt\pard\s1\sa100\sb100\li0\plain\fs24\cs16\cf1\ul www.alicestewart.org}}\plain\fs24\plain\fs24 for selections from the book, photos, and reviews.\par\pard}



Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars "Truth is the daughter of time"   September 14, 2005
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

"Truth is the daughter of time", a saying used by Alice Stewart, cannot come soon enough in this era.
Gayle Greene should be held in the highest esteem for the eloquent presentation of Alice Stewart's quest for truth. Her writing is crisp and unencumbered, and it hold the reader's interest into the life of this feisty, humorous, brilliant woman. Dr. Stewart, just by being of the female gender, found it hard to be taken seriously, and it was not until late in her life that she was honored for a life of accomplishment and dedication. A simple woman born to parents who were both doctors; doctors who put their patients ahead of money and power.
It was a tenet to be carried on by their daughter, Alice Stewart, who never gave up trying to educate the public about radiation proliferation. Thanks to her, thousands of babies were saved from the horrors of exposure to radiation when the medical profession listened to what she had to say about xraying during the first trimester.
Later Alice was funded to examine the effects of radiation on works who handled nuclear materials and weaponry. When her message was not what the AEC and others wanted to hear or receive, they tried to confiscate her work and cut her funding. Indeed, the funding was cut off, but she managed to secure her work and continue its research. Gayle Greene's writing abilities are able to give you the sense of Dr. Stewart's anguish and frustration.
The Woman Who Knew Too Much is a classic example of the control of information which the public direly needs, but which is buried and censored. This book, though written several years ago, is as pertinent as if it were published yesterday, and it should be read by all who are interested in the welfare of humanity. The inclusion in a science or social studies curriculum of the developing minds of students would be a well-deserved legacy for this wonderful woman who died in 2002 at the age of 96.



5 out of 5 stars Courage and Integrity in Science: A Precious Rarety   February 21, 2000
 15 out of 15 found this review helpful

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.


5 out of 5 stars Fascinating insight into the history of radiation & medicine   February 14, 2000
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

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.


5 out of 5 stars Have your children, your daughters must, read this book.   January 26, 2000
 10 out of 10 found this review helpful

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.

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