Dr Alice Stewart
Thorn in the side of the nuclear industry
ALICE STEWART was one of Britain's foremost epidemiologists until her retirement, at the age of 90, five years ago. Early in her career she showed that X-raying foetuses, a common way of monitoring pregnancy in the 1950s, caused childhood leukaemia. She went on to show that the harmful effects of exposure to low-level radiation were far more serious that had been officially accepted, and championed the caused of nuclear-industry workers.
Alice Mary Naish, epidemiologist: born Sheffield 4 October 1906; First Assistant, Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford University 1942-47, First Assistant, Department of Social Medicine 1947-53, Reader in Social Medicine 1953-74; Senior Research Fellow, Department of Social Medicine, Birmingham University 1974-96, Honorary Professor 1996-2002; married 1933 Ludovick Stewart (one daughter, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved); died Oxford 23 June 2002.
Alice Stewart was one of Britain's foremost epidemiologists until her retirement, at the age of 90, five years ago. Early in her career she showed that X-raying foetuses, a common way of monitoring pregnancy in the 1950s, caused childhood leukaemia. She went on to show that the harmful effects of exposure to low-level radiation were far more serious that had been officially accepted, and championed the caused of nuclear-industry workers.
Her parents, Lucy and Albert Naish, were paediatricians who worked in the Sheffield slums and became local heroes for their dedication to children's welfare. She inherited her mother's intuition and gift for problem solving and her father's analytic intelligence and talent for diagnosis. Dashing and beautiful, she inherited too their intelligence, intuition, commitment to the betterment of society and willingness to sacrifice financial gain for the prevention of disease.
She entered the Cambridge medical school as one of four women among 300 men, who stamped their feet when the women entered the lecture theatre and slammed their desk lids when they sat down. However, she made many friends among the arts students, including the poet William Empson. Her relationship with him lasted 60 years until his death in 1984, although she married someone else.
Barred from hospital work as she was a woman, she went to the Royal Free for her clinical training. After the Second World War she moved to the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at Oxford, investigating the effects of exposure to TNT in munitions-factory workers, the effects of carbon tetrachloride, and the curious prevalence of TB in the footwear industry. Having shown her mettle, she was brought into the Oxford child health surveys.
The incidence of child leukaemias was increasing and no one knew why. She suspected that the mothers might remember something the doctors did not, so she interviewed them and rapidly saw the correlation with X-rays, which she demonstrated statistically. X-rays were medicine's new toy and were being used for everything from examining the position of the foetus to treating acne; even shoe shops had X-ray machines where customers could see how their footwear fitted. This was at the height of the arms race, when the British and US governments were trying to build up public trust in the friendly atom and did not want people to get the idea that low-dose radiation could kill their children.
The leukaemia-pregnancy link was briefly resisted by the medical establishment but soon led to a ban on X-rays on pregnant women. It was, however, fiercely opposed by many physicists and radiobiologists, the UK National Radiation Protection Board, the International Commission for Radiation Protection, and by the powerful nuclear lobbies, within and outside government, that ICRP seemed to serve. Stewart's findings implied that low-level radiation, which had become an everyday part of life for nuclear workers, the armed forces and sometimes even the public, could be far more harmful than had been thought or admitted.
She survived opposition to become Director of the Nuffield Institute of Social Medicine. It was most unusual for women to be in senior positions at Oxford at the time and she stood out both intellectually and for her beauty and vivacity in the dowdy academic world of the time.
In 1974, when she was 68 and about to retire from Oxford and relocate to Birmingham University, she and her statistician colleague George Kneale were contacted by Dr Thomas Mancuso, who had been appointed by the US Atomic Energy Commission to study the health of nuclear workers at a plutonium-manufacturing complex in Hanford, Washington. Since the industry was required by law to work within the exposure levels laid down by the ICRP, the study was also seen as a test of these standards. The Stewart-Kneale-Mancuso analysis revealed over 10 times the cancer incidence predicted from A-bomb survivor studies.
An immediate and damning official outcry ensued. Mancuso was deprived of his directorship by the US government and the use of outside consultants was promptly banned. Stewart and her colleagues, undaunted, published a major report in 1977 and added to it over the following years.
When she returned to England with the Hanford data, there was an inquiry about whether the nuclear installation at Sellafield should be expanded. Stewart assumed that the nuclear industry would be eager to know what she and Mancuso had turned up about the Hanford workers, but she was wrong. "They were sending out refutations of us behind our backs, but never once did they consult us directly." She was, however, contacted by anti-nuclear groups from around the world. She infuriated the Establishment by pointing out that, until the nature of radiation damage to genes was understood at the molecular level, predictions of second-generation and long-term genetic effects were premature.
She spent 20 years as Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham university, working from a caravan, professionally isolated and attacked, paid a pittance and starved of research funding. In the mid-Eighties – when she was 80 – she was awarded a $2m grant from the Three Mile Island Public Health Fund.
Her energy and determination never flagged. She was in demand at conferences, hearings, inquiries throughout England, Europe and the United States. She testified for nuclear workers seeking compensation, for British and American veterans of atomic testing, for women arrested protesting the siting of cruise missiles at Greenham Common.
She was only the ninth – and youngest – woman to become, in 1946, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. (She, her brother John and her father were Fellows all at the same time.) In the 1990s Professor Nicholas Kurti proposed her for Fellowship of the Royal Society but was unable to overcome the opposition.
Alice Stewart loved her home, family, garden and countryside, and always had time for her children and grandchildren. She was the subject of a biography by Gayle Greene, The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the secrets of radiation (1999).
Caroline Richmond
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