Alice M. Stewart interviews

Dr. Alice Stewart was born Alice Mary Naish in Sheffield, England on October 4, 1906. Receiving her medical degree from Cambridge in 1932, Dr. Stewart was the first to demonstrate the link between X-rays during pregnancy and childhood disease. Dr. Stewart found that children whose mothers had had an abdominal X-ray to determine the position of their baby were nearly twice as likely to have cancer as other children. Dr. Stewart warned that low-dose radiation posed more risk than physicians had previously recognized, and as a result, physicians no longer X-ray pregnant people. Her findings were initially met with outrage by doctors and the nuclear industry, but were later duplicated and the practice of X-rays during pregnancy was discontinued by the 1970s. In 1941, Dr. Stewart began research at Oxford on ammunition plant workers who filled shells with TNT. Her research concluded that increased exposure to TNT impaired the body’s ability to form blood. This discovery led Britain to revise their manufacturing processes.

Having authored more than 400 peer-reviewed papers, Dr. Stewart was a prolific scientist. She took courageous stands on controversial issues: for example, arguing that the data on Hiroshima survivors, which served as the main source for standards on safe levels of radiation exposure, were flawed and underestimated the harmful nature of radiation. Perhaps Dr. Stewart’s most famous investigation, pertaining to the health records of employees at the Hanford plutonium production plant in Washington state, came after her formal retirement. Dr. Stewart found a far higher occurrence of radiation-induced illness than was recorded in official studies. While Stewart herself acknowledged that the results of the study were outside of the range considered statistically significant, her research remains a significant response to the perceived bias in reports authored by the nuclear industry. Rudi Nussbaum, professor of physics at Portland State University (PSU), invited Dr. Stewart for a sabbatical at PSU in 1984. Dr. Alice Stewart died on June 3, 2002, aged 95, in Oxford, England.