The lecture that Gayle Greene, professor of English at Scripps College, gave October 10 took on the tone of a cautionary tale as she examined the power of reputation in the fields of scientific “knowledge” and public policy.
In “Sir Richard Doll and Dr. Alice Stewart: Gender Politics, and the Road to Fukushima,” Greene detailed the discrepancies within the science of radiation levels and the disconnect between what the public has been told, and continues to be told, about radiation level safety. She linked her discussion of warnings of low-dose radiation risks to current fears about the effects of the Fukushima nuclear reactor explosion on generations to come. She then posited that downplaying the aftermath is a continuation of the historic discrediting of women’s research and contributions to science.
Greene explained Stewart and Doll made major contributions in the 1950s, he by demonstrating the link between lung cancer and smoking, she by discovering that x-raying pregnant women doubles the risk of a childhood cancer. However, their research was met with quite different responses from the scientific community. When Stewart revealed that radiation at a fraction of the dose “known” to be dangerous could be lethal to the child, she was defunded and defamed, whereas Doll, foremost among her detractors, was knighted, made Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and hailed as “the greatest epidemiologist of our time.”
Greene’s article, “Richard Doll and Alice Stewart: Reputation and the Shaping of Scientific ‘Truth,'” in the scientific journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine,” is forthcoming this fall from Johns Hopkins Press.
A short documentary of Stewart’s life, based on her book, The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation, was partly filmed in Denison Library. It can be viewed online at YouTube.