Dr. Alice Stewart: The Anti-Radiation Activist (Part II)

After retirement, Dr. Alice Stewart continued to raise awareness of how radiation could cause cancer, immunodeficiencies, and other possible health defects. She stood up against government entities on behalf of workers who were dying of radiation poisoning and continued to fight against nuclear weapons manufacturing for the rest of her life. 

Transcript

Aarati Asundi (00:12)
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Smart Tea Podcast where we talk about the lives of scientists and innovators who shaped the world. I'm Aarati.

Jyoti Asundi (00:20)
And I'm her mom, Jyoti.

Aarati Asundi (00:22)
Are you super excited for part two of Alice Stewart's story?

Jyoti Asundi (00:25)
I am so excited to hear the rest of the story of Alice Mary Stewart, the wonderful scientist who understood the correlation between childhood versus the X-rays that the mothers were subjected to during their prenatal visits.

Aarati Asundi (00:45)
Yeah, I was thinking about that actually when I was reading this story and might have just missed it, right? ⁓

Jyoti Asundi (00:52)
I absolutely, I was thanking the stars that I did have to be subjected to x-rays during my pregnancies with you and your brother. You just missed it because were closer to 1990 this point. And seriously, I came to America... I was, I was an adult, but very naive, actually. If the doctor recommended an x-ray, I would have definitely gone through it.

Aarati Asundi (01:24)
Yeah, of course.

Jyoti Asundi (01:25)
And I would have thought, "Oh yes, anything for the health of my baby, I'll do it". You know, that kind of thing. 

Aarati Asundi (01:31)
Yeah. They're supposed to know.

Jyoti Asundi (01:32)
Yeah they're supposed to know.

Aarati Asundi (01:33)
They're supposed to know the best, what's best for your health and your baby's health.

Jyoti Asundi (01:37)
I definitely trusted the system and I would not have fought back. I would have just, "Yes, yes, absolutely. Any tools that you have to improve the life unborn infant. Yes, please. I would like to know more about it." That kind of thing. Yeah. So I am, I was actually thinking exactly the same thing. My mind went exactly there.

Aarati Asundi (01:59)
Just missed it.

Jyoti Asundi (02:00)
God's grace was upon our family for that one. 

Aarati Asundi (02:04)
So that's what Alice Stewart was doing during her career at Oxford. And yeah, we just got to the part where she retired from Oxford in favor of going to social medicine at Birmingham. And so that's where we're picking up. She's gone off to Birmingham.

Jyoti Asundi (02:23)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (02:24)
So shortly after getting to Birmingham, Alice was contacted by an American scientist friend of hers, Dr. Thomas Mancuso, and he was looking at the possible health effects caused by low levels of radiation in workers in a nuclear facility in Hanford in Washington state. He was looking at data across the span of about 30 years from 1943 when the Hanford facility was in operation to the current year, 1974. And surprisingly, he found that the workers who were still alive working at the facility had actually been exposed to more radiation than the workers who had died.

Jyoti Asundi (03:06)
Uuuuh...

Aarati Asundi (03:07)
So in that span of 30 years, some workers have died and some workers have lived. And of the ones that have lived, they were exposed to more radiation when they were working at the facility than the ones who have died already.

Jyoti Asundi (03:23)
Yes, OK. I'm just thinking about how they measured the amount of radiation the people who were already dead had been subjected to?

Aarati Asundi (03:34)
That's a good question. From reading the book, it sounds like they did two measurements. They did internal measurements either through taking blood samples and things like and they had an badge that the workers would wear. And this wasn't across the board, like not every single worker did this. Some workers only wore a badge. Some workers did only the internal testing. Some did both. And so there's like that level of added, complexity to the data as well. 

Jyoti Asundi (04:06)
So unlike today where if you work with radiation, it is regulated that you need to wear radiation badges and you have to undergo testing and checks and all to ensure that you're not contaminating yourself in the name of science and then carrying radiation all over the place. So over those days maybe they just had a bit of a spot checking maybe with the radiation badges. And once in a while, some health checks with the blood samples being tested and all that. And records are available Dr. Mancuso and to Dr. Alice Stewart. So, and from that, they're deriving these things.

Aarati Asundi (04:44)
Yes, Alice did pay particular attention to that. A lot of this information, as I said in part one is coming from Gayle Greene's book, The Woman Who Knew Too Much, which is a biography that Gayle Greene sat and interviewed Alice about her life and wrote this biography.

Jyoti Asundi (05:01)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (05:01)
And it turns out that Alice did in fact see that there was a series of four letters that were either YYYY or NNNN some sort of mixture YNNY. And so she was like, what is this? And they stood for yes and no. And the first two were like, did the worker wear a badge and if they did wear a badge, did it show levels of radiation? And the second one were they subjected to internal testing for radiation? And if so, did anything show up on that screen? So she did pay particular attention to those letters as well and say, ⁓ that's an additional piece of information that we need to look at very strongly.

Jyoti Asundi (05:47)
Talking about radiation badges, just an extra aside piece of information, nowadays we are regulated to the point where if a pregnant lady is going to work with radioactivity, she needs to wear two badges: one for herself and one to monitor the fetus. So she needs to wear one...

Aarati Asundi (06:05)
Oh! Like around her stomach or something? Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (06:07)
Yeah near the womb. She needs to wear one externally... both the badges are external, but one is closer to the womb and they monitor her more closely in cases where they cannot avoid it. I mean, in general,  good employers will do everything to take her off that, especially during the first trimester. 

Aarati Asundi (06:26)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, like just, just give her a break.

Jyoti Asundi (06:32)
Yes, they work really hard to keep her away from radiation to begin with. But there are people who are like, no, I don't trust anybody else with my experiment. I'm going to do it. But then the employer will come back and say, no, you need to be monitored and regulated and confirm that you are not damaging anybody else in this process. 

Aarati Asundi (06:50)
Oh interesting.

Jyoti Asundi (06:51)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (06:53)
Yeah so they were looking through this data for the workers at the facility. And they found that the workers who were still alive had been exposed to more radiation than the workers who had died in this 30-year period.

Jyoti Asundi (07:08)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (07:09)
So there was a department called the Energy Research and Development Administration, or ERDA, that eventually became our Department of Energy. And they were urging Dr. Mancuso to publish his results and conclude that low levels of radiation were fine. But Mancuso was like, this data is very preliminary. I'm not sure what's going on here. Let's not jump to conclusions. And so that's why he called Alice, who's in Birmingham, to come to Washington and take a look at the data.

Jyoti Asundi (07:42)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (07:43)
So Alice is right now retired. She has all the time in the world. So she's like, absolutely, I'm coming over. And she brought with her colleague, George Kneale, who was a statistician.

Jyoti Asundi (07:56)
Hmmm yes, you do need to look through that lens in order to sift through these huge epidemiological studies.

Aarati Asundi (08:05)
Yes, and Alice was a firm believer of that, actually. She believed any epidemiological study needs a team of at least two people. There needs to be a physician, and there needs to be a statistician. So George was like the other half of her team for pretty much the rest of her life.

Jyoti Asundi (08:24)
Again, we always need a Batman and a Robin to go together. ⁓

Aarati Asundi (08:27)
Yeah, Alice and George. After they looked at the data for themselves, they found that it was true that, the people who were still alive overall had been doing more dangerous jobs and were exposed to more radiation than the workers who had died. But they pointed out that the people who were given those more dangerous jobs were more likely to be healthier to begin with.

Jyoti Asundi (08:51)
Yes, so it's not a controlled situation to begin with. You are comparing apples and oranges.

Aarati Asundi (08:57)
Yeah, so she's like, this is just like what was happening in part one, where we talked about the workers in the shoe industry during the war, that if you have a dangerous job that needs to be done, you aren't going to give it to somebody who's elderly or having some pre-existing condition. You're going to give a dangerous, difficult job to the healthiest, strongest person.
So that's one thing. And then the second thing that they pointed out was just because you're saying they're still alive, they haven't died yet, that doesn't mean anything. That doesn't mean that they can't develop something later on in life due to the radiation that they were exposed to.

Jyoti Asundi (09:37)
Radiation at low doses usually shows up after a lot of accumulation over time.

Aarati Asundi (09:42)
Exactly. And so they're like, this doesn't mean anything. Just because they haven't died yet doesn't prove anything. And in fact, they did find that the workers who had been exposed to radiation were as much as 20 times more likely to develop cancer than previous studies from other researchers had shown. So of course, this is not what the ERDA wanted to hear. 

Jyoti Asundi (10:04)
No, so they're going to find ways to shut her down and dismiss her and devalue her opinion.

Aarati Asundi (10:10)
Yes, and not just her, but Mancuso and anyone who agreed with what Alice and Mancuso were saying. They everything to stop these results from getting out.

Jyoti Asundi (10:21)
This is so reminiscent of the tobacco industry, right?

Aarati Asundi (10:24)
Mm-hmm. Yes. And the oil industry. 

Jyoti Asundi (10:27)
And the oil industry. 

Aarati Asundi (10:28)
Like, yeah, just suppress, suppress all the bad data. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (10:30)
Suppress, suppress, suppress. Yeah. Until- until it comes out in such a bad way that you can't avoid it anymore.

Aarati Asundi (10:38)
Yes, for them, it's the nuclear weapons. They want to make nuclear weapons. They want to work on nuclear power. And so they're just like, don't..

Jyoti Asundi (10:47)
Don't talk about this. Yes.

Aarati Asundi (10:47)
...Don't let anyone know. Yeah, don't talk about anything that can say that radiation is bad for you.

Jyoti Asundi (10:52)
It reminds me of this movie Erin Brockovich.

Aarati Asundi (10:54)
Yes. was thinking about that a lot, actually. It reminded me a lot of that movie too. It's very similar. And so in fact, it got so bad that Mancuso sent Alice and George back to Britain with a copy of all the data where it would be safe because the ERDA was trying to seize all of his files and cutting off his funding.

Jyoti Asundi (11:16)
Destruction of evidence! So he send it into another country in order to save the evidence.

Aarati Asundi (11:21)
Yes, to keep it safe. Yeah, we are just at the tip of the iceberg here. It's gonna get so much worse.

Jyoti Asundi (11:26)
This is really like, I now see why "The woman who knew too much". I see it. 

Aarati Asundi (11:32)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Jyoti Asundi (11:33)
This is turning into a nice little espionage story.

Aarati Asundi (11:36)
Yeah. Finally, when Mancuso did manage to publish his results, the ERDA did everything in their power to discredit him and any other American scientists who took his side.

Jyoti Asundi (11:48)
Very sad. Which year are we talking about now?

Aarati Asundi (11:48)
1970- mid 1970s

Jyoti Asundi (11:51)
In 1970s ok.

Aarati Asundi (11:54)
So meanwhile, a very similar cover-up is going on in Japan with the aftermath of the atomic bomb.

Jyoti Asundi (12:01)
Why? 

Aarati Asundi (12:02)
So not from the Japanese people, but again, from America. American propaganda was saying that there's no lasting radiation from the bombs and that everyone who was going to die from the radiation poisoning due to the bombs had already died. 

Jyoti Asundi (12:18)
I see.

Aarati Asundi (12:19)
So they were looking at basically who had died after the bombs had dropped and they found that of course when the bomb dropped there was a huge death toll. And then over the next five years there was a higher than normal death toll. But then after five years the death rate in Japan dropped back down to normal. And so they were pointing this out saying, "See it's all over. That was a really big scary bomb. It took a little while for the death toll to come back to normal, but after five years it's back. And so it's all over. There's no long lasting effects."

Jyoti Asundi (12:59)
Complete denial, no culpability on the long-term effects of radiation. 

Aarati Asundi (13:02)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Jyoti Asundi (13:04)
And the American media are pushing the story out.

Aarati Asundi (13:09)
Yes. Anyone who wants to make a bomb, even the UK and those, you know, all those European countries, anyone who wants to make a nuclear weapon is like, yeah, look, it was bad for five years, but then, you know, it all evened out. It's all normal. So we can go ahead and make these nuclear weapons without the fear that if we drop one of these things, it's going to affect the people of that country for generations. We don't have to worry about that. It's a bad bomb, absolutely. And so that's why we want to make one, because we want that threat of nuclear armament, so that we can dissuade others from attacking us. But if, in the event we do drop one of these, it will be really bad for five years max. And then everything will go back to normal. The country can rebuild.

Jyoti Asundi (13:55)
It's just a big stick. And the threat of this very big stick is going to keep everybody in line.

Aarati Asundi (14:02)
Yes.

Jyoti Asundi (14:03)
I'm sure went to Japan, you would get the real story out.

Aarati Asundi (14:06)
Yeah, so were scientists in Japan who were studying the effects and things like that. But again, they're really suppressing any data that really truly shows the horrors of what happened.

Jyoti Asundi (14:20)
But the Japanese scientists did know the real story. The people who doing the suppression of the news are the Western media. 

Aarati Asundi (14:28)
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Jyoti Asundi (14:29)
This again reminds of the author, Chimamanda Nagozi Adichie and her TED talk on this thing called One Story. She calls it the One Story. So she says, how do you disenfranchise an entire population? You do that by you telling their story in your way and you tell it over and over using multiple formats, using multiple outlets. And all of them say that same single story, which is your version of it. And so finally, because your voice is louder and you are not letting their voice come through, that becomes the reality that everybody believes about this other population.

Aarati Asundi (15:16)
Yeah that's exactly what was happening. People were discrediting Japanese scientists saying, what do they know? We are the big American doctors. We are the big British doctors. These Japanese scientists don't know anything. And so they were really pushing this narrative that it's fine. After five years, we're good.
But Alice said, quote, it's nonsense. It's rubbish. It would have been impossible to undergo the worst holocaust in recorded history, and pop back to normal in five years. It couldn't have happened. My every medical instinct said it couldn't have possibly happened, end quote.

Jyoti Asundi (15:56)
She really trusted her gut. She knew. Even from the beginning, she was able to take those intuitive leaps where she was able to see beyond what is presented and connect those dots, which is so crucial in social medicine.

Aarati Asundi (16:11)
Yeah, and so here she's really just like the other shoe is going to drop and she's just waiting for it to fall.

Jyoti Asundi (16:20)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (16:21)
In 1982, Alice published an article called The Theory of Silent Forces, where she put forward the idea that two forces were acting in opposition to each other to make everything appear normal on the surface. So on one hand, you have the survival of the fittest, the people who are strong and healthy are able to survive either long exposure to low levels of radiation...

Jyoti Asundi (16:48)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (16:48)
...or acute blasts from atomic bombs. 

Jyoti Asundi (16:51)
Yes

Aarati Asundi (16:52)
But either way, when the body is exposed to radiation, the immune system's white blood cells come in to defend it. And those cells get hit by the radiation themselves, causing mutations. And this increases the chance of the person developing cancer. And it can also leave them immunocompromised.

Jyoti Asundi (17:54)
Correct.

Aarati Asundi (17:15)
So when those people eventually die of either infections because they're immunocompromised or cancers that manifest years later, scientists are unwilling to attribute it to the radiation poisoning that happened so far in the past. 

Jyoti Asundi (17:30)
Decades ago, yes, it's the same thing our initial story on thalidomide it was the mother who was taking medicine to prevent nausea during pregnancy. The effects came out much later, months later in the baby. Nothing happened really to the mother, but it took a while to connect these dots, because it was happening months apart. It was happening two separate individuals basically. And so they were not able to connect the dots correctly.

Aarati Asundi (18:02)
Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (18:03)
And same thing is happening here, just because something is happening much later. It's a chronic, low level, systemic exposure that is happening, that is slowly, slowly, slowly corroding away at the human body until finally there is a collapse in one way or the other, either as an infection or as a cancer. And then it's like, well, I don't know what happened. They are old already. Their time came a little earlier than before because by this point they are maybe say in their 50s. And so instead of dying in their 70s or 80s, they're dying in It's like, tragic, so sad. that's it, move on. Yeah, got it.

Aarati Asundi (18:40)
Mm-hmm. And the added complication of cancer just having like... we don't know what causes cancer. So if somebody develops cancer, it's really hard to say it's because they were exposed to radiation and not one of the other many causes of cancer or just like random. Sometimes people randomly get cancer and it's genetic or it's environmental or it just so happens and so it's really hard to prove that.

Jyoti Asundi (19:08)
So the fact that there are so many sources hereditary sources, other environmental factors, the luck of the draw. And because of that, the real data gets occluded.

Aarati Asundi (19:19)
Yes. She said, "The reason people don't believe in radiation is it's out of sight, out of mind. Then 20 years later, somebody drops dead."

Jyoti Asundi (19:29)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (19:30)
So this paper that she wrote was not well received. People said that Alice was overcomplicating the matter. But Alice was like, this is a complex issue. The atomic bomb is unprecedented, and yet no one seems to be willing to accept that maybe, just maybe, there will be unprecedented medical effects. 

Jyoti Asundi (19:50)
Yes, absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (19:51)
And when I say no one, when I say like no one received her paper well, I really mean the ERDA. 

Jyoti Asundi (19:57)
It's always somebody who has a stake in the matter. They want to continue with generating stronger atomic bombs. They want to continue to use nuclear fission or fusion to generate energy. And this is the kind of thing.

Aarati Asundi (20:11)
Luckily though, the general public was on top of it, especially workers unions and independent scientists, including Nobel laureates like James Watts, Harold Urey, and George Wald.

Jyoti Asundi (20:25)
Oh! I'm surprised that the general public got onto this because the media is doing everything to suppress the information. How did it reach the public anyway?

Aarati Asundi (20:35)
You have to remember the time period that this is in. This is in like the 70s and there is this huge anti war hippie movement happening. People are waking up to the fact that the government doesn't always tell the truth. In 1972, there was the Watergate scandal.
And so people are like, "Hey, you know, the government isn't trustworthy. We don't like the Vietnam War. And we don't like this idea of nuclear armament. If everybody has a nuclear weapon, we're going to kill the Earth. Peace and love, peace and love." you know? And so there's this huge anti-government culture.

Jyoti Asundi (21:17)
...sentiment that has risen up.

Aarati Asundi (21:20)
Yes. Even Joseph Rotblat, who had been part of the Manhattan Project, joined this anti-nuclear side. And all these people are now saying the ERDA or the DOE cannot be solely in charge of all of this data. They can't keep this data behind locked doors. You need to let independent scientists have a crack at this data and look at it as well.

Jyoti Asundi (21:45)
So even Joseph Rotblat, who was crucial in the atomic bomb efforts, even he went on to the other side saying, yes, the long term systemic effects of the atomic bomb have to be considered.

Aarati Asundi (21:59)
Yes, that you need to look at it. You can't just ignore the data. And meanwhile, the government is trying all sorts of tricks to silence these scientists. They're withholding funding for research. They're trying to discredit their work or sometimes even paint them as spies or traitors for other countries.

Jyoti Asundi (22:18)
Or like in Alice's case, she's a dingbat, she's eccentric, she's crazy, yeah.

Aarati Asundi (22:25)
But the general public is not having it. There's marches and rallies, and Alice is right in the thick of it. 

Jyoti Asundi (22:32)
Excellent.

Aarati Asundi (22:32)
She's at these activist rallies. She's meeting with other scientists who had gathered their own data on radioactive pollution. And since she was retired, she felt it even more strongly that this was her duty, because unlike other scientists, she had no job or title to lose.

Jyoti Asundi (22:48)
Yeah, she has no skin... She has all the reason to get it right. Get this done correctly.

Aarati Asundi (22:55)
Yeah. Back in Britain too, she went to numerous public hearings where nuclear facilities were being proposed to be built to give her testimony on how these facilities could affect the people and environment around them. And she was called as an expert in court cases where the families of workers were suing these facilities for unsafe practices.
Gayle Greene, the author of the biography, has entire chapters on these hearings and many legal cases that Alice and George testified in in her book, both in America and in the UK. And so many of these cases are just really heartbreaking to read about. There was one case that really stuck with me, and it was of a young janitor named Don Gable, who got a job at the Rocky Flatts nuclear weapon facility in Denver, Colorado. And while he's working there, he saw an advertisement for a job that involved working with radioactive materials. And it would give him, "hot pay", which was $0.10 more per hour as compensation for working with radioactive material.

Jyoti Asundi (24:05)
That's like less than a dollar a day. Even if you work 10 hours, you would make at the most $1 per day extra.

Aarati Asundi (24:13)
Mm-hmmm. Yep. And he took that job and next thing you know, he had died of brain cancer at 31 years old.

Jyoti Asundi (24:21)
Tragic. 

Aarati Asundi (24:22)
It turns out that at his job, there was a pipe right next to his head every day that had radioactive gas in it. And when he asked his boss about it, the boss said, "Don't worry about your head. Radioactivity only affects your body."

Jyoti Asundi (24:37)
The head is not part of the body, is it? I see. I see. That's a really cool logic. Okay. I see.

Aarati Asundi (24:42)
Yeah. Yes. Mysteriously, after his death, his widow signed a release for his brain to be tested, and somehow, magically, the DOE managed to lose the brain.

Jyoti Asundi (24:54)
Ah! 

Aarati Asundi (24:54)
Uh-huh. However, the widow's lawyers and Alice did manage to get their hands on the data from the rest of his body. And it turns out his organs contained 5,000 times the amount of plutonium that the average person has.

Jyoti Asundi (25:10)
5000 times more plutonium. 

Aarati Asundi (25:13)
Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (25:14)
I am so sad for that young man who again in a very naive and trusting way believed what he was told because why would the government cheat him? It's the government of my country, it's my country. Incredibly devious.

Aarati Asundi (25:32)
And then after his death, you know, these government entities that have very deep pockets are paying these big lawyers to say that radiation at these facilities was safe and, you know, getting scientists on their side, funding research to say that radiation is safe. 

Jyoti Asundi (25:48)
This story book happens over and over and we still don't learn. This happened with tobacco. Exactly same. It's the same playbook. They have the deep pockets. They are the Goliath and they crush the Davids with their money and their ability to buy people who will present lies as truth.

Aarati Asundi (26:06)
Yeah. And these workers' families don't have anything. A lot of times they've lost their main breadwinner, you know? Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (26:12)
Yes, they don't have the resources to go into this long drawn legal battle.

Aarati Asundi (26:19)
And so Alice is meeting up with these lawyers and helping and fighting for them. And she knows what dire straits these families are in. And so she's asking for very little monetary compensation. One lawyer that she worked with, Bruce Daboski, said, "Her fee was ridiculously low. She charged me $300 for all of her work on Krumback," which was one of his other cases, "where someone of her skills could have been charging $300 an hour."

Jyoti Asundi (26:51)
She truly was a crusader for social justice. She put her money where her mouth is. She believed in it and she went after it. I never tire of saying this, soldiers come in different shapes and forms. And she should have been honored with a medal for her heroism as a true for the world.

Aarati Asundi (27:09)
Yeah, she just kept on going. Just incredible. Then in March 1979, we have the Three Mile Island disaster. Mechanical failures as well as human operator errors caused radioactive gases to escape and spread for several days before the accident could be contained. It was impossible to cover up and in 1981, a citizens group won a class action lawsuit against Three Mile Island facility for $25 million.

Jyoti Asundi (27:30)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (27:41)
$2 million of that was used to set up a grant to study the effects of background radiation on the population from the accident. And Alice and George were selected be part of that study. Still, the DOE did everything they could to stall the investigation. They refused to release the information about the workers at Three Mile Island saying it would violate the Federal Privacy Act or that they thought that the data would be too complicated for outsiders to understand.

Jyoti Asundi (28:09)
Insult upon injury.

Aarati Asundi (28:11)
Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (28:11)
Not only are you the truth, on top of that you are saying you are too simple minded to understand the truth. 

Aarati Asundi (28:17)
Yes, too complex for your little mind to understand.

Jyoti Asundi (28:18)
It's too complex yeah. Don't worry your pretty little head about it

Aarati Asundi (28:24)
They held out for years from 1982 to 1990 until finally the DOE was forced to cave in under the pressure of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and congressional legislation that would have forced the DOE to hand over the information to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jyoti Asundi (28:42)
Eight years of fighting to hide the truth and it was like no we know the truth exists you better cough it up

Aarati Asundi (28:49)
And in the meantime, all these other nuclear sites all over the place are having quote unquote little accidents and contamination issues. So nothing as big as Three Mile Island. That's like the big one we hear about. And then we also hear in 1986, the Chernobyl accident happened. So these are like really big meltdowns that have happened. But smaller scale accidents are happening all the time at all these nuclear facilities all over the place. And Alice is like running around defending the workers in all of these cases.

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Aarati Asundi (29:29)
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Aarati Asundi (30:16)
By this time, Alice is now 84 years old.

Jyoti Asundi (30:20)
And still going strong.

Aarati Asundi (30:22)
Yes, and she has earned this reputation of being a feisty, white-haired old woman who's willing to stand up to the big bad DOE.

Jyoti Asundi (30:30)
Yeah, and so obviously if she's got that kind of a reputation, she's somehow managed to kick off dingbat, mad hatter... 

Aarati Asundi (30:38)
Well, they're still trying, know, her naysayers will still try, but...

Jyoti Asundi (30:41)
They're trying, but nobody's buying into that anymore. She's got credibility on her own rights now.

Aarati Asundi (30:47)
Yes. In 1992, the New York Times published an article about Alice and George's study of the Three Mile Island disaster. They reported that Alice and George had found that 200 of the workers have lost or will lose years of their lives because of radiation induced cancer. Alice and George published these results in 1993 with a follow-up study that took into account more data in 1995.
But still, the fact, again, that cancer effects pop up so many years later and decades after the exposure, and the fact that cancer has so many causes makes it really hard to prove that the cancer is, in fact, being caused by the radiation. And it's not a correlation. So causation is really hard to prove. ⁓

Jyoti Asundi (31:36)
Yes, correct, correct.

Aarati Asundi (31:38)
And Alice continues to struggle against that. And then when you add in the fact that there are so many other factors, like the fact that wealthier people and healthier people who have better access to health care are stronger overall and more likely to develop cancer due to radiation just because they live long enough to get it rather than people who poorer and have less access to health care and may die from something else before they live long enough to actually develop cancer. That's like another, complex, you know, wrench thrown into this data. It's not straightforward at all.

Jyoti Asundi (32:14)
These studies are complex enough, but then one more factor that generates more heterogeneity in the data.

Aarati Asundi (32:20)
Yeah. And so because of this, people are still finding it very easy to dismiss Alice's claims this is what's happening. And they're continuing to cling to this idea that low enough levels of radiation are safe. But that threshold of what is low enough keeps changing. And as new data continues to come out, the threshold for what's safe keeps getting bumped lower and lower.

Jyoti Asundi (32:43)
Lower and lower. Yes, right.

Aarati Asundi (32:46)
In the words of Morris Greenberg, a UK Health and Safety Commission officer, "There is something disturbing about the repeated assurances 'This time, folks, we have got it right.' when on each occasion a previous understatement of the hazard is revealed."

Jyoti Asundi (33:02)
Yes because you're decimating the trust that people feel in the governments and in these large agencies. When you state with great authority and conviction that this is the lowest limit, this is the lowest limit, and every time you're proved wrong, how many times can you get a pass like that?

Aarati Asundi (33:22)
But every time you keep moving closer and closer to what Alice is saying, that there is.. zero. Zero is what's safe. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (33:28)
Yes and every time you kept telling us not to believe that crazy old bat. And here you are slowly, slowly inching your way towards where she was recommending decades ago.

Aarati Asundi (33:41)
So Alice also had a favorite saying about truth. She said, "Truth is the daughter of time." And she thinks that we still haven't had really enough time to see all of the effects that radiation can have, especially through generations. We're only just really starting to understand that radiation can cause cancer or health effects in a person decades later. But what about their children or their children's children?

Jyoti Asundi (34:06)
I've heard a saying similar to this where you say that a child is only as healthy as his grandmother was.

Aarati Asundi (34:14)
Yeah, that's crazy. It's crazy. All the things we don't know that require these long, long studies. We were talking a little bit about this Kiara who was the interview that we and the epigenetics of stress and how stress could affect your children and your grandchildren. And how that needs to be studied. We don't know, but we're not going to know for a long time because those kinds of studies are going to take a hundred years to complete.

Jyoti Asundi (34:44)
And I'm also very shocked that all this is happening like 1995, mid 1990s. 

Aarati Asundi (34:51)
Mm-hmm.

Jyoti Asundi (34:51)
That's so recent. The only thing I can be thankful for is I remember when I first working in the USA in early 1990s, I did have to work with radiation. But...

Aarati Asundi (35:03)
Oh really?

Jyoti Asundi (35:04)
Yes I'm going to date myself when I say all this, but the early northern blots for to look at RNA, they required P32 and then S35 was used for looking at DNA.

Aarati Asundi (35:16)
Oh! I feel like I remember learning that in textbooks, but then I never actually had to do it.

Jyoti Asundi (35:21)
Because you are much younger. But anyway, I'm an old timer who used radiation to look at DNA RNA and things like that. But I do feel very thankful that my employer at that time was indeed very cognizant of the dangers of radioactivity. And for the very brief amount of time that I did a couple of small experiments when I was pregnant with your brother, they had me wear the fetal monitor, my other monitor, and then slowly job was taken away from me and I was assigned to other tasks while some other person did radioactive experiments. So I'm very thankful for that.

Aarati Asundi (36:02)
Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (36:03)
Also there were a couple of other scientists in that facility who poo-poohed this whole radiation and "Haha this is all big hooha about nothing" kind of thing, but they were treated like mavericks. They were treated like the rebels. So the wacky and

Aarati Asundi (36:18)
Yeah. So it was flipping. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (36:21)
...mad hatter thing was flipping already. Early 1990s. I'm thankful about that.

Aarati Asundi (36:26)
Yes. She did her part for sure in fighting against it, and I think people who didn't have a stake in nuclear armament and nuclear power, they did believe her. And they were no, what she says makes a lot of sense. 

Jyoti Asundi (36:42)
It makes a lot of sense.

Aarati Asundi (36:42)
And even if she's wrong, better safe than sorry, why would you want to? Why would you want to take the risk? Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (36:45)
Absolutely. Why would you want to get into it? Yes.

Aarati Asundi (36:49)
Just don't use it. Just stay away from it if you can.

Jyoti Asundi (36:51)
Give it some time. Do the experiment right. Get the data out. Then let's decide. And if it turns out to be simple and were overthinking it, we can easily go back.

Aarati Asundi (37:02)
Yes. What's the harm? In 1985, Alice was made a fellow of the Royal College of Social Medicine and Public Health. And in 1986, she received the Right Livelihood Award, which I haven't heard of, but apparently it's often called the Alternative Nobel Prize. 

Jyoti Asundi (37:22)
Oh wow.

Aarati Asundi (37:23)
Yeah, it's given to people who have worked in environmental protection, human rights, sustainable development, health, education, or peace. And I was reading up a little about it. Apparently, the founder of the Right Livelihood Award had actually gone and tried to make these kinds of awards part of the Nobel Prize. They had lobbied to make environmental protection and human rights categories, but it didn't work out. And so they just started their own prize instead.

Jyoti Asundi (37:55)
I see. So she's now being recognized for her work.

Aarati Asundi (38:00)
Mm-hmm. At the equivalent of a Nobel Prize, practically. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (38:02)
Nobel Prize. Oh Oxford must be grinding its teeth at this point. It's like, wait, maverick who we used to shut up in dusty room down there in the basement. She's actually right all along.

Aarati Asundi (38:14)
Yeah, you would hope at some point they woke up and were like, was a big mistake on our part.

Jyoti Asundi (38:20)
Big mistake, big missed opportunity. All of this glory could have gone to them also. So again, it's the same thing. Truth shall prevail.

Aarati Asundi (38:28)
Yeah. In 1996, Birmingham University made her by this time she almost 90 years old. 

Jyoti Asundi (38:37)
Good for her! 

Aarati Asundi (38:38)
Yeah. 

Jyoti Asundi (38:39)
Being appointed professor at the age of 90, that is wonderful. She must be such feisty old lady at this point, lots of energy and obviously great potential for additional work to be done.

Aarati Asundi (38:54)
I do feel a bit sorry for her though that she never really got the recognition. Like it came so late. Like, can you imagine fighting for 90 years of your life? You know, it's practically your entire life. You're fighting and fighting and fighting. And then finally just at the very end you get some recognition for all the work that you did, whereas your male colleagues are getting it in their 30s and 40s, you know, and you're just constantly being shoved aside. It takes such a strong person to stick it out for that long and, you know, never ever give up hope that what you're doing is the correct thing.

Jyoti Asundi (39:33)
Yes, the title of her biography was The Woman Who Knew Too Much, but if she ever wrote an autobiography, it would be titled I Told You So.

Aarati Asundi (39:44)
Yes. Yes. Yeah. She had so much skill. She had so much knowledge and she never really got the recognition or the compensation that she should have for someone with that amount of skill.

Jyoti Asundi (39:59)
Absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (40:00)
She also was aware of that. You know, she had siblings, like I said, who also went into the medical field. And they became very highly successful physicians who were paid a lot. So she knew that she could have taken that path. She could have gone that way. But she said, "I have seen my brothers become bored with their subject and eventually give it up. One took to farming and another took to building boats. Whereas I've had continued interest, I count myself very lucky."

Jyoti Asundi (40:32)
That is a beautiful sentiment. And in fact, I was just going to say success has many phases. Monetary success is not the only form of success. True success is the peace and contentment in your heart. It reminds me of that story of that fisherman who was enjoying his life on his boat and some investor tells him, you know, you could make so much more money if you did this, if you invested in a bigger boat, in a bigger crew, you could get more fish for your time. In the same amount of time, you would be able to harvest more fish from the sea, sell it for more money. And so the fisherman keeps asking, OK, then what? And then what? And then what would I do? And so then ultimately, the investor tells him, well, then at the end of it, you would have so much money that you could retire and you could do whatever you wanted, like you could just relax on your boat and go fishing anytime you wanted. And he's like, that's exactly what I'm doing right now. Why would I want to go through your torturous route to get to the same point where I am? 

Aarati Asundi (41:37)
Yeah!

Jyoti Asundi (41:38)
So really, I think stories multipurpose, actually. They're not just the fact that women do end up struggling a lot more to gain the recognition than their male counterparts get earlier and with more ease. But also what exactly is success? Let us look at that and define that more clearly. And the enrichment of the soul is something to be thought of also.

Aarati Asundi (42:05)
Yeah, and just the knowledge that you're doing the right thing and that what you're doing is meaningful, you know.

Jyoti Asundi (42:11)
Yeah, that satisfaction of having served for social justice, that cannot be taken away.

Aarati Asundi (42:18)
Yeah, the fact that she was using all of her knowledge and skill to fight for people who really needed it,

Jyoti Asundi (42:23)
You always gain more happiness when you give and she gave, she gave everything in herself, her energy, her spirit, her scientific skills. Everything was put to the greatest that can admire and look up to.

Aarati Asundi (42:38)
And that actually was her only regret when she was asked... that she never had the opportunity to teach and pass on her knowledge. She found that as she got older and she was looking at the field of epidemiology, she found that it had become more the field of biostatistics and data analysts and that young physicians were very unlikely to choose epidemiology as a career because it was just seen as like a lot of data mining and analysis.

Jyoti Asundi (43:07)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (42:08)
But she, on the other hand had been drawn to it as a physician because she found it to be like a detective story again, like we were saying, like this interesting puzzle that you need to solve the culprit is, who's causing this, you know? And the field without her was being taught like, you need to follow these rules when you look at the data, you need to limit your focus, ask a very specific question, don't look at 10 different things, look at the one thing, but she was always the opposite. She was like, the messier the data, the better, because that's when you find real discoveries. That's when you really find the truth. 
And in fact, she says, part of the reason that she in that initial study, she found that X-rays were leading to birth defects. Part of the reason she found that was because she told her interviewers when they went to talk to the mothers to just let the mother talk. And if the mother got off topic and wasn't sticking exactly to the questionnaire that they had set forth, that was fine. Just let the mom talk about what she remembered about her pregnancy, about the birth and everything, and maybe they would bring up something that wasn't on the questionnaire. And in that case, they should maybe think about amending the questionnaire. So..

Jyoti Asundi (44:26)
Absolutely, yes.

Aarati Asundi (44:26)
Don't stick so tightly to the questionnaire, because then you might miss something that you didn't think about that the mother remembers. So...

Jyoti Asundi (44:34)
Yeah, it's like missing the forest for the trees.

Aarati Asundi (44:37)
Yeah. And so she's like, you know, that complexity, looking at the big picture, that's what gives you the true knowledge that would give you the true insight. And the way epidemiology was being taught was like, no, just focus on the data that you have, look very narrowly, look at the statistics and see what's... 

Jyoti Asundi (44:59)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (45:00)
And she's like, yeah, I would have been bored with that too, if that's how it was taught to me, I would have probably not gone into it either. 

Jyoti Asundi (45:04)
Correct. It's not like a wonderful detective story anymore.

Aarati Asundi (45:08)
Yeah. And so she does regret that, you know, she didn't have a hand in bringing up the field of epidemiology and teaching it to new students. Getting them excited. So it was like, yeah, the one thing she regrets is that she couldn't give more of herself to the next generation.

Jyoti Asundi (45:25)
Yes, that shows you the caliber of person she is. A true warrior for social justice.

Aarati Asundi (45:32)
So we've come to the end of her life. Alice died on June 23rd, 2002 at the age of 95 in Oxford, England.

Jyoti Asundi (45:42)
Good long, good long life.

Aarati Asundi (45:44)
And she was, like we said, working and presenting her ideas at conferences well into her 90s. And I wanted to end with an anecdote from one of her conferences that she went to. She had later in life gotten interested in SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. And she was presenting some of her ideas about it, but she knew that she was too old at this point to take on the project. But she was encouraging that someone in the audience, you know, should take her ideas and run with it.

Jyoti Asundi (46:15)
Please pick up this baton.

Aarati Asundi (46:16)
Yeah. And she was like telling the audience, like someone in here could probably get a really good grant if they wanted pursue these ideas. And an audience member said, "Oh! We're getting these ideas free of charge from you." And she responded, "We give all our ideas free of charge. We put these ideas on the table for others to develop. The most I can do is throw a pebble in the pool and create circles and leave somebody else to get on with the work."

Jyoti Asundi (46:46)
Beautiful, beautiful. It's no hoarding of ideas, no wanting a cut in it. You know, this reminds me of another great lady that... The Mother of Immunology. Ummm...

Aarati Asundi (47:00)
Mm, Brigitte Askonas.

Jyoti Asundi (47:03)
Brigitte Askonas. She was the mother of immunology and she did the same thing.

Aarati Asundi (47:07)
Yeah we did her episode... We did her in episode... I forget what episode, but we did her.

Jyoti Asundi (47:11)
Yeah, and this reminds me of her also, where she mentored so many people. They all said that they wouldn't have reached these great conclusions in immunology without her guidance. And yet she was like, no, no, no, I just threw the stone. 

Aarati Asundi (47:25)
No, it's all you. It's all you. 

Jyoti Asundi (47:27)
It's all you, it's all you. These are great women look up to.

Aarati Asundi (47:32)
And I think that's partly why a lot of times their names get lost in science because they don't go after the power and the prestige sometimes, you know, so...

Jyoti Asundi (47:41)
Yes, they are so focused on the greater good that they are completely divorced from the idea of personal gain out of something that is so important to the world.

Aarati Asundi (47:52)
Yeah. So that's the story of Alice Mary Stewart. I hope you enjoyed it. It was a long one...

Jyoti Asundi (47:59)
It was a beautiful story.

Jyoti Asundi (47:59)
...but she was an incredible woman.

Jyoti Asundi (48:02)
A very fitting story for March, Women's History Month. I this brings awareness, it sheds a bit of light on the inequalities and the fights that a woman has to face the additional amount of work that she has to do to get the same recognition the additional amount of time that she has to wait to get the same recognition and hoping for some kind of Equal treatment at some point in my lifetime. Maybe? Let's see.

Aarati Asundi (48:30)
Yeah, that would be nice. Every decade that goes by, it's getting a little bit better.

Jyoti Asundi (48:36)
Yes, at least hoping we women can be advocates for each other each other. At least that's the least we can do. 

Aarati Asundi (48:44)
Yep.

Jyoti Asundi (48:45)
This was a beautiful story. I really enjoyed it.

Aarati Asundi (48:48)
I'm glad you did. I had a feeling you would.

Jyoti Asundi (48:51)
Yes, absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (48:53)
Thanks for listening. If you have a suggestion for a story we should cover or thoughts you want to share about an episode, reach out to us at smartteapodcast.com. You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @smartteapodcast and listen to us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a rating or comment. It helps us grow. New episodes are released every other Wednesday. See you next time.