‘These are murmurs by a housewife with a child. I speak as a housewife and a mother’, a Japanese woman prefaced the Kashiwa Mom's Radiation Newsletter that challenged official radiation measurements after the Fukushima disaster (Nozomi Mizushima, ‘Into our own hands’, Voices from Japan, English Edition of Women's Asia, 26 (2012), pp. 33–5, 33). Distrusting official measurements, the mother from Kashiwa city purchased her own measuring equipment to control radiation in kindergartens, nurseries and primary schools in Kashiwa City. Following the Fukushima accident in 2011, more Japanese mothers utilized a wide array of new media, produced their own scientific data, and called for public participation in defining radiation decontamination standards.

There is something unique in associating a mother's embodied knowledge with scientific expertise arguing that indeed non-experts and citizens have been excluded from vital decision-making processes and questioning the validity of scientific knowledge on radiation risks. In the many ways gender and science are intertwined, this one caught my attention in The Woman Who Knew Too Much. Gayle Greene brings front and centre the story of Alice Stewart, a pioneer British epidemiologist, who more than half a century earlier, had trusted the same association and approached mothers as her primary source of information in linking X-ray pelvimetry, the use of radiology during pregnancy, with leukemia in children. In 1956 Stewart was the first to suggest that a single prenatal diagnostic X-ray would double a child's risk of developing cancer. When epidemiologists were mainly based on scientific statistical data, Stewart suggested, ‘let's go to the mothers. They might have a memory of something prenatal that the doctors might have forgotten’ (p. 79). And certainly they did. Working closely with statistician David Hewitt and physician Josephine Webb, Stewart embarked on a nationwide exercise, interviewing mothers of children who had died of different forms of cancer. Her retrospective method – beginning from the effect and then looking back – was not only unique, as she focused on women's experiences, but it was also unpopular among the new school of epidemiologists who favoured prospective studies – enrolling the sample of individuals, documenting current risks, and following individuals into the future. Eventually, the group's preliminary report was published in The Lancet in 1956, arguing for the direct correlation between prenatal X-ray testing and children's cancer.

In the midst of the Cold War, with nuclear testing at its height and the anti-nuclear movement in its infancy, Stewart's warnings about radiation effects divided the related scientific communities and sparked an aggressive response from the most powerful epidemiologist in the country, Richard Doll. Based on the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission's studies, Doll and his equally influential colleagues William Court-Brown, secretary of Britain's Medical Research Council committee on radiation hazards, and Bradford Hill, Doll's mentor in his earlier studies of the association between lung cancer and smoking, discredited Stewart in both the scientific and popular press, thus weakening her scientific standing and excluding her from major networks and funding opportunities. She retired from Oxford in 1974 having had a bitter taste of the all-male educational and research environment and what seemed to be an enemy on the face of Doll. ‘Doll made it clear that I wouldn't be welcomed … I had no supporters’, Stewart admitted to Greene. ‘I was neither fish nor flesh nor fowl. And I was a woman’ (p. 99).

But what at the age of sixty-eight seemed to be the end of Stewart's career turned out to be the beginning of another extraordinary study. Invited by Thomas Mancuso from the US Atomic Energy Commission, who studied the effects of low-level radiation among workers in the nuclear energy industry, Stewart embarked on a study of the Hanford nuclear weapons complex and the effects of low-level radiation on its workers. It was not long after, based on the Hanford data, that Stewart undermined the well-accepted assumption that there is a threshold beneath which radiation exposure incurred no risk. She was indeed one of the very few, along with Mancuso and her brilliant statistician George Kneale, who disputed the radiation standards of the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP), arguing basically that ‘people are far more sensitive to radiation-induced cancer than anyone had thought – as much as twenty times more sensitive’ (p. 122). Being in direct conflict with the nuclear industry and AEC's interests, Stewart had to flee the US right after the publication of her study while Mancuso was removed from the Hanford study and discredited by the nuclear establishment. The Energy Research and Development Administration, formerly the AEC, tried hard, but in vain, to seize Mancuso's data and barred the group's access to further research files. According to Greene, eventually in 1976 the ICRP acknowledged that all exposures carry a degree of risk, partly because of the impact of Stewart's study (p. 144).

The Woman Who Knew Too Much, first published in 1999 and republished in 2017, is Alice Stewart's first major biography told almost exclusively through her voice. Greene was fortunate to conduct a series of interviews with Stewart in the course of a few years. She felt for her as Stewart shared tragic family stories along with her experiences from her unconventional scientific career. Greene indeed gives life to one of the forgotten women in science, shedding light on Alice Stewart the epidemiologist, the persistent researcher, the anti-nuclear advocate, the exceptional colleague. As author and literary critic, Greene adopts a literary style and her story reads often as Stewart's personal and unfiltered account of the politics of radiation risks, one of the most stumbling issues of the twentieth century. I read The Woman Who Knew Too Much not as a historical biography but as a literary memoir, a valuable source for the historian who would wish to dig into archives or the press of the time in order to place Stewart's claims in their historical context. As such The Woman Who Knew Too Much is a valuable contribution to the history of radiation protection and a prized source for the gender analysis of this history.