Critical Responses
Alice Stewart, the inspiration for Sternglass' work on radiation health effects, firmly repudiated it, saying of an encounter with him in 1969:
- Sternglass had been tremendously excited about our findings But he had exaggerated what we'd said, grossly exaggerated, and we comment on this in the New Scientist. He's said that we'd shown that fetal x-rays had doubled the infant mortality rate, when all we'd said was you'd doubled the chance of a child's dying from cancer. Well, the difference is that one is measured in thousands and the other in single figures Sternglass was a supporter of our work, but he had got our figures very wrong, and we couldn't have our statistics misused like that.
A review in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Sternglass's 1972 Low-Level Radiation lauded the author for bringing the risks (and the nuclear industry's reluctance to discuss them openly) to public attention, with a relatively "calm presentation" compared to other recent titles. However, the reviewers sided more with Stewart on methodology, saying that it was
- ... over-confident in its manner of reaching conclusions. his method is to to amass many instances of events under various conditions, necessarily uncontrolled, that seem to corroborate the same trend. it seems likely that he has exercised some selectivity, emphasizing favorable cases over those showing no distinct trend. his work should be but a beginning.
Read more about this topic: Ernest J. Sternglass
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