Molly Biscar (17:40)
Right. So it makes sense, based on Alice's past work and what she just went through at this factory, that that's what she would decide she's going to go into now. Now, she didn't have any formal training in epidemiology. There was none at the time. But she was running, at that point, a small department at Oxford as part of the social medicine program. And in running this department, she needed funding to try to do some epidemiology studies. And this was a big deal for a woman to be running a department at Oxford. She was finally kind of feeling like she was being respected in her field. And so she needed this funding. She needed the funding to prove to Oxford, to the world, that women can do this job. And that is where these rising rates of childhood cancer came in. They realized that nobody had studied this childhood cancer issue before. Even though it was on the rise, childhood cancer was still rare. And so nobody had studied it. And she says later in interviews that it sounds rather crude that she chose this cause because she needed funding for her department. But that was just the truth. That's what she needed. She needed funding to make the department work. And this was a cause she thought could get funding. Ironically enough, it did not get funding. So she goes to a grant committee to pitch them this study, and they all say no. And like I mentioned at the time, everyone was wondering what was happening with this childhood cancer thing. So the fact that she didn't get the money, I don't know what the men in that room are thinking, but it feels like sexism to me. Everyone is running around England trying to figure out why all these kids are getting cancer. Finally, this is the woman from the job. She's here. She's going to do the damn thing. And no, we're not going to give her the money. I don't know, it's. It's smelling a little fishy to me. But as she's leaving this committee meeting, one of the members of the committee comes up to her and says, I have a thousand pounds from a different fund and it's not going anywhere. If we don't use it, we're going to lose it. So we could give you this £thousand pounds. And £1,000 was not enough to do what she needed to do, but she took it and she decided she was going to make it work. So her and her department got to work on the study and they picked 300 children who had died of childhood cancer and then 300 children who had died of other causes as a control group and surveyed all 600 of those mothers. Now, because £1,000 was not enough to fund her traveling to do all these interviews and finding all these mothers and talking to them, she actually partnered with the NHS, the UK's public health system, which was just, just recently founded, and worked with them to do these interviews through the doctors of the NHS system. Since they had the records and they knew who the mother's doctors were, this really cut down the costs of these surveys. And people questioned her at the time that interviewing mothers was not the right way to go, that the moms would not know enough to give adequate information. But Dr. Stewart pushed back against that. She knew that mothers would have the information they needed for these surveys, and she pushed forward. So the surveys start to come back, and it is a surprise to everyone that is involved in this study how quickly a glaringly obvious answer comes back to what is causing this childhood cancer. And you might think, that's great, that's fantastic. They figured it out. But as soon as the surveys came in, Dr. Stewart knew there was going to be pushback, that this was not going to go over well. And she knew that because the thing that was causing childhood cancer was all the rage at the time. It was being used in medical settings everywhere, but it also was being used outside of medical settings. It was being used in shoe stores to fit people with the right shoes. It was being used as a hair removal technique. It was being used for anti aging, it was even being used at amusement parks as like a novelty. So this thing is everywhere. And now Dr. Stewart knows that she's going to have to be the one to blow the whistle and let the world know that this fun new toy we thought was safe and helpful is actually causing cancer. And that thing was the X ray. And what Dr. Stewart found in this survey was that the mothers of the children who died with cancer were X rayed twice as much as the control group mothers. And at the time, more and more women were getting X rays while pregnant because doctors were using these X rays to look at the mother's pelvis and make sure that they didn't have any issues that could cause fatality in labor. So it was all for really good reason. But what we didn't understand at the time was the effect of radiation, even really, really small amounts of radiation. At the time, it was widely recognized that X ray machines were 100% safe. And even though they were giving off radiation, it was such a small amount, it didn't really matter. And so in 1956, she published her findings in the Lancet, which is a scientific journal. And one thing to note is that in 1956, the Lancet had different rules for publishing than they have now. Now, to publish in the Lancet, everything has to be very peer reviewed. It takes a long time. But in 1956, you could publish more quickly based on just the editor's judgment of the findings. So she published her findings in the Lancet, and she also went and presented her findings to a panel. Have you ever presented a case like this to a panel before?
