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NUCLEAR GUARDIANSHIP FORUM, On The Responsible Care of Radioactive Materials,
Issue # 1, Spring 1992, p. 6.

HONORNING A COURAGEOUS SCIENTIST

Dr. Alice M. Stewart is a British medical doctor and a distinguished epidemilogist, who for 27 years conducted scientific research in social medicine at Oxford University. Her work first established the connection between childhood leukemia and fetal X-rays. She has continued to look at the effects of low-level radiation on the health of children and adults.
ALICE STEWART
    Using the language of science

    she showed us the steep curve

    mysterious on the graph

    pointing to casualties of a certain kind.

    Only over time, did the idea

    come to her, hidden

    under this curve early deaths

    of another kind produced a different

    invisible curve

    making it one long slope

    of dying.

    All this proceeded in

    a now to be calculated way

    after the first explosion

    began the chain of events,

    diminishments, loss,

    collapses, cancers

    the disappearance of

    family, friends.

    Genetics? she said

    The children?

    The ones born later.

    Yes, but that

    is another study.

    Perhaps next time,

    another lecture.

    The consequences

    grim as they are

    are sterling clear.

    There to see in the numbers.

    One might easily

    infer

    the stories, the

    telling

    blank spaces.

    Susan Griffin






Susan Griffin is the author of Pornography and Silence, Woman and Nature, Rape, the Politics of Consciousness, and the Emmy Award Winning play, "Voices". Her book of poetry Unremembered Country won the prestigious California Commonwealth's Clube's Silver Medal. Her recent play "Thicket" premiered in May of 1992 in San Francisco. A Chorus of Stones, The Private Life of War, was published by Doubleday and Company October, 1992.

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