| Ernest Joachim Sternglass | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 24, 1923 Berlin |
| Nationality | German, Jewish, American |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Naval Ordnance Laboratory Westinghouse Research Laboratories Radiation and Public Health Project |
Ernest J. Sternglass (born 24 September 1923, Berlin) is an emeritus professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He is an American physicist and author, best known for his controversial research on the health risks of low-level radiation from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and from nuclear power plants.
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Both of Sternglass' parents were Jewish physicians. The Sternglass family left Germany in 1938, when Ernest was fourteen. He completed high school at the age of sixteen, then entered Cornell, registering for an engineering program. His family's financial troubles forced him to leave school for a year; by the time he returned to Cornell, the US had entered World War II. Sternglass volunteered for the navy. He was about to ship out when the atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima.
After the war Sternglass married. In Washington, D.C. he worked as a civilian employee at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory which researched military weapons. Sternglass began studying night vision devices, which led him to work with radiation. In 1947, his first son was born, and he got a chance to meet Albert Einstein.
From 1952 to 1967 Sternglass worked at the Westinghouse Research Laboratory. Early in his time at Westinghouse, he proposed a technology for image intensification.[1] He also published a formula for interplanetary dust charging[2] that is still extensively used.[3] All his work there involved nuclear instrumentation. At first he studied fluoroscopy, which "exposes an individual to a considerable dose of radiation." Then he worked on a new kind of television tube for satellites. Eventually he was put in charge of the Lunar Station program at Westinghouse.[4] During his time at Westinghouse, he worked on a wide range of projects, including applying magnetohydrodynamics to gas-cooled reactor systems, and helping to develop the video cameras used in Project Apollo.[5]
Sternglass is Emeritus Professor of Radiological Physics in the Department of Radiology, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Sternglass is Director, Cofounder, and Chief Technical Officer of the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP).
In the early 1960s Sternglass became aware of the work of Alice Stewart. Stewart was head of the Department of Preventive Medicine of Oxford University, responsible for a pioneering study on the effects of low-level radiation in England. Stewart had discovered that a small amount of radiation to an unborn child could double the child's chances for leukemia and cancer.
In the 1960s, Sternglass studied the effect of nuclear fallout on infants and children. He claimed not only an increase in leukemia and cancer, but a significant increase in infant mortality. In 1963 he published the paper "Cancer: Relation of Prenatal Radiation to Development of the Disease in Childhood" in the journal Science.[6]
In 1963, Sternglass testified before the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy regarding the level of strontium-90 found in children as part of the Baby Tooth Survey. The result of bomb-test fallout, strontium-90 was associated with increased childhood leukemia. His studies played a role in the Partial Test Ban Treaty signed by President John F. Kennedy.
In 1969, Sternglass reached the conclusion that 400,000 infants had died because of medical problems caused by fallout—-chiefly lowered resistance to disease and reductions in birth weight.[7] In an article in Esquire, he claimed that the fallout from the nuclear explosions of an ABM system would kill all children in the U.S.[8] (This claim was distorted by Dixy Lee Ray in 1989, asserting that Sternglass had said this of all nuclear weapons testing, in an op-ed in which she also dismissed anthropogenic global warming as "the current scare".[9]) Freeman Dyson, taking up the debate over ABM systems in the pages of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, disagree with Sternglass, though he admitted
In 1979, Sternglass began extending his analyses of fallout effects to embrace behavioral disorders, including academic deficits seen in high school students.[11] Later he was to blame radioactivity for higher crime rates and higher AIDS mortality.[12]
Alice Stewart, the inspiration for Sternglass' work on radiation health effects, firmly repudiated it, saying of an encounter with him in 1969:
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
In April 1979, Sternglass was invited to testify to Congressional hearings on the Three Mile Island accident. Two days later, when the hearings were moved from the House to the Senate, he was told his testimony was no longer desired. Sternglass believed that an effort was being made to suppress any evidence about possible deaths as a result of the accident.[16] In a paper presented at an engineering and architecture congress, Sternglass argued that an excess of 430 infant deaths in the U.S. Northeast that summer could largely be attributed to Three Mile Island radiation releases.[17] This led some writers on environmental issues to claim that he had proven that figure as a minimum.[18]
Sternglass's methodology was criticized—including by the medical researcher who provided him with the statistics (Gordon MacLeod), and by an otherwise-sympathetic researcher with the Natural Resources Defense Council (Arthur Tamplin) -- on several counts:[19]
As well, he had relied on figures that had incorrectly compounded fetal deaths with infant mortality (Tokuhata).
Sternglass has also written a book called Before the Big Bang: the Origins of the Universe, in which he offers an argument for Lemaître's theory of the primeval atom. He offers technical data showing the plausibility of an original super massive relativistic electron-positron pair. This particle contained the entire mass of the universe and through a series of 270 divisions created everything that now exists. If true, this would help ameliorate some of the problems with the current models, namely inflation and black hole singularities.