Ernest J. Sternglass


Ernest Joachim Sternglass was a professor emeritus 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.

Early life

Both of his parents were physicians. When Ernest was fourteen, the Sternglass family left Germany in 1938 to avoid the Nazi regime. He completed high school at the age of sixteen, then entered Cornell, registering for an engineering program.
Financial difficulties encountered by his family forced him to leave school for a year. By the time he returned to Cornell, the U.S. 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.

Research career

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 had the opportunity to meet Albert Einstein. They discussed his results which suggested a low energy creation of neutrons, a work that came to be rediscovered four decades later.
From 1952 to 1967 Sternglass worked at the Westinghouse Research Laboratory. Early in his time at Westinghouse, he proposed a technology for image intensification.
He also published a formula for interplanetary dust charging,
which is still used extensively.
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.
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.
In 1967, Sternglass moved to the Department of Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he eventually was named professor emeritus. While there, through the early 1990s, he led pioneering work on the development of digital X-ray technology for medical imaging.
Sternglass was director, co-founder, and chief technical officer of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He died of heart failure on February 12, 2015, in Ithaca, New York.

Claims of radiation harm

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.
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.
In an article in Esquire, he claimed that the fallout from the nuclear explosions of an Anti-ballistic missile system would kill all children in the U.S. Freeman Dyson, taking up the debate over ABM systems in the pages of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, disagreed with Sternglass, although he admitted
In 1971, Sternglass claimed that infant mortality rates increased in communities living in close proximity to nuclear industrial facilities. His study included several nuclear power plants and a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. He claimed that when setting allowable limits for nuclear industrial emissions "the AEC grossly misjudged the sensitivity of the fetus."
In 1974, Sternglass identified elevated levels of radiation and increased cancer and infant mortality incidence in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. This prompted a scientific review initiated by Pennsylvania governor, Milton Shapp. The review concluded that "it was impossible to rule out the fact that there may have been a relationship between environmental radiation exposure from the Shippingport operation and an increased death rate in the population."
In 1979, Sternglass began extending his analyses of fallout effects to embrace behavioral disorders, including academic deficits seen in high school students.
Later he was to blame radioactivity for higher crime rates and higher AIDS mortality.

Critical responses

Alice Stewart, whose work was the inspiration for the work of Sternglass 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 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

Three Mile Island

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. 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.
This led some writers on environmental issues to claim that he had proven that figure as a minimum.
Sternglass's methodology was criticized—including by the medical researcher who provided him with the statistics, and by an otherwise-sympathetic researcher with the Natural Resources Defense Council -- on several counts:
As well, he had relied on figures that had incorrectly compounded fetal deaths with infant mortality.

Cosmological theories

Sternglass also wrote the book Before the Big Bang: the Origins of the Universe, in which he offers an argument for the Lemaître 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.
E. J. Sternglass, Relativistic Electron-Pair Systems and the Structure of Neutral Mesons,Phys. Rev., 123, 391.
E. J. Sternglass, A Model for the Early Universe and the Connection between Gravitation and the Quantum Nature of Matter, Lettere al Nuovo Cimento, 41, 203.

Books