The evolution of attitudes to the human hazards of ionizing radiation and to its investigators.

Hanford Works, Richland, Washington, was one of the largest atomic plants in the United States. Several tens of thousands of persons employed at that site have been followed over four decades. Impressive as this number may seem at first sight, the Mancuso/Stewart/Kneale team consider it too small to estimate a cancer risk even 10 times as large as the low level radiation estimate produced by the International Commission on Radiation Protection [Stewart and Kneale, 1981]. It has been estimated [Stern, 1981] that a population 10–100 times the size would be required, even employing sophisticated techniques of analysis.