Edward P. Radford, 79, Researcher in Radiation Cancer Risk, Is Dead

By CARMEL McCOUBREY 

Dr. Edward P. Radford, who energetically promoted a higher estimate of the cancer risk from radiation exposure and whose position was eventually upheld, died on Oct. 12 at his home in Haslemere, England. He was 79.

The cause was a stroke, his family said.

Dr. Radford was chairman of a committee of the National Academy of Sciences that released an initial report in 1979 indicating that one-half of 1 percent of Americans would develop cancer from manufactured sources of radiation like power plants and X-rays.

The report, widely expected because it was released shortly after an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, came in for sharp criticism by some members of the group that prepared it, the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation.

The split in the 21-member committee was so bitter and public that the academy withdrew the report and the next year issued a revised paper that essentially halved the estimated risk, a conclusion Dr. Radford rejected.

He argued for a model showing that there was a risk, albeit small, even at the lowest levels of exposure, while his opponents favored a model that found there was a threshold below which there was no harm.

The committee's conclusions were important to the nuclear industry because they were used by the Environmental Protection Agency to update its radiation protection standards. One committee member said of Dr. Radford, "If the guideline levels were reduced the way he wants them, there wouldn't be any nuclear industry at all."

Since then, Dr. Radford's ideas have been upheld by many other scientific bodies that study radiation, said Dr. Evan B. Douple, director of the Board of Radiation Effects Research at the National Academy of Sciences. "He's been an outspoken person who's contributed to the debate on radiation protection standards," Dr. Douple said.

Dr. Radford was also known for his research on cigarettes, particularly studies in the 1960's finding that radioactive polonium 210 was present in tobacco and made its way into the lungs of smokers. The concentration was high enough, he and his colleagues said, that the radioactivity could be a contributing factor in lung cancer.

He also developed a kind of chart called a nomogram that was widely used by anesthesiologists to calculate the proper mixture of oxygen and anesthetic in the days before computers, said Vilma R. Hunt, a retired professor of environmental science at Penn State.

"That kind of quantitative rigor characterized his approach to his clinical work and to his work on ionizing radiation," she said.

Edward Parish Radford, who was known as Ted, was born on Feb. 21, 1922, in Springfield, Mass., and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his medical degree at Harvard in 1946. He was in the Air Force from 1947 to 1949; one of his duties was to measure radiation levels at flight altitudes soon after atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific.

He held research positions at the Harvard School of Public Health, DuPont, the University of Cincinnati and Johns Hopkins University, and was the chairman of the department of Environmental Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health from 1979 to 1983. He then focused on consulting in legal cases about the health effects of radiation and toxic chemicals.

His marriages to Nettie Garrison and Olivia Kolar ended in divorce.

He is survived by his wife of 18 years, Jennifer Barnard Radford; 4 daughters, Martha Jo Radford of Farmington, Conn.; Donna Radford Patterson of Grand Junction, Colo.; Catherine Radford of Charlestown, Mass.; and Lilith Radford Calkins of Harvard, Mass.; a son, George Leslie, of Exeter, N.H.; and 11 grandchildren. 

From Obituary, NY Times