Bross, Irwin D.J. (1921–2004)

Irwin D.J. Bross was an American public health advocate and biostatistician who devised methods for analyzing vehicle crash injury cause and effect, and conducted clinical studies of the relationship between low-level radiation exposure and cancer. In the late 1970s, Bross showed that people exposed to low-level radiation at work or as a result of frequent medical X-rays were 10 times more likely to develop leukemia than had been thought. Bross also spoke out against animal testing for medical purposes.

As director of biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York, Bross studied the increasing rates of leukemia in the 1970s. His sample consisted of 16 million people from New York, Maryland, and Minnesota. Bross took into account factors as different as health history, employment, residential history, family background, cause of death for parents and grandparents, exposure to farm animals, and pet ownership. Bross concluded that the main cause of the rising rates of leukemia was medical radiation in the form of diagnostic medical X-rays. The nine-year study also indicated that children who were subjected at various stages in utero to X-ray exposures of under 1 rem were up to 50 percent more likely to die from leukemia.

The survey was initially sponsored by the govern-ment-run National Cancer Institute (NCI). Its final data confirmed the findings of the British epidemiologist Alice Stewart contained in an earlier study. In 1977, Bross published his study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, despite the fact that it had been peer reviewed by government scientists who, according to him, were deliberately placed on the NCI board to bring his research into disrepute. Soon after the publication of the study, the NCI discontinued its funding.

After that experience, Bross became a strong critic of what he called “official science,” saying that the government purposefully neglects new evidence in medical research that goes against previously established conclusions and investments in possible treatments. He publicly accused “[t]he big science Federal agencies …, their industrial constituencies and their allies in the scientific and medical communities” of “lying to the public about the hazards of low-level ionizing radiation for twenty-five years.”

Bross's later research focused on revising the health data on a sample of 50,000 of the estimated 250,000 personnel exposed to radiation because of their employment in the nuclear testing program in the 1950s. He concluded that 500 had died from ra-diation-induced illnesses.