“The neutrality of the term cloaks a complicated history, including nearly seventy years of work by health physicists to establish benchmarks against which to evaluate radioactive safety. At play throughout were assumptions about the “average,” the “normal,” and the “standard.” “Reference Man” is, after all, not just any man: he (until recently, it was always “he,” though there is data for “Reference Woman”) weighs 70 kilograms (about 154 pounds); he is generally described as Caucasian (a “Japanese” and then an “Asian” reference were later developed) and aged between twenty and thirty years old. He is, more or less, like the author of this piece. He is also, according to Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, ”scientifically inappropriate because the vast majority of people, including women and children, fall outside the definition.”
“Standard Man,” from whom “Reference Individual” metamorphosed, was born at a moment when the promise of atomic power appeared limitless and the protection of reactor workers and civilians imperative. It was this latter urgency in particular that confirmed the obviousness of offering male figures (and particularly the 70kg weight), since men were most likely to be placed at risk by occupational irradiation. But that selection mattered, since the weight of a “standard woman” at the time of Chalk River was closer to 56kg. Because permissible doses are determined partly by mass, what was safe for “Standard Man” could be hazardous for many women.
This exclusion was not, as far as available records show, a malignant oversight. Rather, we might view “standard man” as an example of what historian and philosopher Sarah Richardson has called“gender valences” in science; that is, particular moments when scientific concepts are inflected by gendered assumptions without being so explicitly noticed. “Gender valences” are neither “bad” nor “good,” notes Richardson, but when unacknowledged they may yield distortions in scientific assumptions and reasoning. According to experts, reactor workers were men, even if the biological data that constructed “Standard Man” was put together by men and women who worked at nuclear plants.
“Standard Man,” then, was a scientific gender valence with long-lasting ramifications. Though the gendering of “Standard Man” could appear to be a relatively trivial oversight, it is worth noting that these figures determined radioactive safety standards around the world for decades to come. Geographer Shannon Cram has shown that the Hanford Site in Washington (often described as “the most radioactive place in the Western hemisphere”) draws upon “Standard Man” data for its radioactive cleanup efforts. And as the California EPA’s Catherine Caraway notes, the 70kg datum is still standard for toxicity calculations in many places, even though Makhijani and others have repeatedly called its appropriateness into question. Standards, after all, have a tendency to stick.
There is no evidence that Cook was present at Chalk River, though Karl Z. Morgan presented her work to the assembled delegates. In the years that followed, the figures for “Standard Man” were more frequently credited to a report by scientist Hermann Lisco, in part because his data was published while Cook’s was not. One could easily imagine other reasons for her omission.
Yet the afterlife of Cook’s work is ongoing: research she carried out collaboratively with University of Tennessee physics professor Isabel H. Tipton for many years on trace elements in human tissue is still frequently cited to this day. Though Tipton, now deceased, was recently honored by Tennessee with a memorial scholarship that highlights women in physics, surprisingly little can be found about Cook beyond scattered references in scientific journals. When we spoke over the phone recently, Tipton’s daughter, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, remembered Cook’s name but nothing more.
In this sense, Cook was not entirely exemplary; hundreds of women worked as research assistants, data collectors, tabulators, secretaries and more at each of the major American nuclear laboratories. As physicists Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg have shown, few of them ever received major accolades or significant public recognition. Like Harriet Brooks, the brilliant student of Ernest Rutherford who left physics altogether when she married, hardly any left accounts of their visions for science more broadly.”
- Brad Bolman, “Women Radiobiologists and ‘Standard Man’.” Lady Science, for The New Inquiry. May 17, 2018.