Louise Reiss

Louise Marie Zibold Reiss (February 23, 1920 – January 1, 2011) was an American physician who coordinated what became known as the Baby Tooth Survey, in which deciduous teeth from children living in the St. Louis, Missouri area who were born in the 1950s and 1960s were collected and analyzed over a period of 12 years. The results of the survey showed that children born after 1963 had levels of strontium-90 in their teeth that were 50 times higher than those found in children born before the advent of widespread nuclear weapons testing. The findings helped convince U.S. President John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union, which ended the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons that placed the greatest amounts of nuclear fallout into the atmosphere.

Born in the Queens borough of New York City on February 23, 1920, Reiss contracted polio as a child. She originally planned to study art in college, but decided to switch to science after the outbreak of World War II.

She earned her medical degree at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (now part of the Drexel University College of Medicine) and performed her internship and residency at Philadelphia General Hospital, where she met her future husband, the physician Eric Reiss. The couple first moved to San Antonio, Texas, then relocated to St. Louis after Eric Reiss received an appointment at the Washington University School of Medicine. Hired by the St. Louis city health department, Louise Reiss was involved in inoculating children with the polio vaccine.

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