Physicians for Social Responsibility

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) is the largest physician-led organization in the US working to protect the public from the threats of nuclear proliferation, climate change, and environmental toxins. Continuing its long history of physician-led activism, PSR produces and disseminates its own publications, provides specialized training, offers written and oral testimony to congress, conducts media interviews, and delivers professional and public education. PSR’s 50,000 members and e-activists, 30 state and local chapters, 39 student chapters, and 14 national staff form a nationwide network that target what they consider threats to global survival, specifically nuclear warfare, nuclear proliferation, global warming, and toxic degradation of the environment.

PSR was founded in Boston in 1961 by a group of physicians concerned about the public health dangers associated with the testing, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. Drs. Bernard Lown, Victor W. Sidel, Sidney Alexander, H. Jack Geiger, Alexander Leaf, George Saxton and Robert Goldwyn were among the founding group of physicians. PSR's initial reports on the real human, physical, social and environmental consequences of a nuclear war commanded immediate national attention and was followed by a sustained and highly effective campaign over the ensuing decades to educate the public about the irrevocable consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and the unwinability of a nuclear war. PSR originally opposed atmospheric nuclear testing by documenting the presence of testing byproduct strontium-90 in children's teeth.

By 1973 the organization was not active and in effect ceased to exist. In 1978, Helen Caldicott, MD was asked by Arnold Relman, the then editor to write an article for the NEJM on the medical dangers of nuclear power. She was subsequently visited by a young intern from Cambridge City Hospital at Children's Hospital Medical Center where she worked in the cystic fibrosis unit, to ask for some relevant papers on nuclear power. After some discussion with him, Caldicott said - you know this is a medical issue, let's start a medical organization. The first meeting held a week later at the Boston home of Helen and Bill Caldicott with several physicians in attendance including one who had been the past the secretary of the old PSR, Richard Feinbloom. Feinbloom suggested that instead of bothering to incorporate a new organization in the State of Massachusetts, the group take the name of the old and then defunct Physicians for Social Responsibility and use it. They did.

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