Dr Helen Caldicott (b. 1938), physician, author and activist, was born Helen Broinowski in Melbourne and gained her degree in Medicine from the University of Adelaide in 1961. The following year she married William Caldicott, a radiologist. In 1966 she commenced a three-year fellowship at the Harvard Medical School, and on her return to Adelaide she was appointed to a position at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Following a two-year internship in paediatrics at the Adelaide Children's Hospital, she founded its Cystic Fibrosis Clinic in 1975; and between 1977 and 1986 she was back in Massachusetts, working as an instructor in paediatrics at the Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston and lecturing in paediatrics at Harvard.
Meanwhile, and in addition to raising her own three children, Caldicott had become a committed campaigner in the anti-nuclear cause, addressing conferences and gatherings in Australia and overseas on the dangers of radiation and convincing the Australian government to sue France over its nuclear testing in the Pacific. Her work to educate Australian trade unions on the issue of uranium led to a three-year ban on the mining and export of the mineral. In the late 1970s Caldicott was appointed President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and following a visit to the USSR in 1979 she gave up her medical career to devote herself to the nuclear disarmament cause. She founded Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament in 1980. Returning to Australia in 1987, Caldicott ran for Parliament in 1990 as an independent candidate for the northern New South Wales electorate of Richmond. Though unsuccessful, she attracted 23% of the vote and helped unseat the incumbent, the then National Party leader, Charles Blunt.
The founder of the Helen Caldicott Foundation for a Nuclear Free Future, she has published or edited thirteen books including If you love this planet (1992), A Desperate Passion: An Autobiography (1996), Carbon-free and Nuclear-free: a Roadmap for US Energy Policy (2007), and Sleepwalking to Armageddon (2017). She is the recipient of multiple honorary doctorates and has received many honours for her work, including the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year Award (1982); and the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award, conferred by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library, for 1992.
