Award-winning writer/playwright Mary Dickson is an American downwinder and thyroid cancer survivor who is an internationally recognized advocate for radiation exposed individuals who have suffered due to harms they endured from nuclear weapons testing in the U.S. She grew up in Salt Lake City, and for many decades did not connect her family and communities’ health impacts to nuclear weapons tests, having been told by the government that “there was no danger.” In the 1980’s she was a volunteer editor of The Desert Sun, Utah’s Peace News, while working for a local PBS station. She began interviewing downwinders in Utah, including those who were protesting continued underground testing in Nevada. After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1985, and learning more about how widespread fallout was across the country – and how hard it hit Salt Lake City — she realized that she and her community members were also downwinders of testing in Nevada. It was after this that she started organizing in her community, gathering information and data about others impacted by testing, writing articles and op-eds, organizing and testifying at public hearings, and speaking publicly about the human toll of nuclear testing.
