Janette Dexter Miller was born in
Buffalo, New York to Wilma and Frank Miller, both of whom were pharmacists. After her parents divorced, she lived with her mother in
Warsaw, New York. A 1952 graduate of Western Michigan College of Education (now
Western Michigan University), Sherman studied biology and chemistry. She married her first husband, John Bigelow, that same year and moved with him to the San Francisco area while he served there in the navy. Sherman worked as a researcher at the
University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, now the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She was one of only six women in her graduating class at medical school, which she attended on the advice of a boss at the
Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at Hunters Point. She was graduated from the Medical School at Wayne State University in 1964. She authored
Chemical Exposure and Disease: Diagnostic and Investigative Techniques (1988) and
Life’s Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer (2000) and is the editor of
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (2007). ==Personal==