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pitted her against established authorities in cancer research, most notably Sir
Richard Doll.
Doll, a physician at Oxford University, had worked with A. Bradford Hill
in the 1950s to prove the link between smoking and lung cancer. In 1981,
Doll published another treatise on the causes of cancer, this time with
Richard Peto, which dismissed data on rising rates of cancer in people over
the age of 64 as being an “artifact” of better diagnosis. Lilienfeld disagreed
with those findings, and Davis assisted him in researching and writing an
article challenging Doll's conclusions. Lilienfeld died, suddenly, just before
the article was published. Davis was left, a postdoctoral fellow in her early
thirties, to carry on the debate. “Can you imagine the chutzpah of it?”
she asks.
Davis had an opportunity to meet with Doll at the International Agency
for the Treatment of Cancer. She admired his pioneering work and felt very
flattered that he would give her so much attention. During the meeting he
proceeded to explain why she was wrong, seeking to convince her of her
errors.After that meeting, she spent nearly 2 years checking, point by point,
what he had said, going directly to official death and population records to
compute the rates of cancer among older people from specified and
unspecified causes. If Doll were right and the overall rate of cancer was not
increasing, better diagnoses would mean that increases in cases of specified
cancers would be offset by a decline in the number of cancers from unspec-
ified causes. But the evidence seemed to contradict Doll's conclusions. Sta-
tistics indicated an increase in all kinds of cancer, both specified and
unspecified. Davis's determination to find answers was intensified by news
of her own father's bone cancer, multiple myeloma, which had been diag-
nosed in 1979, when he was 53 years old.
In 1983, after getting a master's in public health from Johns Hopkins and
working at the Environmental Law Institute, Davis was recruited by the
National Academy of Sciences to direct the Board on Environmental Stud-
ies and Toxicology.There she headed a large staff and coordinated the work
of hundreds of experts throughout the country in studies such as the one
that led to the ban on smoking on most domestic airline flights.When her
father died, in 1984, she decided she needed to do more on the issue of
cancer in the older population, this time comparing evidence from a num-
ber of industrialized countries. She wrote to Alice Whittemore, a highly
respected professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, who told Davis
that the work she proposed was very important and had to be done.
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