Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Davis then requested a leave from the National Academy of Sciences and
was instead given a 16-month sabbatical. Colleagues—particularly David
Rall, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences—
helped her contact authorities in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Denmark,
and Great Britain. Davis spent two months visiting those countries, taking
her 9-year-old daughter with her and lugging an early-generation laptop
computer, with which she “vacuumed up” data from computerized gov-
ernment records. David Hoel, associate director of NIEHS and a collabo-
rator in the project, obtained statistics from Japan. Returning to the United
States, Davis divided up the data among an international team of epidemi-
ologists who proceeded to analyze it. Their findings were presented at a
workshop at the Collegium Ramazzini in Italy in 1989 and published in
both the British medical journal
Lancet
and the
Annals of the NewYork Acad-
emy of Sciences
in 1990.
Basically, the report presented strong evidence that the incidence of
many forms of cancer was increasing in all the countries studied, particu-
larly among people over 55, and that brain cancer was increasing in those
under 45. Davis and Hoel concluded that the rise was too great and too
widespread to be simply an artifact of improved diagnoses.They urged fur-
ther research on possible causes of these cancers and emphasized the need
for prevention.
The publication brought her greater attention and gained her more crit-
ics. Doll and others dismissed Davis's work.They said she was seeking pub-
licity. By generating new hypotheses and raising issues about possible causes
of cancer, she made many people uncomfortable. But she had her support-
ers as well.Vilma Hunt, an Australian-born epidemiologist who had done
important work a few decades earlier, advised Davis that she would be
taken more seriously when she was older. In 1992, after an article appeared
in the
New York Times Magazine
discussing the controversy about Davis's
research, Hunt wrote a letter to the editor stating that “Davis's professional
experience had a unique impact on the very small group of female scien-
tists from earlier generations.”The letter continued:“We read familiar words
to describe Davis and her work— 'out for publicity,''she's not that reliable,'
'unoriginal,' 'wrong.' They were such devastating words for us thirty or
forty years ago.They seem so trite and inconsequential today, now that we
know what those words really mean.”
Other supporters applauded Davis for finding new ways of synthesizing
information and interpreting data. Gradually, as concerns about the envi-
