Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ronment, public health, and global changes became more widespread, her
once-radical ideas filtered into the mainstream. By now, even Doll has pub-
lished papers reporting unexplained increases in certain cancers.
Davis, an avid skier, likens the experience of coping with attacks from
colleagues to knowing how to take a fall: “You have to learn to fall, and
relax in your fall, and get back up again. I think that applies to professional
life as well, because one always learns from it. If you are putting things out
there that people aren't going to like to hear, you have to be prepared for
the fact that not everybody's going to be happy.” She notes that she has had
many fruitful critical exchanges with people with whom she doesn't always
agree, but from whom she always learns something.
When her sabbatical concluded, Davis returned to the National Academy
of Sciences as a scholar in residence. At the Collegium Ramazzini work-
shop in 1989, Davis had founded the International Breast Cancer Preven-
tion Collaborative Research Group. One day in 1992 she received a phone
call from Representative Bella Abzug, whom she had never met, telling
Davis to appear at City Hall to testify on breast cancer at a special hearing.
Women on Long Island had been developing breast cancer at a high rate.
Those who had lived there more than 40 years developed 4 times more
breast cancer than those who had lived there less than 4 years.A study con-
ducted by the Centers for Disease Control concluded that these statistics
could be explained by the standard risk factors, but Long Island women's
organizations had mobilized to demand better answers. Davis testified, and
breast cancer became a major focus of her work, particularly after she
joined the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit environmental research
group, in 1995. At WRI she studied links between the environment and
health and examined effective public policy options. “Spurred by Bella's
demands,” Davis says,“my colleagues and I began to look again at what was
known about breast cancer and to consider whether avoidable environ-
mental agents could be involved.”
In countless lectures and publications, on the WRI web site, in a video
titled
Exposure,
and in a CD-ROM (requested by women in developing
countries), Davis has raised questions about possible links between cancer
and chemicals in the environment. She explains that fewer than 10 percent
of breast cancers develop from inherited genetic factors. Known risk fac-
tors, such as early menarche or late menopause, account for a relatively
small portion of other breast cancers. In the
World Resources 1998-99
report, she wrote: “. . . a growing and complex array of evidence suggests
