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FILE NAME DuPont DUP DATE 1995 DOC DUP194 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION Book Excerpt - Cancer Wars Referenced in BC report on DuPont DUP000 Cancer Wars How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer ROBERT N. PROCTOR dd in BasicBooks A Division of HarperCollins 1995 CANCER WARS l through the chimney to : were employed their parents for a small ight and therefore easier was not optimistic about sweeps had been found to out the first English laws labor of this sort did not raised to ten in 1834 and d evaded and frequently hat chimney sweeps still pation and even as late y to die of scrotal cancer ilar results only slightly Hueper denounced the nd sprayers of arsenic in- of arsenic daily from the stances such as these did enerations would have to es estimated to have been ted the fact that as late as ; fixing an upper limit for ion he suggested was to y degrade into harmless ant causes of cancer was a lishmentand lionized by of environmental carcino- 1 it first appeared though was only one medical replanation for the neglect ring of 1942 just months tional carcinogenesis was ans were more concerned ffects of industrial polluinced accent certainly did . nor did the fact that only Reich he had returned to most notably Morris sociation Fishbein appar- the issue of occupational of the journal Several of THE ENVIRONMENTALIST THESIS 43 Hueper's editorials did unsigned as was the practice 1949 when Fishbein was replaced as editor.36 a In 1948 Hueper's pioneering efforts in the area of environmental carcinogenesis won him post as founding director of the Environmental Cancer Section of the National Cancer Institute NCI a position he held until his retirement in 1964. The NCI had been founded in 1937 by a special act of Congress it was part of the Naonal Institutes of Health NIH in Bethesda Maryland the research arm of the Pub- ic Health Service The NCI had greater autonomy than other branches of NIH until 1944 it was the only branch authorized to provide grants to outside investigators but as we shall see it was not entirely free of political pressures Medical research funding was growing rapidly in this period the NIH budget for example rose from only 180,000 in 1945 to more than 46 million in 1950.37 Hueper's appointment came in the middle of this period of rapid almost euphoric growth fueled by the optimistic faith that scientific research was the key to social progress Paul Starr's history of The Social Transformation of American Medicine states rather categorically that scientists at this time enjoyed autonomy within the constraints of professional competition This was indeed the position articulated by the official in charge of the NIH Division of Research Hueper's superior aho in 1951 wrote The investigator works on problems of his own choosing and is not obliged to adhere to a preconceived plan He is free to publish as he sees fit and to change his research without clearance if he finds new and more promising leads He has almost complete budget freedom as long as he uses the funds for research poses and expends them in accordance with local institutional rules pur- The NCI may well have enjoyed greater autonomy than other branches of the but for Hueper personally there were many strings attached to freedom ShortlyNafItHer eining the NCI he received a letter from the Federal Loyalty Commission informng him that he was under investigation for disloyalty to the United States G. H. Gehrmann Du Pont's medical director had denounced him as a Nazi a that was dismissed when trumped charge Hueper was able to show that it came from a former colleague jealous of the acclaim Hueper had won for his work Gehrmann later rote to the director of the NCI accusing his foreign colleague of harboring communistic tendencies though this was shown to have no more substance than the Nazi charge Political pressure was also felt from the Public Health Service's own Division of Industrial Hygiene DIH which was wary of Hueper's untiring quest to document Shemical and nuclear hazards On one occasion the DIH director forced Hueper to remove his name from a study identifying lung cancer hazards in the chromate in- Sustry industry officials with influence at the notably A. J. pressured =x PHS officials via Surgeon General Leonard A. Scheele to tone down or with- draw the paper which eventually appeared under the sole authorship of Thomas F. Mancuso director of the division of industrial hygiene at the Ohio Health ment On another occasion Depart- Hueper learned to his astonishment that carbon copies