Interview with CHE Partner, Julia Brody, PhD

Silent Spring Institute

Steve Heilig: Tell us your own background and how you came to do the work you do.

When I was a teenager, my family lived in Richland, Washington, the town closest to the Hanford nuclear facility where the fuel was enriched for the first atom bomb. It made me think about who’s in charge of technology and who decides what’s safe. Since then, my high school classmates who were born in Richland have been designated the “maximally exposed cohort” for nuclear releases that affected the milk they drank when they were younger. The chance to bring together science and community is what makes Silent Spring Institute special for me. The complex, multidisciplinary demands of the science grab me, too. 

I have been doing environmental research for most of the past 20 years, but I have also served in policymaking positions as Deputy Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management and at the Texas Department of Agriculture.

Please describe the primary mission and work of Silent Spring Institute.

Silent Spring Institute was founded in 1994 by leaders in the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition as a partnership of scientists and activists dedicated to studying the links between the environment and women’s health, especially breast cancer. Our goal is prevention.   

The Institute’s research is focused on exposure to endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) that may affect multiple hormonal cancers, fertility, and child development. Studies include the first measurements of estrogenic activity in groundwater that supplies drinking water and the most comprehensive assessment to date of pollution in homes. Study teams include Silent Spring Institute’s scientific staff working with co-investigators from Brown University, Harvard University, SUNY-Stony Brook, and elsewhere.
   
The Institute’s first and largest study is the Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment Study, which now includes 2,100 women, environmental sampling in 120 homes, groundwater testing, and disease and exposure mapping using a geographic information system (GIS). Results provide the strongest evidence to date of a geographic region with unexplained high breast cancer risk, strengthening the hypothesis that environmental factors play a role. Analyses in three different data sets show that higher risk on Cape Cod is not due to an older population, in-migration of high-risk women, established breast cancer risk factors, demographics, or mammography use.

While reaching toward the longer-term goal of identifying – and breaking – the links between environmental factors and disease, Silent Spring Institute is committed to science that makes a difference now, building the knowledge base for precautionary public health policies and developing scientific expertise to inform activist campaigns.


What is/are the most striking recent developments related to your work, both scientifically and otherwise?

Recent laboratory evidence provides increasingly strong evidence for three mechanisms that may link environmental pollutants and breast cancer:  

• more than 100 chemicals cause mammary tumors in animals;
• more than 150 mimic estrogen (an established breast cancer risk factor) or otherwise disrupt hormones; and
• the newest science shows that in utero chemical exposures – for example to the pesticide atrazine -- can affect development of the mammary gland in ways that increase susceptibility.

Environmental sampling and biomonitoring studies, including Silent Spring Institute’s research, show that exposure to these chemicals is widespread. The evidence points to new directions for environmental health policy focused on indoor environments and consumer products from cosmetics to computers.

In parallel to emerging science, women and men touched by breast cancer and other diseases have become a powerful force in the new environmental health movement, and this trend hasn’t peaked yet! The tenacity of breast cancer activists in sustaining Silent Spring Institute is one of the most remarkable developments.


Can you tell us the most salient lessons you've learned in pursuing your organization's goals?

I take inspiration from the many women who have transformed the very personal question “why did I get breast cancer?” into the broader questions "Why do we have breast cancer rates higher than generations before and among the highest in the world? What can we do as a community of women and men to change the legacy for our daughters?" They remind us both that our individual contributions are finite and that together we build a whole that is greater than its parts.


Any comments on how CHE has been useful to you - and how we might do
more/better?

CHE provides a tremendously valuable network that takes us beyond our own day-to-day concerns, linking across issues and geography. It provides practical opportunities to share resources. CHE’s snowballing constituency together with the commitment to civil discourse has great potential to advance consensus that will generate action on environmental health policy.

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Posted: 31 October 2005