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In February 1999, I began my job as a research associate for Devra Lee Davis, an environmental health scientist who had spent the past fifteen years researching and writing about environmental causes of breast cancer. At the time, Davis was a senior scientist and the director of the Health, Environment, and Development Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a nonpartisan environmental policy think tank located at Seventeenth and G Streets Northwest, a few blocks from the White House. In contrast to WomenCARE’s small stucco duplex and the American Cancer Society Santa Cruz chapter’s five-room Victorian house, WRI’s setting for its offices was two floors of a tenstory office building that spanned almost half a city block. On my first day, I checked in at the front desk. Several minutes later, Davis came out to meet me, wearing a blue dress, stockings, and heels. If clothing styles help to delineate cultures of action within the broader breast cancer movement, as sociologist Maren Klawiter claims, it is also the case that they help to delineate different cultures of action within the terrain of environmental breast cancer activism. Rather than the casual outfits worn by Lynn Boulé and Amber Sumrall at WomenCARE, dresses and suits turned out to be Davis’s standard garb.1 Davis’s scientific work at WRI was part of a developing culture of action within the environmental breast cancer movement. Although the movement’s earlier efforts to challenge the cancer industry’s stance on environmental links to breast cancer included critiques of the uncertainty surrounding these causes, this set of political strategies did not necessarily emphasize direct participation in the scientific process itself. In fact, some activists who embraced this From Touring the Streets to Taking On Science Chapter 3 45 approach discouraged the promotion of further research, as they viewed it as a regulatory stall tactic within a system that demanded levels of proof that were difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.2 By the mid-1990s, however, a growing number of activists began to call for more research on environmental causes of breast cancer as a way not only to better understand the disease but also to further their prevention agenda. A Growing Focus on Xenoestrogens My arrival at WRI coincided with its move to another office building across town, next to Union Station and several blocks from Capitol Hill. As Davis led me through the halls toward her office, people were filling Dumpsters with unwanted books, journals, and papers and packing their office supplies into moving boxes. Davis should have already started to do so as well, but because of her perpetual business trips and meetings, she had barely begun. As we sat in her office, attempting to talk in the midst of incoming phone calls and visits by WRI staff who were hoping to catch her before she left for another appointment , Davis told me that one of my first jobs would be to help pack up her files, books, and other office things. Davis’s interdisciplinary background gave her with ample experience in science, politics, and policy. In 1972, Davis received her PhD in sociology of science from the University of Chicago. She then completed a postdoctorate in epidemiology at the National Cancer Institute, receiving a Master’s of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins University in the process. From 1983 to 1993, she worked at the National Academy of Sciences—first as the director of the National Research Council’s Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology and several years later as its scholar in residence. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the newly established National Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. She also held affiliated faculty positions at Mount Sinai Medical Center, George Washington University, and Strang Cornell Cancer Prevention Center of Rockefeller University. In her position at WRI, which she took up in 1995, Davis continued her work on breast cancer; she also took on new projects relating to children’s environmental health, reproductive health, air pollution, and climate change. In her breast cancer work, Davis is perhaps best known for her research on xenoestrogens. In contrast to the more widely studied carcinogens (such as ionizing radiation) that cause normal cells to become breast cancer cells by directly mutating their DNA, xenoestrogens are believed to increase breast cancer risk by mimicking natural estrogen function. Among the xenoestrogens that are of particular relevance to...

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