Royd Sayers Service Bureau

Early in 1917 two young Public Health Service doctors arrived in Butte, Montana, and prepared to begin a study of the lung diseases and other ailments that afflicted the city s copper miners. Here came together for the first time a pair of men whose scientific and political influence would shape environmental policy for decades to come. 

Miners health had been a concern of the federal government for all of seven years, since the creation of the Bureau of Mines. The two doctors were on loan to that agency, among whose purposes it was to ameliorate the health and environmental effects of mining.1 The Bureau was now relocating its medical research to the city that already housed the smelter smoke investigation. 

One of the physicians, Royd Sayers (1885—1965), was new to industrial medicine. Born in the small Indiana town of Crothersville, where his father owned a jewelry store, Sayers had studied chemistry at the University of Indiana. After working as a chemist for three years, he enrolled in the medical school of the University of Buffalo, teaching chemistry while pursuing his studies. Upon completing his internship in 1915, he joined the Public 

Sayers, who remained a uniformed Public Health Service officer, spent the next 16 years on loan to the Bureau of Mines. In 1917 he took Lanza s place as chief surgeon of that agency, and a few years later he added the title of chief of the Health and Safety Section. Sayers was a tireless worker who rarely took vacations when he traveled overseas on behalf of the mining agency, much of his sightseeing was done underground. The scope of his work extended 

Questions were quickly raised about whether lead, long known as a poison, was safe to use in fuel. William Mansfield Clark, the head of the Chemistry Division in what would soon become the National Institute of Health, wrote to the Assistant Surgeon General in October 1922 to warn of a serious menace to the public health. Clark was a distinguished scientist who had pioneered the measurement and control of pH in biochemistry. The Public Health Service s response to this warning was that research was needed, but experiments would take time. It was decided to contact General Motors first.11 

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