Wilhelm Hueper and Environmental Cancer

Confidentially, I believe that there may be something to justify these statements. While the incidence of pulmonary carcinoma among our chrome workers has been very low, it is still significantly higher, in fact many times the incidence in the general public. 

The story of environmental cancer in the mid-twentieth century is inextricably linked with the name of Wilhelm Hueper (1894—1979). Hueper was a scientific pioneer in a field that did not fully flower until his career was at an end. Beyond that, his story epitomizes the era s struggles over environmental protection. Hueper s stubborn insistence on the dangers of modern industry made him a bete noire for chemical manufacturers even before the appearance in 1962 of Rachel Carson s Silent Spring, for which he was a principal scientific source. In the history of the industry s often successful efforts to suppress Hueper s research, one sees the sharply etched image of behavior that more often can only be glimpsed through a fog of evasions and excuses. 

The memo was not the first warning to the DuPont company—a chemist in the company s research department had learned of the problem from a British colleague in 1928. DuPont at the time had seen no cases of bladder cancer in dye workers cancer emerges after a delay of years, and the company 

Gehrmann s proposal was quickly approved. The need for testing was increasing rapidly as new chemicals entered the market and the onset of the New Deal made it uncertain whether the confidential arrangements whereby such studies had been done under contract by the Bureau of Mines could continue. Dow and Union Carbide also established in-house toxicology laboratories around this time.4 

Hueper began work in November 1934 as chief pathologist of what was named the Haskell Laboratory. In experiments on dogs, he was able to show that beta-naphthylamine, and not other chemicals used in the plant, produced bladder tumors similar to those observed in the diseased employees. This finding, published in 1938 in the Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology, was a landmark in cancer research, the first experimental demonstration that a synthetic organic chemical causes cancer. 

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This story has been told many times Hueper autobiography, pp. 148-158 Hounshell and Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy, pp. 561-564 Proctor, Cancer Wars, pp. 38-40 C. Sellers, Discovering Environmental Cancer Wilhelm Hueper, Post-World War II Epidemiology, and the Vanishing Clinician s Eye, American Journal of Public Health, vol. 87, pp. 1824—1835 (1997) D. Davis, The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Basic Books, New York, 2007), pp. 75-77, 91-96 D. Michaels, Doubt is Their Product (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008), pp. 21-24. 

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