Rachel Carson, Cancer, and the NIH
The Pulse and Politics of the Environment, Peace, and Justice
Bob Musil, President, Rachel Carson Council
“In nature nothing exists alone.”
“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history… It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”
“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.”
— Rachel Carson
While writing Silent Spring, Rachel Carson was dying of metastasizing breast cancer. Often in agony before she died, Carson asked her friends and colleagues to form an organization, the Rachel Carson Council (RCC), to carry on her work. Part of her revolutionary project would have been to further explore and show the connection between people exposed to toxic chemicals in the environment and the development of cancer, a key finding of Silent Spring. Until then, cancer had been considered entirely hereditary and often a subject of shame. But with the rise of the women’s movement and soaring rates of breast cancer, women marched waving copies of Silent Spring shouting “Rachel Carson was right!”
William Hueper, Courtesy of History, National Institutes of Health.
A meticulous scientific researcher, Carson looked deeply into the causes of cancer, keeping her own diagnosis secret since she feared, as a woman with cancer, that Silent Spring would be accused of self-interest and serious bias. Just as she had learned about the harmful health effects of DDT from her government colleagues in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) at the Patuxent Research Center in Maryland, Carson learned about the environmental links to cancer through the work of William Hueper, a cutting edge and controversial scientist at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
Heuper’s work at the NIH and Carson’s spreading of it to the public and policy makers — along with the careers of the thousands of scientists, doctors and researchers who have labored at the NIH ever since – have saved countless lives. But all that is now at risk as President Donald Trump has empowered Elon Musk and the illegally constituted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash, threaten, buy out, and cripple Federal agencies, including those charged with protecting human health and the environment. Prime among these is the National Institutes of Health, the leading biomedical research agency in the world that carries out and funds some $9 billion to local and regional recipients at medical centers, universities, hospitals, and agencies.
But these cuts, with more to come, have been met with widespread, robust, and growing protests like the one I attended outside the doors of the NIH in Bethesda which has its own Medical Center Metro stop whose escalators each day unload the most scientifically and medically educated workforce in the nation.
As I approach the NIH doors and Metro escalators, I see they are surrounded by some 1500 Americans waving American flags and toting handmade placards and signs that are among the most science-oriented, witty, passionate, and personal that I have ever seen. Near me, a resolute and brave girl brandishes one that reads, “You Fired My Mom Illegally!” Others are deeply moving, as I can see and feel the live-saving outcomes of NIH science. One man stands silently with a sign that says simply “NIH Research Saved My Life.” Another carried by a young woman who works her way through the crowd reads, “ I Have My Dad Thanks to Cancer Research”.
Donald Trump and his dangerous and callous cliches about waste, inefficiency, and the uselessness of dedicated civil servants are abstractions that target and take the humanity out of Americans who work for our government and those helped, even saved, by its efforts. It makes it easy to “eliminate” jobs without regard for the individuals and their families who are and will be harmed. Rachel Carson, in some of her final writing before her death, traced the roots of such behavior: “The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen.”
Nevertheless, this intergenerational crowd still somehow radiates goodwill, hope, appeals to reason, even humor. The voice of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD-8), a national leader of the opposition to Donald Trump’s autocratic rule, and the congressman for the district where Rachel Carson lived, worked and wrote, soars over the crowd. Raskin in almost jovial as he tells the protesters, “I am here because you never know when you will need an “emergency constitutional lawyer!” A roar of laughter goes up and a sea of signs are shaken. I like one held aloft by a women with clear lettering, “Leash Your DOGE!” A modern grandmother tries full color, Disneyesque ridicule, “Down with the Musketeers!” while her young granddaughter, who will inherit the medical and scientific mess made by Trump and Musk, is more direct. “Fund More Scientists, Not Less!”
The citizens I see at the NIH rally understand that what are announced simply as “cuts” have human and personal consequences that will resonate far beyond today’s Trump regime and its scorn for science, its push for profits. It is why they are here – standing, smiling, cheering, laughing – clinging to hope, modelling decency and humanity, showing a love for science and the long line of researchers – Rachel Carson, William Hueper and more — who have come before.
It is the United States government, its funding and those who work for it, who have given them their lives and their future. It is why they have brought their children, grandchildren, even babies, to the doors of the National Institute of Health. One baby, bundled in a carriage against a cold March wind, speaks for us all with a little sign with red crosses on it. “Save My Future!”
