Silent Spring Institute builds on a unique partnership of scientists, physicians, public health advocates, and community activists to identify and break the links between the environment and women’s health, especially breast cancer.

This collaboration began in 1994, after members of the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition called for a scientifically sound investigation into elevated breast cancer rates on Cape Cod. To ensure action, they founded a laboratory of their own and named it Silent Spring Institute in tribute to Rachel Carson, whose landmark book, Silent Spring, launched the modern environmental movement. Carson died of breast cancer just two years after the book was published.

The Institute remains committed to breast cancer prevention, with an activist vision that goes beyond the science-as-usual approach. Driven by frustration that so much breast cancer risk remains unexplained, Institute researchers seek to build the foundation for a sustained research initiative that will meet several important priorities:

• To focus on the environment, an under-studied area that can lead to the discovery of preventable causes of cancer, particularly in geographic areas with higher risk;
• To make women’s health, especially breast cancer, a central rather than peripheral research priority;
• To foster true collaboration among scientists, physicians, and activists in order to define a mutual research agenda;
• To support innovation, particularly in the development of new research methods and pilot studies, to enable scientists to investigate new hypotheses; and
• To foster multidisciplinary teams that integrate the strengths of various researchers.

Since its founding, Silent Spring Institute has had the opportunity to serve as a pioneer in environmental health research: the first to tailor a geographic information system to uncover environmental links to breast cancer, the first to identify estrogenic activity in Cape Cod groundwater, the first to design a bioassay for determining the presence of endocrine disruptors in environmental samples. And yet what Silent Spring’s executive director, Dr. Julia Brody, identifies as the Institute’s most notable achievement is the unique partnership that has been at its core from the beginning.

“Silent Spring builds on a collaboration between activists and scientists who are dedicated to finding preventable causes of breast cancer,” Brody says. “This partnership allows us to take on prevention-driven environmental research questions that have been ignored by the cancer research establishment. And the Institute has been increasingly recognized as a model of community-based research and empowerment.”