The Silent Spring Institute is a nonprofit research organization whose mission is to identify and change the links between environmental pollutants and women’s health, especially breast cancer.

 
The Institute was founded in 1994 by activists from the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition who questioned the elevated breast cancer rates throughout Cape Cod and called for an investigation of their causes. Today, this alliance comprises scientists, activists, physicians, public health advocates, and elected officials united around the common goal of finding preventable causes of breast cancer.  

Silent Spring Institute is named in recognition of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, the seminal book on the dangers of synthetic chemicals to our environment. Published in 1962, Silent Spring is credited with changing the public’s consciousness on environmental issues. Her book and her tireless campaign to take its message to the public helped establish what many consider to be Carson’s legacy: the environmental movement. Born in 1907, Rachel Carson died of breast cancer in 1964.

The Institute’s research projects investigate a number of issues key to determining how women are exposed to pollutants with potentially long-term health risks. Its multidisciplinary staff brings together expertise in many fields: biology; chemistry; epidemiology; geographic databases; geology; health communications; information science; risk assessment; and toxicology.

The Institute’s Geographic Information System, a mapping database, integrates health outcomes with historical environmental data. Other scientific tools range from leading-edge chemical analyses to focus groups of concerned citizens.

“Most current breast cancer research focuses on diagnosis, treatment, or finding a cure, while ignoring research into preventable causes,” says Silent Spring’s executive director, Julia G. Brody, Ph.D. “With only one-fourth of all breast cancer traceable to genes, research focused on the environmental risks of breast cancer must continue to expand. This research offers perhaps the greatest promise for identifying other risk factors that may be avoidable causes of this disease.”