Research Catalog

Title

Cancer from beef : DES, federal food regulation, and consumer confidence / Alan I Marcus.

Author

Marcus, Alan I, 1949-

Publication

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 235 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• .
• After World War II agricultural college laboratories discovered in diethylstilbestrol (DES) a growth-promoting hormone of potentially wide commercial use in the cattle industry. In the postwar period of high prosperity and public confidence in science, government approval came quickly. Mass production began in 1954, and the promotional efforts of cattle feed manufacturers soon convinced farmers of the drug's growth-enhancement - and profit-boosting - powers.
• Cancer from Beef uses the DES story to explore the intersection of institutional science, government rule making, and growing skepticism in popular attitudes toward both public protection and scientific authority. Marcus concludes that the DES story provides a case study in the attempt to control uncertainty in our lives when neither science nor government seem effective.
• Marcus shows how DES figured in the enactment of three major pieces of federal regulatory legislation and how the DES controversy led to the establishment of new kinds of risk-assessment models in human health. Fears of cancer in beef, Marcus argues, played a prominent role in the rise of the American consumer movement.
• The DES debate thus reflects a postmodern American accommodation with doubt, moral relativism, and the rueful calculus of cost and benefit.
• Yet gradually, writes Alan I Marcus, other scientists began to suspect links between DES-produced beef and cancer in humans. In Cancer from Beef Marcus traces these developments, as DES emerged as a cause celebre - a source of "expert" factionalism and subject of various attempts to establish "safe" public policy.

Subjects

• Meat
• United States
• Food Inspection > history
• Meat > Contamination
• Food Contamination
• Food Additives > toxicity
• Meat inspection > United States > History
• Carcinogens
• Feed additives > Toxicology
• Diethylstilbestrol > Carcinogenicity

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-227) and index.

Contents

I. Science. 1. Partners in Progress. 2. Cracks in the Facade -- II. Government. 3. Regulation as Opposition. 4. Monitors and Monitoring -- III. Society. 5. Hearts, not Minds. 6. Entitle and Victimize. 7. The New Synthesis.

ISBN

0801847001 (acid-free paper)

LCCN

93021505

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries