How did someone who started out with a love for chemistry end up as a historian?

David Rosner uses history to help people and doesn’t shy away from testifying in court to do so. He is the 2014 recipient of Sigma Xi’s John P. McGovern Science and Society Award, which is given to those whose work transcends their career as a researcher. Rosner has been involved with lawsuits to hold industries accountable for harm they’ve caused by exposing people to toxins such as silica sand, lead, and asbestos. His books include Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, which he coauthored with Gerald Markowitz. Rosner works at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where he is the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences. He is also a professor of history and co-director of the Mailman School’s Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health. He became a Sigma Xi member in 1977. He is also an elected member of the Institute of Medicine.

What drew you to public health?

Of course, I’m a child of the ‘60s, meaning that I entered college thinking that science was inherently a force for good. By the end of the ‘60s, our image of what chemistry was, and what technology could do, were sullied by our experiences in Vietnam. I actually flirted briefly with becoming a chemistry major and remember all too well when my flirtation ended. As a junior at City College of New York when entering my introductory chemistry lecture, I was confronted by a picket line and a friend of mine carrying a picket sign. The sign had a question mark after DuPont’s famous slogan, “Better Living Through Chemistry,” and a picture of a village burning, ostensibly from a napalm attack.

It was then that I became deeply concerned with the “ethics” and the history of science. I became a psychology major, thinking that this major combined a scientific methodology with deeply humanistic concerns. By the time I graduated, I came to believe that the issues of public health and psychology were intimately connected after working in a research unit with the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene. So many of the children were suffering from issues that were not solely “psychological,” as I then understood them, but from basic public health problems.

Public health seemed to be a field that could combine good science, great public service, and incredible humanity when properly applied. I became interested in health and society, how disease is a product not just of “natural” process but of the worlds we build and the inequities that are all too often the root of the problems our people face....

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