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By Root 1983 0

miscarriage was strongly advocated by a husband-and-wife team of researchers from the Harvard Medical School: George Smith, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and Olive Wat-kins Smith, a biochemist. In 1945, Smith and Smith asked 119 obstetricians in the United States and Europe to participate in a clinical trial on the use of DES in high-risk pregnancies. Seven published papers subsequently reported that DES not only reduced miscarriage but also produced bigger babies in high-risk pregnancies. It was later noted that three of the seven studies that reported the efficacy of DES to prevent miscarriage had used no controls at all, and none of the control participants was treated with the experimental cohort or by the same physician. A larger, controlled study at the University of Chicago in 1953 showed that DES had no beneficial effect whatsoever on the prevention of miscarriage; this finding was reinforced by six other controlled studies done in the fifties. Nonetheless, more than three million pregnant women in the United States alone were prescribed DES between 1941 and 1971. Many more mothers and fetuses were exposed to the drug in pregnancy vitamins in which DES was the active ingredient. Ads that appeared in medical journals and women’s magazines promised “a healthy pregnancy” through the use of DES. “DES became a routine part of the quality care that private practitioners gave their predominantly middle-class patients, including their own wives,” write Drs. Roberta J. Apfel and Susan M. Fisher in their 1984 history of DES, To Do No Harm: DES and the Dilemmas of Modern Medicine. “DES was considered the best possible pregnancy enhancer and it was even included in vitamin tablets for pregnant mothers.”

Beginning in the early forties, DES was also used in commercial agriculture, added to the feed given to livestock and chickens in pellets—a practice given added impetus when, in 1947, researchers at the Purdue University Agricultural Station discovered that DES was a potent growth stimulant in cattle. In 1959, high levels of DES in meat were discovered to produce “disturbing symptoms” in agricultural workers and consumers, including sterility, impotence, and gyneco-mastia (breast growth) in men. As a result, the FDA banned the use of DES pellets in chicken and lamb feed in 1959. However, the use of DES in cattle feed was not prohibited by the USDA until 1979, after nearly a decade of wrangling between cattle breeders and regulatory agencies.

The number of people exposed to DES through meat consumption from 1941 to 1979 is incalculable. The effects of this secondary exposure are unknown, though recent data on the epigenetic effects of maternal diet on fetal development make the subject well worth investigating. Epigenetics is a relatively new science that investigates how environmental factors such as diet, stress, and maternal nutrition can change gene function without altering DNA by inducing mutations. Genes can be activated or inactivated by a process called meth-ylation, in which a group of four atoms (methyl group) attaches itself to a gene at a specific point and relaxes or tightens the coiled strands of DNA, regulating gene expression. Methylation is critically important during prenatal and postnatal development, silencing some genes and activating others—one of the two X chromosomes in female cells, for example, is “turned off” by methylation. The mixture of genetic traits inherited from one’s parents is controlled by this process, and the process is highly vulnerable to environmental influences. “Fleeting exposure to anything that influences methylation patterns during development can change the animal or person for a lifetime,” the science writer Sandra Blakeslee reports in an article describing the impact of maternal diet on fetal development published in the New York Times in October 2003. “Methyl groups are entirely derived from the foods people eat…. Maternal diet during pregnancy is consequently very important, but in ways that are not yet fully understood.”

DES had one other major use—it was used to treat prostate