Benjamin G Ferris, Jr.

Benjamin Greeley Ferris, Jr. (24 January 1919 – 1 August 1996) was an American physician and epidemiologist, a professor at Harvard School of Public Health who helped to pioneer statistical studies into the health effects of air pollution in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the early 1960s, Ferris and colleague Donald O. Anderson carried out the first large-scale statistical study in the United States linking cigarette smoking to respiratory disease. In 1973, Ferris and Frank E. Speizer launched a statistical study comparing air pollution in six urban areas of the United States. This became the Harvard Six Cities study, a landmark piece of public health research that helped to prove the link between fine-particulate air pollution and higher death rates when it was published in 1993.

Early life

Ben Greeley Ferris, a distant relative of polar explorer Adolphus Greely, was born in Watertown, Massachusetts in 1919 to parents General Benjamin Greeley Ferris, Sr. and Margaret Ferris (Wright). and he returned to Harvard School of Public Health as a research fellow in physiology in 1948. Ferris was made an associate professor in 1958, and a tenured professor of public health in 1971; in parallel, he served as Harvard University's professor of environmental health and safety from 1957 until his retirement in 1989. Over his four-decade research career, he explored the links between all three types of pollution and respiratory disease. Ferris and Anderson carried out the first large-scale statistical study in the United States linking smoking to chronic respiratory disease. It prompted an editorial comment that "A concerted effort by physicians to alert the public to the nature and dimensions of the dangers of smoking would appear to be overdue". the study by Ferris and Anderson was among those it cited.

Air pollution in the environment

Ferris and Donald Anderson carried out a number of other "community" studies using an approach pioneered by the British researchers, which combined interview questionnaires with simple tests of lung function. One of the advantages of this method was that it allowed researchers to compare diseases across occupations, different geographic areas, or both. Using this approach, in 1963, Ferris and Anderson were able to make comparisons between citizens of relatively polluted Berlin, New Hampshire and relatively unpolluted Chilliwack, British Columbia, where smoking was the more important form of exposure, so, effectively separating the different contributions of smoking from those of ambient air pollution. The idea of comparing people in more- or less-polluted areas would reappear in the Six Cities study.

Occupational exposure

Ferris' research into air pollution included numerous studies of how workers in different industries experienced different types of air pollution, including jute workers (in 1959), coal miners and flax workers (in 1962), movie projectionists (in 1967), and ship workers (in 1972).

In the mid-1960s, Ferris and Harvard colleague Frank E. Speizer studied chronic respiratory disease in road workers in Boston's Sumner Tunnel. It was an early study of "the effects of man on the prolonged exposure to exhaust gas".

Ferris' growing interest in the health effects of air pollution was marked by the publication of a review article titled "Air Pollution and Disease" in the journal Anesthesiology in 1964.

Six Cities study

In 1973, Ferris and Speizer, who had worked with epidemiologists Richard Doll, Richard Peto, and Charles Montague Fletcher in the UK, proposed a research project they called the Harvard Air Quality and Lung Health Study, with Ferris as its original principal investigator. This eventually became the Six Cities study: a landmark public health study comparing people living in six differently polluted urban areas that demonstrated an association between fine-particulate air pollution and "excess mortality" (higher death rates), led by Douglas Dockery, and published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. Data from the Six Cities study has been used to research numerous other issues, including the effects of air pollution on lung development during childhood and adolescence and the effects of passive smoking on children's health.

Clean Air Act critique

In 1980, during the Ronald Reagan administration, Ferris co-authored a report, funded by the Business Roundtable association of 200 corporations, criticizing the Clean Air Act and urging a relaxation of stringent air quality standards in favour of a more pragmatic approach. According to Ferris, commenting on the report: "Any level of exposure may carry with it some risk, however slight, to some small fraction of the population. It is with this logic in mind that we encourage the use of the concept of acceptable risks".

Other studies

Ferris also explored the effects of industrial plants on the respiratory health of people in nearby communities, and the potential environmental hazards of electromagnetic radiation.

Awards

Ferris was the first recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Thoracic Society,

Mountain climbing

Ferris was a keen mountaineer who took part in the first ascent of Mount Hayes, Alaska in July 1941 with Brad Washburn, the first ascent of Houdini Needles in 1948, and the second ascent of Mount Saint Elias in 1946. He published two articles on mountain-climbing safety in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1963.

Personal life

He was twice married, to Sarah Brooks, with whom he had five daughters, and to Stefana Puleo.

His gravestone is inscribed "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills", a quotation from Psalm 121.

Selected publications