THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Jane Sprague Zones, Ph.D.

“I started to realize that sexism was not personal, and that it was an oppression that fell on all of us.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, April 2023

JZ:  My name is Jane Sprague Zones and I was born in August, 1943 in Palo Alto, California.

JW:  Tell us something about your childhood and what influences you think there were that led you to the path you took.

JZ:  Both my parents were born in California. My mother’s parents were Jews from Eastern Europe. She was born in San Francisco, but raised in Stockton, California. It’s in the Central Valley. My father came from a family that was mostly Irish Catholic.

They both went to college. Their families were both very education oriented. They graduated right into the beginning of the Great Depression, had an uphill battle, and they never really made much money. But my mother was very savvy about various things, including finances. She had two wealthy uncles from Romania who had a lumber yard in Fresno, which is also in the Central Valley, and they gave her a down payment for a house in Palo Alto. 

The house cost $12,500 in 1948. She wanted us to live in Palo Alto so my brother and I could get a very good public education and crawl out of, I wouldn’t call it poverty because we owned a house, but we were definitely relatively poor compared to the other people there. It was a very Protestant town and we were raised to be assimilated.

JW:  Did you have a religious background, Jewish or Catholic?

JZ:  I had a dicey, pretty nonexistent religious background, but I got interested in being Jewish when my oldest child went to public school. I was in my twenties, and he was encountering anti Semitism. That was in North Carolina. 

Palo Alto had its own insidious form of anti Semitism at the time. Now it has a huge Jewish population, but at that time, there was almost no Jewish presence. There were no nearby synagogues. My mother was raised speaking Yiddish and going to temple. When I go to school reunions, I realize, “Oh, there were some Jews there”, but I didn’t recognize them at the time.

JW:  Yes, they weren’t really out.

JZ:  Anyway, my mother, who was a mathematician and a very good one, became a typist at Stanford. My parents both were working class and my father was a nurseryman. He worked in a nursery. And because she worked at Stanford, I got to go there free for five years.

JW:  For your undergraduate degree, or more than that?

JZ:  I got an undergraduate degree, and a master’s degree in education so I could teach high school, which was kind of the intellectual girls’ occupation in those days. And I played basketball at Stanford. I like telling people I played basketball at Stanford because it’s a hot team now and has been for many years. But when I went, we played Girls Rules, which were quite stifling, and I think we played two games a year.

JW:  Girls Rules for the audience that doesn’t know, it’s like you could only go halfway down the court, right?

JZ:  That’s right. There are six people on a team, and three of them are forwards, and three of them are guards, and you can’t cross the middle line. Plus, you couldn’t dribble more than twice before you passed the ball. It was because we were thought to be so unable to run for long periods of time. At Stanford there were five boys for every girl, and there was a lot of pressure on you to have sexual relationships. I got pregnant the first time I had sex when I was 20 years old.

JW:  Oh, my gosh.

JZ:  That son is now 58 years old, and he lives across the street.

JW:  Oh, how nice.

JZ:  He has a wonderful family. I got married to the father, and I was married to him for eight years. He was in my class at Stanford. He also came from a family without money, and he had a full scholarship. We both were very good students, and he and I both went to graduate school in North Carolina. He was at Duke, and I was at University of North Carolina. Also, during that fifth free year at Stanford, I got a Master’s in Education, and I taught high school.

I was planning to be a high school teacher, but I couldn’t get a job in North Carolina because they had to pay extra to people with master’s degrees, so they didn’t hire them. The year that I was a teacher at Stanford, the high school that I was teaching at was one of the first to be bussed for school integration, and I became very interested in school integration.

By the way, the only female professor I ever had at Stanford taught sociology in the School of Education. So, I applied for, and got into the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina. The person who would have been my advisor, an educational sociologist, at our first meeting the first few days that I was in Chapel Hill, told me that he believed in inherited intelligence, which is not a sociological perspective at all. I decided I couldn’t possibly work with him. I let him know I didn’t agree, and he didn’t take that very well.

I got a job in the School of Public Health with this wonderful epidemiologist named Al Tyroler and got involved in a very big epidemiological study that lasted for several years. I really got very involved in public health starting then. The sexism in the Department of Sociology was unbelievable. First of all, no females on the faculty. I think there were three or four female graduate students.

All the students had stipends from the NIMH, the National Institutes of Mental Health. All of the boys got extra money if they had a wife, but I didn’t get any extra money. So, I went to the department chair and I said that I wanted to get that extra stipend. It was several hundred dollars a month, which was a lot of money at the time. And he said “No”, that he couldn’t do that, and that “There wasn’t enough money to go around”, and “The males needed it more than the females”, all that stuff. And I said, “Well, if you don’t give it to me, I’m going to protest the National Institutes of Health.” And he said, “Well, if you do that, the boys will lose their stipend.” And I said, “I don’t think that’s going to happen.” The next month I got my $300 dollars.

JW:  You did, and you didn’t have to protest the school?

JZ:  I didn’t have to protest; he gave in immediately. I was raised to be pretty accommodating, so to do something like that took a lot, and I had a child also. We were living on our two stipends. I think it was about $1,000 a month for each of us.

JW:  And what year was this?

JZ:  We went to North Carolina in 1966, and I was in North Carolina for eight years.

JW:  Okay.

JZ:  The other experience I wanted to tell you about was that to advance to candidacy as a PhD student in that department, you had to take a three-day written exam. It was essays. The day before the exam, one of the boys gave me some carbon copy notes, and he said that all of the boys had organized themselves into study groups, and they had covered all this material, and they had done it in several groups. Anyway, I hadn’t been informed or included. The notes weren’t that helpful, actually.

The exams were graded without the person’s name on it. You were given a code. Anyway, I got the highest score on the quantitative sociology part of the exam, which was their macho best element of what they were teaching. I was reading one essay the night before the exam and holding my little boy, who had scarlet fever, so I really couldn’t move.

I read this one article very thoroughly, and it turned out to be the main issue on the exam; on that part of the exam, anyway. So, it came back that I’d gotten the highest score, and then immediately, the rumor started spreading that I was sleeping with the chair of the scoring committee. It just was endless, that kind of stuff.

Now, we’re coming to the turning point. I was in the library at University of North Carolina right around that time looking for a book. I must have been taking a class or something, and I was doing something on the doctor-patient relationship. I found a book called, The Doctor Patient Relationship or something like that. It had a chapter called The Difficult Patient. And in that chapter, they used the feminine impersonal pronoun. So instead of he and they and him, which had always been used, it was she and her. I couldn’t believe it. It was so striking. I had never seen anybody use she and her for a neutral gender.

JW:  But it wasn’t neutral in the author’s eyes.

JZ:  No, in the author’s mind, all the difficult patients were females. Remember when we used to call it the Click Experience?

JW:  Totally.

JZ:  That was my click experience. I think that was the first time I started to realize that sexism was not personal, and that it was an oppression that fell on all of us. This must have been in ’67 or ’68 maybe. Around that time also, I was invited to a women’s consciousness raising group. It was graduate students and young female faculty. Probably about a dozen women, there weren’t that many of us. I don’t remember too much about the consciousness raising group, except that it had a lot of eccentric, interesting people in it, and I liked them. We mostly told personal stories. So, that’s that part. Okay, so, I was working in the School of Public Health.

JW:  What were you doing in the School of Public Health?

JZ:  Well, those first few years I was a research assistant, and then I was hired as a faculty member while I was writing my dissertation. I think I was hired as a faculty member around 1970. I became involved in a big NIH funded study of innovations in hospitals in New York State. We interviewed hospital administrators. We had a big list of questions and I was an interviewer and helped analyze data. New York State passed a liberalized abortion law, I think in ’71, and people started flocking to New York State to get abortions.

And so, we were just headed out on this project and I said, “Can I append some questions about abortion as a medical innovation?” And these guys that I was working with, I knew them all, and we had a pretty good relationship, but they didn’t think it was a big issue. They agreed to let me do it, and I formed a dissertation committee that was seven men. They were very opposed to my doing this dissertation because it wasn’t a sociological topic. Even I knew that this is going to be big. It was the first core issue of the women’s health movement.

I ended up with all this data about how these hospitals were providing abortion. I think at the time, you had to have an abortion in hospital and they put you under general anesthesia. You had to stay overnight, and it was a big deal. Anyway, I published a couple of papers and I started getting some attention for it. Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose all over the place. Not in Chapel Hill, but particularly in New York. Our Bodies Ourselves had its first meeting and so on. I didn’t travel there, but I really had my eye on it.

JW:  What was your dissertation on?

JZ:  It was how hospitals in New York State responded to the liberalized abortion law. I used all the data from this big project, which of course I never could have done by myself.

JW:  Oh, wow, okay. I thought maybe your reviewers discouraged you from doing it, but you did do it.

JZ:  Oh, I handled those guys. When I was defending my dissertation; you’re in a big room, and at one point I interrupted and I said, “May I speak?” They were arguing with each other. 

My first job after getting my PhD was at University of California at San Diego. I was thrilled because I wanted to go back to California, and it was a good university. I left husband number one, so I was a single mom and several things happened.

First of all, I was very involved with the American Public Health Association, and they started a women’s caucus, probably around 1975. I can’t remember what happened, but I agreed to become the chair for the first year. Mainly what that meant was, you’re in charge of a meeting at the annual conference of the APHA. So, we did that. I was pretty nervous, I remember. But the thing I wanted to tell you about, was that I got my first attack.

Public health people in general are just wonderful people because they care deeply about the population and they have a population perspective. Anyway, this woman in the mental health division of public health wrote to me, and I haven’t read this letter in many years, but it was an attack on the Women’s Caucus, and feminists and so on. And in it, she called me “A horse faced Hebrew.” I’m quite sure I wasn’t out as a Jew in front of that group.

JW:  Now, did she attack abortion too?

JZ:  I can’t remember. I probably only read the letter once or twice.

JW:  Yes, that’s good.

JZ:   Also in 1975 was the beginning of the National Women’s Health Network based in Washington. You interviewed Cindy, I think. Cindy Pearson?

JW:  Oh, yes, absolutely.

JZ:  Anyway, I became a member right away. APHA asked me to write a Women and Health bibliography, so I did that and it was published. That was really interesting, and it started my career in women’s health, as an academic arm of the women’s health movement. A lot of what I did subsequently was write articles for the organizations I was involved with. I wrote a lot of articles for the National Women’s Health Network newsletter, and in the ’80s I joined Breast Cancer Action, which is a really good progressive breast cancer organization. I wrote a lot of articles for them, but that’s jumping again. I taught a women’s health course at UC San Diego.

Kind of shifting gears, I was continuing my quest to learn about Judaism, but I was intimidated by anything religious, and I also felt like, “Who’d want me as a Jew?” Being Jewish is weird in California, or was at the time. The Jews were pretty assimilated. I had a friend, Ricky Sherover-Marcuse, who was the third wife of Herbert Marcuse, but she was quite a bit younger than Herbert. 

She felt the same way I did. She was interested in our Jewish identity, but we didn’t know where to begin. So, we just timidly walked into the Jewish Community Center in San Diego and there was a poster there, advertising a course taught by Irene Fine, whose name I gave you as a potential contact.

The course was, World of Our Mothers, after the other book, World of Our Fathers. Ricky and I started this course. I think Ricky dropped out right away. Irene was a newbie to feminism, and she came from a sort of pissed off housewife background, but she taught this really interesting course that focused on Jewish women in the bible. It was all new to me, and I really liked it.

Irene started an organization called the Women’s Institute for Continuing Jewish Education. One of the best things she did was she organized these Shabbat afternoons once a month on Saturday afternoon, and she invited people from all over the United States. She was married to a doctor and had some money, but she raised money by charging admission. Quite a few people came to these, like the first woman rabbi, and just things that we aren’t exposed to in San Diego.

And then, Irene had this idea that we needed a feminist Haggadah, and she asked me to be the editor. So, we had a little group of women, and we met, and we made up things. It was pretty creative and I cut and pasted. I had a computer, but it was early in the computer era, and it was a cut and paste job. Irene made sure it was published. There was a women’s Haggadah that was published in Ms. but I think this was the first little pamphlet booklet that you could buy.

JW:  What’s the name of it?

JZ:  It’s called the San Diego Women’s Haggadah. You could still buy it online from Amazon. At least a few years ago, I bought a copy. It was very popular and sold a lot of copies. And then we made a second edition, so it was a little slicker, the second one.

JW:  Do you know what I just realized? You should say what a Haggadah is. I know, but maybe our audience does not.

JZ:  A Haggadah is the story of the Jews liberation from slavery in Egypt, and it’s told usually in a family setting or in a group setting during Passover, and followed by a very nice meal.

JW:  Thank you. And they were always about what the men did and it’s really lovely for me to find a women’s Haggadah and integrate that into our dinner.

JZ:  Get the second edition. It’s better.

JW:  Okay.

JZ:  That was such a big success, and Irene made some money for her institute off of that. We decided to publish a second book, she asked me to edit it, of women’s midrash. Midrash are basically stories of the Bible, and it’s kind of how Jews pass down religious lore by oral tradition. So, we made up biblical stories that featured women, and I came up with the title of which I’m very proud, which is, Taking the Fruit. We pulled that apple off the tree of knowledge.

JW:  That’s great.

JZ:  We had a women’s seder where we used the Haggadah; Irene organized that. Irene’s in her late ‘80s now, and a couple of years ago, she called me up and she said, “Jane, I’m standing in the San Diego Museum of History, and they’re having a special exhibit on the Jews of San Diego and there’s a big picture of you and me.”

I was working in the late ’70s. First of all, I got married to my husband Stacey in 1978. My job at UCSD was a soft money job and I got a hard money job at San Diego State. And somewhere in there I became the Title IX officer and affirmative action officer for this huge public university. That’s like 35,000 students. I have a lot of great stories about that.

JW:  Explain what Title IX is.

JZ:  Title IX, I think, was enacted in the early 70s.

JW:  Yes, I think ’72.

JZ:  It basically required any institution that was receiving federal funds to have equity between men and women.

JW:  In education.

JZ:  Yes. And San Diego State is a very athletic focused university. It’s kind of the second tier after the University of California. Then there are the state universities, and it had one of those football coaches who had been there forever. One of the girls teams, maybe the basketball team, came to me and said, “The boys get to stay in hotels when they’re on the road and they have dinner with steak and we have to pay for our own meals and transportation and hotels.” That got taken care of. In 1980, Stacey got a great job in Northern California. We were both from Northern California, so we moved to Northern California.

JW:  And that’s where you are now.

JZ:  Yes. And will be forever. So, it’s in the 1980s, I had a second child, also a boy, in 1981, named Isaac. Isaac is a Jewish folk singer who is increasingly popular in Northern California. So, everybody in the Jewish community knows him. That’s just an aside, I’m a proud mother. After we moved to San Francisco, I joined the first women’s health organization I found, which was the Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women. 

Right away, all these organizations I immediately get put on the board because I’m enthusiastic. I met some wonderful people there, including the founder of the New Israel Fund, which is where I give my money for Israel. It totally promotes cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis, so they just do a great job. I met some really wonderful people there.

Then I was asked to represent the National Women’s Health Network on an FDA advisory panel as a consumer representative. It was the General and Plastic Surgical Devices Committee. Their first issue that was brought up was silicone breast implants. The committee met in this very large room in the Hubert Humphrey building. The only other woman in the room was the transcriber, so, it was all men and mostly plastic surgeons. For three years, that issue was before our committee.

Up until 1978, anybody could invent any device, put it on the market, and there was no review or safety issues. Remember the Dalkon Shield? That’s how Dalkon Shield got on the market. Our assignment was, should these devices, silicone breast implants, where there was by the way, no good research – there still is no good research on that. Should they be classified in one of three categories? Category three requires research for safety and effectiveness, which is what I wanted. The first category was, it doesn’t require anything, just use safe practices in its manufacturer, and I can’t remember what the second one is.

I published an article in the National Women’s Health Network newsletter that was widely distributed, and I got pretty interesting letters from plastic surgeons. One of which, I was hoping I could get this person as an ally, but she was too scared to do anything; but I made allies on the committee. And also, I wrote a letter from the National Women’s Health Network saying that these should be class three devices. I just wrote the letter and I had the ED sign it. Anyway, they became class three devices. But did anybody ever follow up? The FDA never said, “How were you guys doing on your research?” There just wasn’t any research.

Right around the same time that I published this article, a woman named Sybil Goldrich wrote an article in Ms. Magazine about her experience with breast implants. She’d had breast cancer, had a double mastectomy, and had implants on both sides. She had horrible problems with them and it required re-surgeries, and finally she had them taken out. But because she wrote this article, a lot of women wrote to her and she started an organization of consumers. 

So, I contacted Sybil and we got together. Oh, man, she was great to work with. The other person who I worked with on this issue was Esther Rome, who was a founding member of Our Bodies Ourselves. Both of these women were just terrific people. Esther died of breast cancer when she was 50. Anyway, we had troops.

So, in the early ’90s, this is kind of the one issue where I was a major mover. In 1992, there was a meeting of the FDA because somebody had sent, probably it was a lawyer, had sent secretly all of the documents that he had uncovered about silicone breast implants, which were probably data from the manufacturers that they hid. Anyway, somebody sent this to the commissioner of the FDA, who at the time was David Kessler. 

He took it very seriously, and he called a meeting of the advisory committee that I had been on, but I was no longer a member of. I went to Washington, and I testified at the meeting. And also, I was asked to be on Good Morning America. I was so terrified. I had gotten used to talking in front of groups, but to be on television, I avoided it.

Part of what’s going on – this is an aside. When I was 28, I joined an organization called Reevaluation Counseling. It’s a peer counseling organization that was international at the time. There are a lot of women who ran the organization, and there was a component of eliminating sexism or women’s liberation within the organization that I was very active in. The women’s part was led by Diane Balser. She’d be a great person for your interview, in Boston. I may have mentioned her to you.

JW:  You did.

JZ:  Anyway, I’m still a member of that organization. I’ve been a big leader in it for a long time. It basically is an organization where you form relationships with individuals. You take half the time as client, and half the time as counselor, and everybody knows what’s going on. You look at your feelings and express them, usually working on your early feelings, in order that you won’t be as confused as we get when we’re in the midst of our feelings.

Anyway, from the beginning in co-counseling, I worked on being more powerful and taking on challenges, because that’s what my life was like. In all of these years, I had been working to become more powerful. So, when Good Morning America asked me to be on their show, I thought, I have to do it. I used co-counseling in the weeks before; I shook in terror. 

And the night before I was on, my son Milo, who was living in Boston, flew down to help me ou. He was very good at debating. He and I sat in a pizza restaurant and he had me write down five things I wanted to communicate. And he said, “It doesn’t matter what question they ask you; you just use these answers.”

So, he was great. I was on the show with their house doctor, a man, and one of the vice presidents of Dow Corning, which made silicone, and the head of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. The afternoon before the show, I got a call from the producer, who it turned out was a young woman who was a member of the National Women’s Health Network. And she said, “We don’t want you up there with these three men getting pummeled. What questions should we ask them?”

JW:  Oh, how fabulous.

JZ:  It was great, and I sort of choreographed it.

JW:  Oh, that was marvelous.

JZ:  Anyway, it turned out to be very successful. Plus, I was laden with makeup. I was in Washington for these hearings, which were concluded that day that I went to Good Morning America, so pretty much from the program, I went to Dulles Airport. But I didn’t take off the makeup, and three guys hit on me in the airport. That’s when I realized, “Oh, makeup is a signal that you’re interested.” But mainly, I wanted my family to see what I looked like with makeup on. Everybody was amused by the whole thing.

JW:  Yes. From one extreme to the other.

JZ:  After that meeting, breast implants were off the market for twelve years.

JW:  And they’re back? They were back after that? I didn’t realize.

JZ:  They came back, and they were required to do some research, but they did lousy research. Actually, even the research they did, showed that these things cause more problems than they’re worth, but they’re still very popular and they make a ton of money off of them.

JW:  Oh, I didn’t realize that.

JZ:  So, there’s a lot here that I’m not going to talk about. I kept being involved in Jewish things, like my synagogue. I was on the board of our Northern California Jewish camp, Camp Twonga. My younger son worked there for many years as a counselor, and he got married there. I wrote a few articles for the Jewish Women’s Encyclopedia. Do you remember that? That was published, I think in ’97. I was on the board of Breast Cancer Action, and then I got to be chair of the board. I was on the board for 16 years of the National Women’s Health Network, and I was chair of the board there for a few years. Stacey just came up to me and reminded me to talk about hormone replacement therapy, which is really the thing I’m most proud of.

JW:  Oh, okay, let’s hear about that.

JZ:  Bernardine Healey became the first female director of the National Institutes of Health, and there was some relationship there between her and maybe Cindy. But at any rate, the National Women’s Health Network had a project to get this big trial of hormone replacement therapy run by the NIH, and they were successful in doing that. And for the first time, they randomized women into the taking the hormones or not. Up until that time, all of the research was comparing women on the hormones with women not on the hormones. And the women on hormones always did better. 

Well, the reason was, the women on hormones were the people who saw doctors, they had more money, and they were more compliant. This stuff was not cheap. In all studies, health status is class related. People who are in better shape economically, do better health wise, and that was happening with hormones. So, they weren’t measuring hormones, they were measuring class status, basically. By randomizing, they equaled that all out. That disappeared as a factor.

By the way, this large clinical trial was totally opposed by the entire medical establishment. They thought it was stupid and ridiculous. The medical establishment really believed in their bones that hormone replacement therapy was good for women, and that it prevented heart disease and it prevented breast cancer and it prevented Alzheimer’s and all these things. The exact opposite turned out to be the case as a result of this trial, which are, by the way, still being argued today.

But the effects of that trial were, that the best-selling drug in America, Premarin; its sales just dived. It was so heavily publicized and women got off that drug. It was a huge difference. And they think that the results of that trial, far fewer women taking the HRT, that it had the effect of 10,000 cases of breast cancer being averted every year. So, it’s a big deal. That was a great.

JW:  What was your role in it?

JZ:  For probably 20 years before the Women’s Health Initiative, the National Women’s Health Network published a pamphlet that we revised every few years, talking about the benefits and costs of hormone replacement therapy, and why we thought it didn’t work the way it was being advertised and promoted. And then we decided to make a book. 

So, there were about five or six of us who got together during spring break in Santa Cruz, California, at a member’s home, and we spent the entire week working on this book. We did that for three years in a row just on spring break. It came out maybe about six months before the trial result came out. And the results of the Women’s Health Initiative totally corroborated all of the things we had been saying all these years. So that was very satisfying.

JW:  It made a big impact. The last question is, how did your click, shall I say, how did the beginnings of your awareness of women’s issues carry you through your career and your personal life? You told us about your career for sure, and I wonder if that was true for your personal life, too?

JZ:  Well, absolutely. First of all, I got a better husband the second time around.

JW:  Me too.

JZ:  That’s made a huge difference in my life. He’s the one who came up to me just a little while ago to say, “Hormone replacement therapy.”

JW:  Okay, I see. Great.

JZ:  I’m the mother of two sons, and they both grew up with feminism all over the place. They’re men, but they’re lovely men.

JW:  And they get it.

JZ:  They get it. I have met and made friends with so many fabulous women over these years. That’s wonderful. And then actually, this wasn’t my career. My career was teaching statistics and research methods.

JW:  Really? Oh, I didn’t get that.

JZ:  Virtually everything I’ve told you is voluntary activity outside of work. Although I did teach women’s health classes, I really used what I had learned in graduate school and along the way, in my analysis of various issues. I’ve had this totally satisfying life of feeling like I’m doing something that’s worthwhile. I think that’s the best thing that people can have. Besides just the closeness with family and friends, is to have satisfying work. So that’s great. But the question I really wanted to answer was, “What are the main issues?”

The main issues that guided my work, were regulation of drugs and devices. I was on four FDA committees, one of which was reproductive health drugs. Someday I’ll tell you the long story. My last day on that committee was the day that they approved Mifepristone (the abortion pill). We were sequestered in a hotel, protected by the Secret Service, trained by the Secret Service, taken to the meeting in a bus with the windows covered, the meeting was held in a warehouse with armed guards. It was like, wow. But anyway, but that was the day that Mifepristone passed.

JW:  You must be concerned about what’s going on now.

JZ:  It’s totally fascinating. And you know what I know? I know women are going to figure out a lot of things, and I hope this is the end of the attacks on women’s lives. The other major set of issues has been what we call, “Pills for Prevention” and that’s been a theme in the National Women’s Health Network. Women are a big market, and so there have been several times where they’ve tried to get women, all healthy women, to take pills to lower the risk of breast cancer, mostly. The first one was Tamoxifen. So, we did a lot of work to counteract the pressure to get healthy women on Tamoxifen.

There was a second effort on Raloxifene, which is an osteoporosis drug, and it also causes some women to lose the bones in their jaw. I don’t know what the relationship is. Anyway, I wrote a scathing article about that. It was research sponsored by the NIH and there was a rollout of the research before they had published their results. Anyway, it was dicey. So, I wrote an article about how they were putting one over on women again. I’m very proud that that never took off. We hardly heard from them after this. Hormone replacement therapy is another “Pills for Prevention.”

And then, I think that’s enough.

JW:  That’s quite a bit. I would say, more than enough. Well, then, is there anything you would like to add to close?

JZ:  I just want to thank you for letting me dwell on all of this. I totally enjoyed going over this aspect of my life.