New Scientist
Image: Images by John ‘K’
It’s the morning of 24 September 2015, and Mona Hanna-Attisha is hours away from the biggest moment of her scientific career. Then her phone rings. As she recalls in her new book, it was a representative from her medical school at Michigan State University, calling to say the institution wasn’t in a position to support her in what she was about to do. “I felt like I was being thrown under a bus,” she says.
Hanna-Attisha was about to go public with some controversial and horrifying evidence: that the children in Flint, Michigan, were being poisoned by lead in the drinking water. Her revelation went against the state, the scientific consensus – and now her university.
Just a month or so earlier, Hanna-Attisha had been urging the children in her care to drink the water in place of unhealthy sugary drinks – she felt it was her duty as an associate professor at MSU’s College of Medicine in Flint and a paediatrician in the city’s Hurley Medical Center. What had changed? Read more on newscientist.com…
