William Goodson, MD, breast cancer specialist and a past-president of the SFMS, has been toiling on some innovative research for over a decade.  His publication of some results were featured in a cover story in the San Francisco Chronicle in September, with the title “Study: BPA, methylparaben block breast cancer drugs”. Goodson, senior clinical research scientist at California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute and lead author of the study published in the journal Carcinogenesis, noted that BPA and methylparaben not only mimic estrogen's ability to drive cancer, but appear to be even better than the natural hormone in bypassing the ability of drugs to treat it. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="333" caption="Photo: Lacy Atkins / The Chronicle"][/caption] Goodson attributes his interest in this field to meetings at the SFMS and editorials he wrote in San Francisco Medicine while serving as SFMS president in 1999.  He served as faculty at early meetings of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, founded at the SFMS in 2002.  As for the chemical he studied for this paper, as he concluded in the Chronicle, "It's used so much. We kind of swim in it.” Goodson plans to continue with more research in this arena. The Carcinogenesis article: http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/09/01/carcin.bgr196.abstract?sid=ed031383-0b51-49c1-b768-02b7b5b80054 The Chronicle article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/12/MN2U1L2ERJ.DTL#ixzz1Y44FJeEu The Collaborative on Health and the Environment: http://www.healthandenvironment.org