OTTAWA--For J.J.B. Pierre Blais, doing good science has also turned out to be good for business.
Two years after the Canadian chemist was fired from his country's health department in 1989 after his repeated attempts to have the MÆme breast implant removed from the market (The Scientist, September 4, 1989, page 7; also see accompanying story), Blais is running a burgeoning consulting practice built on advising physicians whose worried patients want their implants removed.
Blais never abandoned his campaign against the implant, which is coated with a material that laboratory tests have shown can degrade into a substance that causes cancer in laboratory animals. Last month his views gained support from the United States Food and Drug Administration, which has advised physicians to stop doing implantation surgery using the MÆme implant until the agency has completed a study of potential health risks of the polyurethane foam that coats the silicone ...
