ABOVE: COURTESY OF CONNIE BIGELOW
Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicology researcher known for her work on radiation, pesticides, and breast cancer, died November 7 at an assisted-living facility in Alexandria, Virginia, according to The Washington Post. She was 89 years old and had dementia and the adrenal disorder Addison’s disease.
“She was absolutely a champion for the underdog,” her daughter, Connie Bigelow, tells The Scientist.
Sherman was born Janette Dexter Miller on July 10, 1930 in Buffalo, New York. She received bachelor’s degrees in biology and chemistry at Western Michigan College of Education (now Western Michigan University) in 1952 and completed medical school at Wayne State University in Detroit in 1964.
Sherman began to do legal work in toxicology in the 1970s after realizing that a series of her patients who worked in the automobile industry had developed health problems from arsenic exposure. She served as a consultant or ...
