Val Beral - Career

Career

At Hammersmith Hospital Valerie Beral worked under Charles Fletcher, who recognised that she was suited to epidemiology and so propelled her towards the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. There she completed a combined course in Epidemiology & Statistics in 1971–1972 under the tutorship of Donald Reid. Beral felt very comfortable with the move because she had never felt happy in clinical medicine. She says that "she had never been able to understand how her peers could be so certain about making decisions on incomplete evidence. Epidemiology has offered her not an escape from that uncertainty, but the opportunity to tackle it head on." She also became a member of the Royal College of Physicians.

One of Beral's first interests as a professional epidemiologist was the combined oral contraceptive pill because of work she had previously done in family planning. She felt that epidemiology would give her the tools to begin to answer the questions that people had asked her about safety of the pill. Although Beral has moved on to other projects, this is still one area in which the data have yet to provide support for her initial instinct that the contraceptive pill, like pregnancy, will eventually be shown to protect against breast cancer. Later work included the effects of radiation, breast cancer trials and screening, AIDS, gene therapy, Hiroshima survivors, Chernobyl, food toxins, and much else. The British Medical Journal described her tally of jobs, publications, and committees as reading "like a checklist of the epidemiological causes célebres of the past three decades".

Beral completed her training in 1972 and began working for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for a number of years. From there she moved to direct the Cancer Research UK Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford in 1989. Beral said of being offered the role: "One of the major deterrents when I was offered the ICRF job in 1989 was the thought of being so much in the public eye. It's not my nature."

Beral has served on various international committees for the World Health Organisation and the United States National Academy of Sciences. She also chairs the Department of Health's Advisory Committee on Breast Cancer Screening.