In the mid-1990s, white women in the Bay Area believed they were being targeted by an epidemic of breast cancer with an epicenter in the sun-sculpted hills of Marin. The source of their fear, the press, had relied on claims by the Cancer Prevention Institute of California that the region’s high incidence rates were exploding in white suburbia without rhyme or reason.
But when scientists with the Centers for Disease Control determined that the so-called…