“The Cancer Detectives” Film Preview and Discussion

Click this link to join: https://wgbh.zoom.us/j/99001979557

Featured guests include:

Gene Tempest is the writer and director of The Cancer Detectives. She is an award-winning filmmaker and historian whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe and The New York Times, and whose screenwriting has been recognized by the Writers Guild of America. She has taught at SUNY Cortland and Boston University, and from 2016-2017 served as the first-ever Historian in Residence for American Experience, where she helped fund and develop new history programming for public television.

Deirdre Cooper Owens is an award-winning historian and popular public speaker. She is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and The Origins of American Gynecology.

The discussion will be moderated by Cameo George, executive producer of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE.

About the film: The story of how the life-saving cervical cancer test became an ordinary part of women’s lives is as unusual and remarkable as the coalition of people who ultimately made it possible: a Greek immigrant, Dr. George Papanicolau; his intrepid wife, Mary; Japanese-born artist Hashime Murayama; Dr. Helen Dickens, an African American OBGYN in Philadelphia; and an entirely new class of female scientists known as cyto-screeners. But the test was just the beginning. Once the test proved effective, the campaign to make pap smears available to millions of women required nothing short of a total national mobilization. The Cancer Detectives tells the untold story of the first-ever war on cancer and the people who fought tirelessly to save women from what was once the number one cancer killer of women.

The Cancer Detectives premieres Tuesday, March 26th at 9/8c on PBS.

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Major funding for American Experience provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance, Carlisle Companies and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Funding for The Cancer Detectives provided by GBH Voices and Equity Fund and members of The Better Angels Society including The Fullerton Family Charitable Fund. Additional funding for American Experience provided by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, The American Experience Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and public television viewers. American Experience is produced for PBS by GBH Boston.