Valerie Beral

Dame Valerie Beral AC DBE FRS FRCOG FMedSci (28 July 1946 – 26 August 2022) was an Australian-born British epidemiologist, academic and a preeminent specialist in breast cancer epidemiology. She was Professor of Epidemiology, a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford and was the Head of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford and Cancer Research UK from 1989. Valerie Beral was born in Australia on 28 July 1946. She completed her MBBS degree graduating with first-class honours from the University of Sydney in 1969. Beral then spent six months travelling the "hippie trail" through Asia of which she said "That taught me how much I wanted to work. But I still wanted to leave Australia." She then travelled to England and successfully applied for a job at the Hammersmith Hospital. At Hammersmith Hospital, she 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 1971–72 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 was a member of the Royal College of Physicians. One of Beral's first epidemiological interests was the combined oral contraceptive pill because of work she had previously done in family planning. Beral moved on to other projects but this is an 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.