2006 Donald E. Cummings Memorial Award Lecture. Industrial Hygiene: the founders, the pioneers, and the next generation.

This paper is about the Founders of industrial hygiene, the Pioneers who followed them, and the Next Generation of industrial hygienists. It highlights the development of industrial hygiene and how that development did not necessarily follow a master plan but has nonetheless been constructive and manageable. There has been and continues to be much conversation and debate about the status of our profession (from within our profession), most of which seems to center on what is wrong and how we are threatened. But as long as we focus on the core definition of what it means to be an industrial hygienist, change has been and will continue to be beneficial in the long run. To help us understand why our profession should feel confident about the future, I offer the reader a tour of some of the people who have guided and influenced the direction of the profession in the past, recent past, and present, and those who are likely to be guiding us into the future. The Founders planted the seeds that “became” industrial hygiene. The Pioneers “grew the trees and harvested some low-hanging fruit” (and some “not so low-hanging fruit”). (The Founders and Pioneers are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, and some have passed on.) The Next Generation is planting “new types of crops and becoming better farmers.” Two rules must be understood when reading this paper: