In "Scanners Live in Vain" (1950), Cordwainer Smith explores a society where space travel is only possible if the pilots undergo drastic surgery. The "Great Pain of Space" makes it, well, greatly painful to be up there. Crew have their senses, aside from sight, cut off; they have a chest unit implanted so that they can continue to monitor and control the situation of their bodies. As a side effect, they lose empathy — becoming somewhat robotic in affect and making decisions that don't value human life — as well as giving them the sense of being like walking corpses. They are divided into two castes, the habermans (criminals forced into service) and scanners (volunteer officers who oversee the habermans).
I was wondering if this story was a conscious influence on Doctor Who's Cybermen, when they were created by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler in the 1960s. While they are certainly not identical (e.g. the Cybermen come from Mondas, the scanners can "cranch" to temporarily regain their faculties), it feels like they have a lot in common, especially in their early presentation in serials like "The Tenth Planet," which emphasizes their surgical alteration and excision of emotion in response to travelling "to the edge of space".
Is there any evidence that Davis and Pedler had been exposed to the "Scanners" story? Or, on the other hand, do we know enough about the origin of their idea to rule it out as a significant conscious influence?