This was a new area of knowledge at the time. How did it come together?
It was like writing a new book. We were changing the paradigm. We knew that lead paint could cause lead poisoning, and it was understood that the routes of exposure were the eating of paint chips and the ingestion of lead dust that would get on children’s fingertips. Then, of course, there were poison control centers dealing with acute ingestions. But it was only through my work in El Paso and Needleman’s work in Boston that people came to understand the notion of subclinical toxicity—that pollutants could have harmful effects in children at levels that were too low to produce grossly visible symptoms. Very real damage was still being done.
Did things change after that?
It took us a while to realize it, but we were dealing with an entrenched vested interest in the smelter. When you’re doing measles outbreaks or fighting smallpox, there is no vested interest and nobody is in favor of smallpox, at least nobody in their right mind. Here, however, we were dealing with one of the largest employers in El Paso, and they actually commissioned a counterstudy. They got a local pediatrician and a guy who was a psychologist for the school board to do another little study of the city’s children. Those researchers claimed to find no difference in IQs. It escalated into a major food fight at several national meetings. The whole thing hung unresolved until Herb Needleman confirmed our work in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979. The essence of his paper was his demonstration that kids who had no signs of lead poisoning still had loss of IQ and alterations of behavior and shortening of attention span as a consequence of their lead exposure.
Between the new discovery and the fight with the powers that be, it sounds as if the pattern of your career was set right then.
Yes, I would say so. From that experience I realized there were probably a lot of environmental hazards out there about which we knew very little that could cause toxicity across a broad range of exposure. All of a sudden we had the beginnings of a map, and we could start to explore the effects of a whole range of chemicals on children. That realization coincided with the development of precise laboratory instruments that enabled us to measure chemicals in blood, in urine, and in environmental samples down to low levels. This gave us the tools to explore the effects of chemicals on children.
So with those tools in hand, you looked at pesticides?
In 1988 Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont became concerned that children were more susceptible to pesticides than adults. When we finally figured out what children were being exposed to in their daily diet, it was clear that kids were being substantially overexposed and that government standards were not protecting children. It seems ludicrous in hindsight, but at the time standards were set, they aimed to protect a 21-year-old guy who weighed about 150 pounds. Finally someone proved that children and adults require different sets of standards.
After five years of detailed analysis, you went to work on a large report for the National Academy in 1992. What happened next?
We got the report mostly ready, and we turned in what we thought was a virtually final draft to the Academy that fall. There was a woman there who had been a senior staffer in the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration. She was the senior support person for our committee at the National Academy. She was very helpful, and then we gave her the report around October of ’92, and she said she’d go through it, clean up the English, check the punctuation, do the footnotes, and all that kind of good stuff that a good staff person is supposed to do. She did all that and she sent the text back between Thanksgiving and Christmas of ’92, and thank God we read it because she had gutted the report. She had softened the conclusions. She had changed the word cancer to tumor throughout and just deeply weakened the report.
Was she under orders?
I never found out. I wrote a scathing report back to the National Academy that somehow got into the hands of Senator Ted Kennedy and led to the Academy’s being somewhat embarrassed. They granted my request, which was to reconvene the committee that had been dismissed. We had one more meeting in January of ’93, and we did the final rewrite of the report with the woman sitting right there. It got unanimous approval.
Was that a turning point in the regulation of pesticides?
It was a huge victory to get that report out. But then nothing happened because a few months later the [Newt] Gingrich Congress came to town, so the report gathered dust. By 1996 it was toward the end of the Gingrich Congress, and they suddenly realized the public perceived them as antichild and antienvironment, so they passed the Food Quality Protection Act by a unanimous vote of both houses. The stars lined up. It’s an old story—you have to work hard and get everything ready, then wait for the right political moment.
So at that point you said, all right, we’re done with pesticides—now we can move forward to the thousands of other chemicals in the environment?
Yes and no. The most important thing in the Act was the requirement that it establish special standards for children. When the EPA wants to set a pesticide standard, they have companies test the pesticide in rodents and measure what’s called the no observed effect level—the NOEL—which becomes the threshold. To extrapolate from rats to humans, they divide that NOEL by 100. But 100 wasn’t good enough to protect kids, so they had to divide it by 1,000. But in the mid-’90s, after the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act, the pesticide industry found a way around that: Instead of testing pesticides in rodents, they began testing them in humans—usually very poor people. For 15 years they have been paying these so-called volunteers a couple of thousand dollars to swallow the pesticide and see what happens. Then they just divide the figure where damage is first observed, the NOEL, by 100. And the EPA has been accepting these data over the protests of a lot of people, turning a blind eye to the third tenfold safety factor for children and not enforcing the law. The EPA’s decision to allow people to swallow pesticides to see what’s going to happen to them is frankly immoral.
The story seems to repeat itself again and again: No one wants to admit that damage has been done. Your department has also been monitoring the health effects from the collapse of the World Trade Center in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When the towers collapsed, 2 million tons of dust containing concrete, asbestos, glass, lead, and carcinogens rained down on Lower Manhattan. Yet less than a week later, the EPA said it was safe to work there and breathe the air. What is your perspective on this?
[EPA director] Christine Todd Whitman’s statement that the air in Manhattan was safe to breathe was stupid and ill considered because she was making a very strong assertion with almost no data. It’s like a doctor telling a patient that the patient is healthy before he’s done any tests. At that point only minimal air sampling had been done because all the air monitors had been destroyed. And most of the early sampling was focused on asbestos because people got it fixed in their minds that asbestos was the big hazard. It took a few more weeks before we realized the complex mix of chemicals and dust—especially the pulverized concrete, which was extremely alkaline—was the hazard. We realized only later that concentrations of dust in the air were so high that they overwhelmed all the normal defenses of the human respiratory tract, and people inhaled ounces of dust into their trachea or their bronchi.
