Poison Spring (19 page)

This was all too much for Senator Edward Kennedy, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure. He launched an investigation that concluded that “pesticides regulation in the United States is fundamentally deficient.”

The EPA has “largely failed in its responsibility to assure the safe use of pesticides,” Kennedy wrote in the report. “EPA has failed the consumer and the farmer, as well as the pesticide industry. I find it incredible that a regulatory agency charged with safeguarding the public health and the environment would be so sluggish to recognize and react to so many warnings over the past 5 years . . . The EPA was warned and certainly should have known that testing data, submitted by industry as long ago as 25 years ago, should not be accepted at face value in the reregistration of thousands of pesticide products presently used in our farms and in our homes. But EPA by and large ignored these warnings. Even more alarming is that apparently EPA made a conscious policy decision sometime in 1973 or 1974 not to evaluate the safety testing data submitted by pesticide manufacturers. The record behind this decision is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that EPA had no sound basis upon which to assume that data 15, 20, or 25 years old was generally good and reliable . . . In my view, EPA’s decision in the 1970’s not to evaluate safety testing data submitted in the 1950’s and 1960’s was irresponsible.”
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The South Carolina study merely confirmed what other scientists were beginning to suspect about the dangers toxins posed to the body’s intricate systems. EPA had funded another study in the mid-1970s at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in which the main investigator, Joan Spyker Cranmer, discovered that exposing mice before birth to pesticides had “profound” behavioral effects on the newborn animals. Cranmer was a pioneer in the examination of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors—chemicals that don’t fit the accepted maxim that “the dose makes the poison.”

Here’s the problem. Given the infinitely subtle chemical dance that goes on inside the human body, even the tiniest exposure to some toxins can throw the body’s music off key. And people who spend a lot of time in the home—notably women and children—suffer disproportionately from chemical burdens, because poisons trapped in the home can reach levels up to one hundred times higher than in the outdoor air.

Equally troubling, many chemicals, including chlorine-based poisons (DDT, toxaphene, PCBs, dioxins, and eleven thousand other organochlorines) mimic the female hormone estrogen, so they are particularly dangerous to women. Organochlorines are known to disrupt human developmental and reproductive mechanisms, causing breast cancer in women and feminization in men. Furthermore, these and other toxins can also pass from mother to fetus across the blood-placenta barrier and have deleterious effects on undeveloped organ and immune systems.

“Large numbers and large quantities of endocrine-disrupting chemicals have been released into the environment since World War II,” the eminent scientist Theo Colborn has written. “Many of these chemicals can disturb development of the endocrine system and of the organs that respond to endocrine signals in organisms indirectly exposed during prenatal and or early postnatal life; effects of exposure during development are permanent and irreversible. The risk to the developing organism can also stem from direct exposure of the offspring after birth or hatching.”
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Endocrine disruptors mimic or block hormones, and at nearly infinitesimal amounts, these chemicals cause harm to the system responsible for the development and healthy functioning of animals and human beings. The endocrine system regulates the body by sending signaling molecules and hormones into the bloodstream. Interfere with that process, as endocrine-disrupting chemicals do, and you get deadly diseases and birth defects. Large amounts of dioxin will be fatal, for example, but tiny amounts like those people get from eating contaminated foods “increases women’s risk of reproductive abnormalities,” according to Laura Vandenberg of Tufts University. “There truly are no safe doses for these hormone-altering chemicals. Hundreds of studies have examined people from the general population and found associations between low levels of hormone-altering compounds and infertility, cardiovascular disease, obesity, abnormal bone health, cancer and other diseases.”
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Among the endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the most deadly and ubiquitous include pesticides, plastic components and plasticizers, phytoestrogens, preservatives, industrial chemicals, flame retardants, sunblock, and fragrances. The result of poisoning life by tiny amounts of toxins is “neurological diseases, reproductive disorders, thyroid dysfunction, immune and metabolic disorders and more,” Theo Colborn writes.
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Warren Porter, a professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin, has found that rats and mice exposed to toxin levels similar to those found in groundwater all over the United States suffer measurable damage to their immune, endocrine, and neurological systems. Among other impacts, he found, this damage has made the animals more aggressive. Other studies complement these findings, revealing that children exposed to pesticides in utero or at preschool age turn out to be highly aggressive, with diminished intelligence and decreased stamina.
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For a time, the EPA supported the innovative and original work of scientists such as Joan Spyker Cranmer, even buying equipment for her laboratory. But after the late 1970s, when agency administrators read Cranmer’s report, the EPA tried to neutralize her laboratory and work, demanding that the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences transfer the EPA equipment from Dr. Cranmer’s laboratory to the Government Services Administration. The reason? Cranmer had found that low-level exposure of the women to three farm sprays (carbofuran, diazinon, and chlordane) pose “significant danger to the developing fetus.”
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In an August 17, 1979, letter to the EPA administrator, Douglas M. Costle, Dr. Cranmer accused the EPA of destroying a laboratory that had received national and international recognition and honors for its pioneering studies of the subtle and delayed effects of environmental chemicals on living organisms. “I feel that for EPA to destroy my laboratory by recalling equipment being used to generate data needed by the Agency would be the height of administrative folly,” Cranmer wrote. The letter had its intended consequence—EPA stopped demanding the return of its equipment—but the effort to disrupt the promising and timely work of Dr. Cranmer showed all too clearly how thoroughly the EPA was still beholden to agribusiness.

Cranmer is now a professor of pediatrics and pharmacology at the University of Arkansas School of Medicine and a respected member of Children’s Environmental Health Network. As it has done to so many other skilled scientists, the EPA damaged Cranmer’s career. Instead of encouraging her innovative and extremely useful work, the agency tried to bury her discovery and her spirit with crude managerial moves. But this behavior was also a setback for all researchers bent on investigating the origins of what (decades later) we know to be the endocrine-disrupting effect of petrochemicals on living beings.

As I explained above, the endocrine system controls the growth and development of organisms. The phenomenon that Cranmer discovered in 1979—that minuscule quantities of farm sprays have deadly effects on mice—has now been shown to be far more widespread than anyone could have imagined. So when it got rid of Cranmer, the EPA derailed a scientific advance that was not only prescient but lifesaving.

Chapter 7

The Swamp: The Big Business of Fraudulent Science

In the fight against corruption in the chemical industry and within the EPA, there have been few more courageous soldiers than Adrian Gross.

In the early 1980s, Gross was in his late fifties, five feet eight inches tall, round and muscular, with a small, nearly bald head, wire-rimmed glasses, and blue eyes. He walked bent slightly forward, usually holding a filterless Pall Mall cigarette. He often wore a tie, but he always wore a black leather jacket, carrying with him the rest of the protective gear that goes with driving a huge motorbike. He looked like an army corporal ready to do battle against a fierce enemy.

Gross was not a man for small talk, though he enjoyed telling jokes and stories. He spoke clearly, with the distinct accent of a highly educated Romanian Jew. At the age of sixteen, Gross had fled Romania for Palestine, where he joined the British army and fought in World War II. During the creation of the Jewish state, Gross fought against the British in Palestine. He then left for Canada, where he did advanced studies in veterinary pathology, before coming to the United States for more advanced education, earning a doctorate in statistics and biometry at Michigan State University.

It was this cosmopolitan background and scientific rigor that Gross brought to his work, first at the FDA and later at the EPA. His speech was characterized by ruthless logic, arrogance, and crushing contempt for the failings of less intelligent, less courageous human beings. But Gross was also unpretentious, with both a European’s erudition and a peasant’s forthrightness. He made difficult scientific issues easy to understand, but when he found fault with the science of others, he became angry. And if he smelled unethical behavior—and he smelled a lot of unethical behavior at the EPA—he became enraged. “Once you begin to ask questions, the entire fabric of gangsterism begins to fall apart, because some people are honest and resent having to fabricate things for too long for money,” Gross told me. “People are jealous and they are ready to spill the beans once the opportunity knocks at their door.”

“How do you deal with the crooks we have here at EPA?” Gross asked me. “After all, these are managers and scientists who work for the government. They are paid high salaries. Why do you think I have spent at least twenty years of my life in this struggle—fighting constant battles against those who want to feed the American people carcinogens? I’m also at war with these government scientists and administrators and chemical company men. They are destroying science in this country while they are poisoning its people, all of them.”

Gross had the toughness of a military veteran who had served with the British paratroopers fighting the Germans in Europe. And no sooner did he join the bureaucracy of the U.S. government than his outstanding scientific training (as a pathologist and statistician) and cunning slowly made him one of the foremost scientific investigators in the United States.

“You only master toxicology with experience. You need fifteen to twenty years on the job to know what things to look for when you review an animal study,” Gross told me. “There are more than a hundred different kinds of cancer you must be able to detect when you look at a pathology slide. We are here to see that people don’t eat carcinogens. So the first thing they should do at the toxicology branch is to ask their reviewers
to read the studies we get from the chemical companies.
”

When the EPA first approached Gross, they told him they wanted him to fix a “terrible mess” in the pesticides program: staff scientists were openly using industry’s own in-house (and therefore inherently biased) science in the formal approval process of dangerous chemicals. This was not oversight, it was rubber-stamping.

“The cut-and-paste business was what really broke the camel’s back,” Gross said. “Every Friday afternoon I used to get all my scientists together and discuss how you handle a review of an animal study. And if I had been left alone, I think, I could have made a difference, guiding those toxicologists in the right direction. But careful reading of what the chemical companies send to EPA in support of their sprays takes time. They pushed me out of that position, and the cut-and-paste reviews got into the routine of EPA’s business. Now I walk through the corridors where these cut-and-paste scientists work and, once they see me, they cease their discussion and look at the ceiling. Need I say these are also dangerous people who threaten public health as much as pesticide companies do?”

Congress could easily demolish the toxic alliance between EPA’s senior managers and the chemical industry, Gross says, but the truth is that congressmen and senators “don’t care especially when the agribusiness contributes money for their reelection.”

“You need to fire EPA’s senior managers and start all over again with a small and dedicated scientific staff to do the critical job of safeguarding our people from the deleterious effects of farm sprays,” Gross told me. “In this business you cannot cover up for too long, especially when you have so many people involved with simple operations like cleaning the shit out of the animal cages while scientists carry out complex experiments, each of which may involve hundreds of animals.”

I knew Adrian Gross for several years. I listened to his stories for many hours over a long period of time, and I admired his courage to expose fraud in the chemical industry and the government. And when it came to fraud, there were not many bigger cases than the scientific cesspool called IBT Laboratories.

Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories was a biological research and testing organization created in 1952 to test all kinds of chemicals for human safety and environmental effects. Joseph Calandra, the man who founded IBT, was a professor and scientist with advanced degrees in biochemistry and medicine. Calandra taught at the medical and dental schools of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago. He built his lab in Northbrook, a suburb close to Northwestern, and when his business picked up, he expanded his testing facilities to Wedge Creek, Wisconsin, and Decatur, Illinois.