Authors: Douglas Carlton Abrams
7:20
P.M.
University of California, Berkeley
E
LIZABETH AND
F
RANK
arrived at Room 22 in Warren Hall just as Professor Ginsburg was being introduced. They would have to wait to talk to her about Apollo and the whales, but Elizabeth was glad to have made it in time for the lecture. The sheer volume of evidence that Elizabeth had discovered in the library suggested that widespread chemicals were affecting animal and human health—especially babies. She hoped that Professor Ginsburg would explain how all of these individual studies might fit together.
The large hall in the Berkeley School of Public Health was filled to capacity, and the only seats were near the front. Elizabeth and Frank walked down the aisle as inconspicuously as possible.
As the dean finished his introduction, the excitement was palpable in the air. “…what I’m trying to say in these rather long introductory remarks is that no one since Rachel Carson has done more to educate us on the role of toxins in our environment and in our lives. It is my privilege to introduce Professor Gladys Ginsburg.” There was a polite and respectful clapping from Professor Ginsburg’s colleagues, whose professional decorum prevented them from expressing the depth of their admiration. Yet this was a public lecture, and throughout the audience, a number of people who did not have to worry about the opinions of their colleagues leaped to their feet and gave her a standing ovation.
“Thank you very much,” Dr. Ginsburg said, smiling, clearly moved. Elizabeth imagined it must be some small validation for the hours she spent in airplanes and hotel rooms around the world, trying to sound the alarm about the dangers she and her colleagues had discovered.
Dr. Ginsburg stood only a foot taller than the wooden podium, with styled gray hair and a grandmother’s warm smile, but her voice was strong and confident. “We all know that we are facing grave dangers in our
outer
world.”
The first slide appeared on the screen behind her. Four pictures revealed the dangers of global warming: smokestacks spewing carbon emissions into a sky turned gray by pollution, the white spiraling cloud of a hurricane seen from space, the bones of a dead animal in a desert landscape, and a polar bear on a melting ice floe.
She clicked her remote, and the full, round belly of a pregnant woman appeared on the screen. The mother’s hands cradled the top and bottom of her near-term womb. “But what about the
inner
world?” Dr. Ginsburg asked. “We face dangers here that are equally grave.” The screen filled with a picture of the translucent pink body of a baby floating in a black sac, like an astronaut in space. Its tiny hands floated above its chest, its thumb practically touching its lips. “A recent study of umbilical cord blood found over 413 toxic industrial chemicals and on average more than 200 different chemicals per child. Since World War Two, approximately 80,000 chemicals have been invented, and thousands of these have been produced in quantities in excess of millions of pounds per year. Only a small percentage of these chemicals have ever been tested to discover their effects on animals and humans—”
“Dr.
Ginsburg,” interrupted a man in the back of the room, “the chemical companies follow strict state and federal regulations. How can you mislead this audience by suggesting that they are putting us and our children at risk?” The man was standing. He had short black
hair and wore a double-breasted blue suit. His voice was smooth and deep.
“I am happy to answer all questions at the end,” Dr. Ginsburg said wearily. “However, since you raise the issue of testing, I will address it now. The government only tests chemicals that are known to be health hazards, and very few chemicals are known in advance to cause problems. In other words, chemicals are innocent until proven guilty. In addition, when tests are conducted, they are done on one chemical at a time. We are exposed to great chemical cocktails that compound and exacerbate our reactions. Scientists are starting to discover interaction effects that can dramatically increase the danger.”
The man sat down. Elizabeth could see a smug smile on his face. He seemed satisfied with having sown a little doubt in the audience’s mind.
“Let’s look at what these dangers are,” Dr. Ginsburg said, returning to her presentation. “We are starting to discover that many of these synthetic chemicals play havoc with our physiology and that of other animals. They disrupt the endocrine or hormonal systems that regulate everything from our mood to our development to our fertility. What global warming is doing to the environment, endocrine disruption is doing to our bodies.”
Dr. Ginsburg showed a collection of pictures of fish with enormous, bulbous tumors, frogs with too many legs, alligators with tiny penises, and seagulls with deformed beaks. She explained the exposures that may have caused each of these problems.
“
Dr.
Ginsburg,” the man interrupted again, “so far, you are talking just about fish and birds. How do we know that the dangers are the same for humans?”
People were turning around and getting impatient with the intrusions, but Dr. Ginsburg seemed to know from experience that it was not possible to leave a heckler’s objections unanswered. “For too
long we have thought of the land and the sea as separate and ourselves as somehow different from the rest of life, but increasingly, we are seeing that all life is connected at a chemical level. We share 97 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and 60 percent of our DNA with something as distant as a fruit fly. Common sense would tell us that what affects them will eventually affect us. But we don’t just need to rely on common sense. Unfortunately, we have mounting evidence of the effects of these chemicals on humans. Let me give you one graphic example.” The next slide was a neck-down photo of a naked baby.
There was an audible gasp in the room. The genitals were very hard to distinguish.
“This,” Dr. Ginsburg explained gravely, “is an extreme case of hypospadias—where the urethral hole of the penis is not in the correct place. Here you can see the rather large hole is at the base of the scrotum, almost like a vagina. The sample of cord blood from this child contained 271 industrial chemicals that did not exist a hundred years ago.”
“How many cases are we talking about here,
Dr.
Ginsburg?” said the man in the back.
“Hypospadias has tripled in the last thirty years to one in every hundred births; undescended testes have doubled; and testicular cancer is also rising. Just as worrisome as these individual conditions is the overall decline in the birth of boys. North of the Arctic Circle, where many of these chemicals end up, twice as many girls as boys are being born. Much closer to home, in the heavily polluted town of Sarnia, Canada, three girls are now born for every one boy. The town only discovered this startling fact because they had so many girls’ softball teams and so few boys’. A recent study has found an unexpected drop in the number of boys throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere. The number of ‘missing boys’ in the U.S. and Japan alone is estimated at over 250,000.”
“Why is this happening, Dr. Ginsburg?” a woman in the front asked, with obvious worry in her voice.
“I guess we might as well take questions as we go. I understand that what I am saying is difficult to hear and raises numerous questions and concerns. Many of these chemicals look a lot like estrogen—the female hormone. Our hormonal and other bodily processes are so sensitive that the presence of toxins in the parts per billion can have profound developmental consequences.”
Another hand shot up in the air. “What kinds of exposures are we talking about?”
“Let me give you one example. Will you hold up the water bottle in front of you for the others to see?” Elizabeth recognized it as the hard plastic bottle favored by backpackers and athletes. Professor Ginsburg clicked past several slides to one of plastic baby bottles. “That water bottle and these on the screen are made out of a plastic that utilizes a chemical called Bisphenol A. It is also used in PVC pipe and to coat children’s teeth so they don’t get cavities. Seven billion pounds of this plastic chemical are produced and put into our environment every year, a little over a pound for each person on the planet. Exposing pregnant rats to tiny amounts of these plastic-making compounds resulted in their babies having precancerous lesions in their breasts when they reached puberty.
“This and other studies are showing that many adult diseases can be preprogrammed into our genes by exposure to toxins in the womb and during childhood. This is nothing less than a revolution in our scientific understanding of toxins and public health. We once believed that ‘the solution to pollution was dilution.’ In other words, if you kept your exposure under a supposedly safe level, there was no problem. We now see that this is not the case. Minute quantities can alter the expression of our genes and cause lasting health problems. Other possible dangers of Bisphenol A include impaired brain development, hyperactivity, Down syndrome, prostate cancer, low sperm
count, long-term memory loss, dementia, and even obesity and diabetes. Bisphenol A is just one chemical of the thousands our bodies have to contend with. You probably have always looked at the ingredients that you couldn’t pronounce in the products in your home, and something deep inside said that these were probably not good for you. The truth is, you were right. Many of them aren’t.”
“Dr. Ginsburg, you are only presenting part of the data.” It was the man in the blue suit in the back of the room. “There have been numerous industry studies that have shown these chemicals are safe.”
“There are many reasons that the design of certain studies hides the true dangers—which I don’t have time to go into—but let me show you one slide that I think will present the problem of relying on companies who have billions of dollars at stake to conduct their own health research. There have been 180 animal studies of Bisphenol A at levels beneath FDA/EPA safety standards.” Dr. Ginsburg clicked on the next slide. “In the studies funded by the government, 14 found no effect, and 153 found an effect.” She switched to the next slide. “In the studies funded by industry, 13 found no effect, and 0 found an effect.” There was an audible murmur in the room.
The man who had asked so many questions got up to leave, perhaps realizing that he had done what he could or that this audience was increasingly unsympathetic to his position.
“Sir, before you leave, would you share with the audience whether you work for an industry lobbying group or a product defense firm?” When the audience showed surprise at this last term, Dr. Ginsburg added, “Yes, even products now have lawyers.”
The heckler looked over his shoulder but left without answering. Dr. Ginsburg turned her intense gaze back to the audience.
“We worry about chemical weapons in the hands of terrorists, but we are using chemical weapons against ourselves. Endocrine disruption is a time bomb that could lead to the extinction of our spe
cies and much other life on the planet. We have spread these chemicals so far and wide that there is no longer any hope that one person can avoid exposure through food and lifestyle choices. Eating organic and other precautions are important, but they are not enough. What is required is collective action. Our survival depends on it. But I must share with you my greatest fear. There may be fates worse than extinction. If we don’t address the problem and we do survive, we may do so as such a disease-riddled, suffering species that we may someday wish we had been wiped out.”
E
LIZABETH SAT THERE
stunned. It was difficult to accept the magnitude of the danger. Even as scientists, she and Frank had not yet known that the problem was so great. Clearly some people—no doubt many—were trying to obscure the data. After the applause died down, she and Frank walked up to speak with Professor Ginsburg as other audience members gathered around.
“Dr. Ginsburg, my name is Elizabeth McKay, and I am a marine biologist.”
“Oh yes, I’ve seen you with that whale, Apollo.”
“That’s why I’m here. I’m trying to understand what might be happening to the whales. Could endocrine disruption and the kind of environmental toxicity you were describing lead to lesions and tumors in newborn whales?”
“Absolutely,” said Professor Ginsburg. “We’re starting to find these problems in marine as well as terrestrial life. To prove the relationship, of course, you need to do testing.”
“What tests do you recommend?”
“You’re at UC Davis, aren’t you?”
Elizabeth decided not to explain that she had been kicked out. “Near there.”
“Well, I work a lot with Pete Sanchez at UCD. He’s a toxicolo
gist with a state-of-the-art lab. If you can get tissue and water samples, he can do the testing.”
Frank said, “Have you mapped the distribution of these chemicals? For example, in Northern California?”
“We’re working on that now. Actually, most of our mapping gets done in Pete’s lab. That’s his specialty. Would you like me to let him know you’ll be in touch?”
“Yes, thank you,” Elizabeth said, knowing what she had to do next.
I
N THE ROW
where the heckler had been sitting, Amanda Hanson flipped open her thin silver cell phone.
“Elizabeth McKay is a bigger problem than I thought. I want to know everything she knows, the minute she knows it. Did you get her phone?”
“Our security officer was…unsuccessful.”
Hanson inhaled deeply, trying to control her temper, remembering what her yoga teacher had said about deep breathing and relaxation. “What are you going to do
now?”
“We’ve figured out how to do it remotely. With the transmission of one firmware patch, her cell phone will tell us everything we want to know and more.”
FIFTY-THREE
9:00
P.M.
“G
OD, THAT WAS DEPRESSING,”
Frank said. He and Elizabeth were outside the lecture hall, trying to process the disturbing information. But most of all, they were thinking about their child. The future of the species was no longer an abstract fear—part of that future was right in Elizabeth’s womb. “She seems so cheerful, even though she’s telling us that the world is ending.”