CHEMICAL CRUSADER: Through her leadership at NIEHS and NTP over the past three years, Linda Birnbaum has pursued a broad vision of environmental health that incorporates gene–environment interactions along with the impacts of disease, diet, stress and other factors.
Image: Courtesy of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)/Steve McCaw
-
What a Plant Knows
How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it actually feel an insect’s tiny, spindly legs? And how do cherry blossoms know when to bloom? Can they...
Read More »
From plastics to flame retardants, the ubiquitous chemicals of our daily lives have raised public health concerns like never before. Inside the Beltway, however, data-crunching scientists are often no match for industry lobbyists and corporate lawyers. The exception, no doubt, is Linda Birnbaum, the toxicologist who leads, two little-known scientific agencies, the National Institute of Environmental Health Services (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program (NTP).
Last April, Birnbaum sat inside a Capitol Hill conference room packed with poker-faced chemical industry executives ready for a showdown. The NTP had recently issued its report on carcinogens—a sort of name-and-shame list of chemicals on which no company wants to find its products. Charles Maresca of the Small Business Administration—taking a stand for the maligned styrene industry—argued that the report was "based on inaccurate scientific information" and faulty peer review.
North Carolina congressman Brad Miller (D) was unimpressed. He took the microphone and described Birnbaum's resume of more than 700 publications in public health, toxicology and environmental science. Removing his black reading glasses, he glanced at Maresca, and delivered the fatal blow with relish: "And you're a lawyer. Isn't that right?"
If Birnbaum got a kick out of the put-down, she didn’t show it. After 33 years working as a federal scientist at both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the NIEHS, Birnbaum's career is a study in the way science becomes law and the ways lobbyists subvert science. She has watched her contributions to an EPA report on dioxin sit in limbo for 20 years, she has worked to study the health impacts of types of asbestos that are not legally recognized as asbestos and she has challenged the chemical industry in her pursuit for answers about the controversial chemical bisphenol A (BPA).
Through her leadership at NIEHS and NTP over the past three years, she has pursued a broad vision of environmental health that incorporates gene–environment interactions along with the impacts of disease, diet, stress and other factors. She has also tried to make the NIEHS quick on its feet: After the 2010 BP oil spill, she initiated the Gulf Long-Term Follow-Up (GuLF) study, the first extended review of the health effects of an oil spill.
Scientific American sat down with Birnbaum in Washington, D.C., to learn more about environmental health, toxic chemistry and the politics of chemical regulation.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
How did you become interested in toxicology?
When I was in eighth grade at Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in Teaneck, New Jersey, I had a science teacher who was an attractive, peppy, young blonde woman who was also the cheerleading coach. I was a cheerleader, and that positive reinforcement made it okay to like science.
I became interested in thyroid hormones. I can't tell you exactly why, but I had written to a local pharmaceutical company and asked if they could give me some rats and some chemicals. That's something that would never happen easily today—but they did it! I got a letter from them that said, "Please come. We'd like to talk to you." The next thing I knew, I had 40 rats in four cages and feed and bedding and everything else, along with thyroid hormone and chemicals that block thyroid hormone.
They let you keep the rats at your house?
Yeah. We had them in my basement.
What did your parents say about that?
My parents were really incredibly supportive—even when one escaped. I eventually found its body and put it in the freezer figuring I'd dissect it at some point. But my grandmother went in thinking it was a package of ground beef. She had a little bit of a fright.
How much of human disease is due to environmental exposures?
The estimates vary, and it depends on how you define environment. People often say it's about 30 percent. I think that's defining environment fairly narrowly, considering only environmental chemical exposures, but your environment includes the food you eat, the drugs you take, the psychosocial stress you're exposed to and so forth. After all, what's the difference between a drug and an environmental chemical? One you intentionally take and the other one you don't. Considering all that, I would say then the environment is much more than 30 percent.
We also know—especially from studies of identical versus fraternal twins—that for many different diseases, genetics is not the whole story. Actually, I think it's time to stop asking, "Is this caused by genes or is this caused by the environment?" because in almost all cases, it's going to be both.
Why has it been so difficult to link environmental exposures to specific health consequences?
Nobody is exposed to one chemical at a time, right? I mean we live in a soup of chemicals and we live in a soup of exposures. Here, I'm having a lemonade. Well, it's not only lemon in here. I'm sure there's some sugar. There might be a preservative or something. I don't know what's in this. So think of all those things interacting, but when we test chemicals in the lab we tend to test them one at a time.
I guess we don't consider these other types of exposures.
Right. A high-fat diet, for example, can completely change the way your body handles chemicals. Exposure to a certain chemical may lower your ability to respond to an infection. At EPA we did a lot of studies exposing rats and mice to air pollutants and then to bacterial infections or influenza infections. Those who were exposed to pollution were more likely to die, whereas those in clean air recovered.
Rights & Permissions
See what we're tweeting about
16 Comments
Add CommentFrom using coal ash in kitchen products to polluting ground water to insufficiently or untested food additives to home pesticides, humans have always and will always be the guinea pigs. We can’t really trust the FDA or NIH when it comes to pharmaceuticals; not even OTC meds. The US chemical industry is so politically powerful and so entangled with modern life that the public is basically screwed. So, if we are going to be exposed to something like hexavalent chromium or coal ash no matter what, why even bother with a healthy diet or exercise. If the government doesn’t really care enough about the public to ensure the health of the nation why even bother with the pretense?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience finally recognizes that we are a chemical soup composed of water and carbon living in a bigger chemical soup of environment composed of other elements, and life is sustained by various chemical bondings between these two soups.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think its more to do with business acting with impunity. It seems obvious the people working for
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe agency are very concerned. All the agency can
accomplish is to make known the dangers. It really
is up to ALL of us to be informed.
There is a point where the 'other' is actually us.
A surprisingly uncritical and one-sided article, not up to SA's usual journalistic standards.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile much is made of the influence of business interests on US regulatory policy, we don't hear very often about the inluence of activists, which is equally pervasive and, in my experience, significantly more prone to distortions and half-truths. We also too often uncritically conflate the interests of activists with those of the public; while there may be overlap, these are not the same. Finally, we often assume that because someone is employed by a federal agency that they don't have an agenda, but this is in too many cases not correct. Unfortunately, when one becomes an activist (regardless of their agenda or academic and professional qualifications), they cease being a scientist.
If you have read 'Silent Spring' then you know how
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnegligent business can be. Then there is 'Love Canal'.
The Gulf multiple oil spills.
Though the people's reaction might seem overly restrictive, they have very good reason to hold
that view.
Another for the Cassandra file.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel "The Sheep Look Up," has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality ... as we know it."
-- William Gibson in a 2007 interview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up
Unfortunately, you've avoided responding to my point. I don't think anyone would argue that business has not on some past occasions been irresponsible, and at other times the hazard created by an action simply wasn't recognized until later.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy point is that while business has an agenda, activist groups have one also, which is chiefly to raise funds for their continued existence; this often means distorting evidence or trumpeting conclusions that are unsupported by the data. Assuming that someone who is an activist has pure motives is as great a mistake as assuming the same of business. Again, once you allow activism (of any stripe) to color science, it is no longer really science.
We all want clean food, air and water. Don't we? If we do, then respective groups in society have a responsibility, as human beings, to safeguard these things. Businesses, individuals, trade organizations, governments. Science is a great tool, but it is only that. True science keeps asking questions, simply because of the complexity of the world around us. Therefore, science ALONE will never give society the answers. The answers will be found in the CONscience necessary to care about Earth's beings and environments, in light of what is known.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExplain "Chemtrails", the who, what, how, when, and why, and effects of GM frankenfoods as well as on humans directly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhew. After reading this article, I feel like I'm swimming in "chemical soup." LOL. =)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI totally believe all the chemicals and plastics are causing all these illnesses that we have. There are tons of people now with autoimmune illness now and cancer is rampant. We should take a look at the Amish, they don't use chemicals and most of them are really healthy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe EPA did a huge job protecting citizens from contact with chemicals but were more effective protecting individuals from grams of useful chemicals and net, net let the tons users be in charge of learning. We now have a generation that will pour out rubbing alcohol after 2 years on their own shelf without the thought that nothing changes without chemistry. Without thought is the result of no contact by generalized fear and ignorance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you read "The True State of the Planet"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://amzn.to/IrVHYa
you might have a different opinion! No one died or contracted cancer at Love Canal, and DDT is much
safer than Rachel Carson described.
Ditto!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsn't odd how any time someone doesn't support the chemical industry they are "activists" and their science is somehow suspect? Not that there is anything wrong with being an activist, or, more to the point, that activists can't be good scientists. To say that this article is "not up to the usual standards of SA" is ridiculous on the face of it. It is an interview with a scientist who is respected internationally with good reason for her 33 years of outstanding science and contributions to the field. If you knew remotely what you were talking about, you would know that when Dr. Birnbaum began the dioxin review - now over 20 years, delayed continuously by the chemicals industry - she thought the review would show what the industry said it would show - that the dangers of dioxin were exaggerated. To her own surprise, the findings of the rigorous scientific analysis of the reassessment changed her mind. The data changed her mind. The truth emerges from the data, not someone's political agenda, or commercial interests. Efforts to malign Dr. Birnbaum - or Scientific American, for that matter, for publishing this article - are the true reflection of bias and activism. Why aren't the efforts of those who stand in the way of chemical reform, who reject all but their own "science", and who have their own political agenda also considered activists, and why don't they identify themselves as such? Those who deny the reality of what the science - solid, reproducible, reputable, peer-reviewed science - has shown are no different than those who deny that human activity has an impact on global climate effects. They are the same people who denied the links between tobacco and cancer, and they use many of the same tactics. SA should be applauded for articles that educate about these issues,and the comments about "Cassandras", the quotes from William Gibson who wrote science fiction himself, and the continued bashing of Rachel Carson are frankly laughable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this