[Pharmwaste] remembering Theo Colburn

Tue Dec 16 10:07:55 EST 2014

Hi Laurie and all,

Laurie, Thanks so much for sending this.  

Yes, Theo was a genius-she brought together environmental contaminants and
hormonal problems first noticing them in wildlife-where they persist and
then linking to humans.  She was instrumental in getting EPA to develop
testing for endocrine disruptors, although after years and years the process
is not complete.  If you haven't read "Our Stolen Future", or visited the
website, I encourage you to  do so.  The issue of pharmaceuticals in our
water is but the tip of the iceberg.  

Very truly yours,

Catherine Zimmer, MS, BSMT

Zimmer Environmental Improvement, LLC

St. Paul, MN 

Ph:  651.645.7509

 <mailto:zenllc at usfamily.net> zenllc at usfamily.net

From: pharmwaste-bounces at lists.dep.state.fl.us
[mailto:pharmwaste-bounces at lists.dep.state.fl.us] On Behalf Of Tenace,
Laurie
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2014 7:10 AM
To: 'pharmwaste at lists.dep.state.fl.us'
Subject: [Pharmwaste] remembering Theo Colburn

Remembering the genius who got BPA out of your water bottles, and so much
more

http://grist.org/business-technology/remembering-the-genius-who-got-bpa-out-
of-your-water-bottles-and-so-much-more/

It was the late 1970s and Theo Colborn was, like pretty much everyone else
in the '70s, getting divorced. She was in her 50s and already retired from a
career as a pharmacist. 

She'd moved to a hobby farm that was close to the Rocky Mountain Biological
Station in Colorado and volunteered as a field researcher, sampling water
and insects for signs that they were picking up toxics released by mining
operations in the area. When she thought about what she should do next with
her life, the answer that came to her was "become an expert in water
sampling techniques." 

So Colborn went back to school. In 1985, at 58, she graduated from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in zoology and minors in
epidemiology, toxicology, and water chemistry. "I wanted to get the
education," she said, in a 1988
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nature/interviews/colborn.htm
l> Frontline interview,"so that I could maybe undo some of the things that
my generation basically foisted on society."

By the time Colborn died yesterday, at the age of 87, she had immersed
herself in decades of research - and inspired even more research - that
sought to do just that. The many, many proposed BPA bans
<http://grist.org/article/food-canada-bans-bpa-why-havent-we/> ? Go back to
the very beginning, and you'll find Colborn. The concern over dwindling
sperm counts <http://grist.org/news/pesticides-are-killing-our-sperm/> ?
Same thing.

After she graduated, Colborn went to work in Washington, D.C., first as a
Congressional Fellow and then as an analyst, researching industrial
emissions and ozone for the Clean Air Act. When those projects ended, she
was hired by two conservation organizations, the World Wildlife Fund and The
Conservation Foundation, to put together an overview of Great Lakes water
quality with another researcher, Richard Liroff. In the Frontline interview,
she talked about what happened next:

I was working on a book on the state of the environment of the Great Lakes.
And I pulled all this literature together, lots of papers, you know: fellows
working in Canada, people working in the United States, one out on Lake
Superior, others over, way over on Lake Ontario had done some work, written
their papers, had them published in a number of different journals. None of
them knew what the other was doing.

And basically, I sat in a wonderful position where I pulled all this
information together. And looking at it I said, "There is something wrong
here." And the easiest thing for me to do is to use - thank goodness for
computers - use a spreadsheet at a computer and start producing these
spreadsheets.

And as I plotted those names of the animals in the column on the left-hand
side, this is called the "Y" column, and then on the "X" column I plotted
the effects that were seen in the animals, it began to fall out that there
were serious problems and actually population declines, population crashes,
actually extirpation of some populations. They disappeared in some places.

What Colborn was seeing was the result of a wide variety of synthetic
chemicals that had come into being in the 1950s and '60s. Even though they
were present in the water at very low concentrations, they were subtly
changing how the animals in that system developed
<http://grist.org/article/the-ed-you-should-really-be-worried-about-endocrin
e-disruption/>  - how their genes were programmed, how their cells
differentiated and spread out through their bodies, and, ultimately, how
they were able to survive and reproduce into the next generation. The
healthy wildlife around the Great Lakes, often, were those animals that had
grown up elsewhere and migrated as adults. When their offspring failed to
reach adulthood, or couldn't reproduce, they were replaced by a fresh fleet
of new arrivals. The lakes looked healthy, in other words, but they were a
death trap.

Colborn credited this breakthrough, in part, to her unconventional
scientific background
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nature/interviews/colborn.htm
l> .

I looked at it from an entirely different perspective. I looked at
endocrinology differently. I began to look at toxicology. I was not trained
in toxicology. I was trained in pharmacology until I went back to college to
get my Ph.D. in my old age. Only then did I begin to sit in on toxicology
courses.

There is a reductionism in scientists, in the scientific community. I have
never been a reductionist. I am always thinking about the big picture. My
thesis committee for my Ph.D. will tell you that. They had trouble with me.

At the time, Colborn said, scientists working on environmental issues had
primarily been looking for cancer, which she described as "the big bugaboo."
Cancer was a rare event: In order to emerge, it had to circumvent the body's
defenses, and in a polluted community, not everyone would come down with it.
What Colborn found was different: To a developing organism, even an
infinitesimally small exposure could alter fetal development and the
possible effects - lower IQ, organ damage, trouble reproducing - could be
spread out across a community like jam on toast. The concept was so new
there wasn't even a term for it. In 1991, Colborn and a team of 21
international scientists working on the issue came up with one: endocrine
disruption.

Unlike a lot of scientists, Colborn was not shy about becoming a public
figure. She co-authored a popular science book with the dramatic title of
Our Stolen Future. She founded a nonprofit called the Endocrine Disruption
Exchange <http://endocrinedisruption.org/> , which, among other things,
helped fund and cheerlead more research into endocrine disruption and its
causes.

Colborn continued to do solid research
<http://cce.cornell.edu/EnergyClimateChange/NaturalGasDev/Documents/PDFs/fra
cking%20chemicals%20from%20a%20public%20health%20perspective.pdf>  and she
also went pretty far out on quite a few limbs, blaming chemicals derived
from fossil fuels for everything from Parkinsons to Alzheimers to obesity to
autism spectrum disorder. "Governments must take heed immediately," she
wrote, earlier this year,
<http://endocrinedisruption.org/assets/media/documents/FFC%20Nov%2014%202014
.pdf>  "or there will be too few healthy, intelligent individuals left to
preserve our humanitarian society and create some semblance of world peace."
(As if we don't have a pretty significant historical record showing that
humans were more than eager to be complete jerks to each other long before
anyone started messing with the benzene ring.)

Still, her big message was incontestable - that over 60 years ago, we began
to introduce all of these chemicals into the environment, and we still have
no idea what most of them do to us. In raising these questions, Colburn got
us closer to looking for answers.

Laurie Tenace

Environmental Specialist

Waste Reduction Section

Florida Department of Environmental Protection

2600 Blair Stone Road, MS 4555

Tallahassee, FL 32399-2400

850.245.8759

Laurie.Tenace at dep.state.fl.us

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