9UNP1274HD_Elisabet_Harrah_WordPress

- I am Kari Borne. I am from the Office of Continuing Education at UW-Whitewater, and we sponsor the Fairhaven Lecture Series each semester, and I'd like to introduce today's speaker. Elisabeth Harrahy is an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at UW-Whitewater, where she teaches courses in environmental science, ecology, aquatic biology, and environmental toxicology. She received her bachelor's from the University of Massachusetts, her master's from West Virginia University, and her PhD from Colorado State University. She has worked in consulting, academics, and for state government. Prior to accepting her current position, she worked as an environmental toxicologist, water quality standard specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, where she coordinated a statewide blue-green algae monitoring program. Her current research interests include occurrence, fate, and effects of blue-green algal toxins, pesticides, heavy metals, and pharmaceuticals in aquatic ecosystems. She has three young daughters who love to explore local streams with her and look for cool bugs. Dr. Harrahy's lecture today is titled Establishing a Link Between Pollution and Health: Women Scientists Who Led the Way. 

Welcome. 
(applause)
- So just one correction. I know I had women scientists, plural, in the title, but I have changed it. I narrowed it down to one. After spending the last month researching three female scientists, idols of mine, I realized I had enough to fill at least three lectures. So I have narrowed it down to Rachel Carson, who really, was an inspiration to those other two scientists. So we'll start with her.

As Kari mentioned, I am an environmental toxicologist, and Rachel Carson really was one of the original environmental toxicologists. So I thought I'd just start with a few words about environmental toxicology in general. 

We, environmental toxicologists, study the effects of various contaminants on organisms, on ecosystems, and when we're talking about contaminants in the environment, we look at things like sources of those contaminants. Is something coming from the end of a pipe? Is it coming from the atmospheric deposition? Is it coming through our drinking water? We are looking at the concentrations because the dose in most cases makes the poison. We look at mobility or transport. Once these contaminants get into the environment, how do they move? Are they moving with the water? Are they staying in place in soil or in sediment in aquatic ecosystems? We look at whether they are being taken up by organisms and then potentially passed on through the food web or food chain. 

We also try and determine how long they persist in the environment. So something like DDT, that was of concern to Rachel Carson, has a very long persistence in the environment, and almost all of us in this room today have detectable concentrations in our bodies. We also look at whether these things..

...are able to transform into something more toxic. We do actually have several contaminants, including some of the herbicides that are widely used here in Wisconsin, that will break down but into something that actually is more toxic.

So we're also concerned with the effects of those on organisms, and those effects are going to depend on all those other things we just mentioned. So we can talk about effects on individuals, like deformities, oops, excuse me.

On this fish that has curvature in its spine, or this frog that has deformed legs.

We can talk about effects on, say, photosynthesis. 

How the leaves are performing when they've been affected by something like ozone. We can look at interactions among different species within a community. So, predator-prey interactions, or competition, or the incidence of parasite load. We can look at how things get transferred in organisms, outside of humans, and in humans. So we know that a lot of contaminants will transfer in the milk. A lot of things transfer to the baby in the uterus.

We can look at reproduction. This is a very common endpoint. Something that we measure often when we're looking at the effects of these contaminants.

So it's important just to kind of define contaminant. 

There are lot of different definitions out there, but this is the one I prefer. Basically, it is anything that is found in an area where it does not belong. Most of our synthetic contaminants, things that are man made, they don't belong in the environment in the first place. It can also be something that is is normally found in nature, but now we have it in very high concentrations. So when we go in mining, for example, for heavy metals, we create these large tailing piles of waste, we concentrate all of those metals in one area, and then we have problems.

Before the early 1970s, we had major issues, particularly with point sources of contaminants where things are coming out of the ends of pipe. We had no regulation, very little regulation I should say, and these things were discharged in the environment in various ways, largely unchecked. So we had things like rivers catching fire. This is a picture of the Cuyahoga River, which is a tributary to Lake Erie. This is the big fire in 1952. 

Believe it or not, this happened several times on the same river, and it wasn't until the one that was in 1960 that people really started to take note.

That oil, which I just read the other day, was up to three inches thick along the surface of this river, along with all the other kinds of chemicals, plus nutrients from farming, all of that in this Cuyahoga River eventually flowed into Lake Erie. There were other point sources directly into Lake Erie as well, and eventually Lake Erie was termed dead. Now, it wasn't exactly dead. We actually had quite a bit of life in there, but it was not the kind of life we wanted. It was covered with blue-green algae, which are cyanobacteria. They led to drops in dissolved oxygen concentration. So, fish, mayflies, other aquatic macroinvertebrates could not survive in that water. This is actually a quote from one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books. 

It's funny. It's the second time I'm quoting Dr. Seuss today. "You're glumping the pond where the Humming Fish hummed. No more can they hum for their gills are all gummed. So I'm sending them off. Oh, their future is dreary. They'll walk on their fins and get woefully weary, in search of some water that isn't so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie." This was from The Lorax. 

This was published in 1971. So the Lorax, if any of you are familiar with that story, was speaking for the trees. Rachel Carson spoke for the birds.

Rachel Carson was born in 1907 in Pennsylvania. She grew up on a farm there. She gained her love for nature from her mother, who would frequently take her birding, take her out to the streams and lakes and ponds, look for bugs, like I do now with my daughters, go fishing. She also had a love of writing. And by the age of 10, she had published her first short story for kids.

One of the things that she found, when wandering around, was a seashell from the ocean, in the middle of Pennsylvania. And this fascinated her. 

The idea that that part of the country was at one point underneath an ocean. And that stayed with her for a long time, and when she grew up, she actually studied the ocean as a biologist.

She attended the Pennsylvania College for Women. She earned her bachelor's degree in biology there. She started off as a journalism major, and she switched to biology, but she still worked for the school newspaper because she did love writing. In her summers, she worked at Woods Hole, or the area that is now called Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. And then, from there, she went on to Johns Hopkins to earn her master's degree. She wanted to earn a PhD degree, which was largely unheard of for women, especially in the sciences at that time, but she had to quit and go to work. Her sister passed away and left two young nieces. And her father also passed away. 

So she had to go and work, and she went to work for the US Bureau of Fisheries, which is now known as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She was only the second female to be hired by that agency. Taking advantage of her writing and biological skills, they had her writing brochures, writing radio scripts, and doing research. And she largely spent her research time out on the ocean. Eventually, she put all of that into a book called The Sea Around Us. This book was very popular. It was written for laypeople, but she was able to incorporate a lot of amazing science, including how the oceans used to be, ideas that we now know as continental drift, the organisms that are common along the shorelines, and it was very, very popular. She won many awards for that book. They actually turned it into a film, a documentary that won an Oscar for best documentary in 1953. This allowed her to earn enough money to be able to leave the service and then move to Maryland and start working, focusing very hard on her next book, which was ultimately called The Edge of the Sea. 

She wrote three books about the ocean, actually. During this time, her niece, who she had helped raise, passed away, leaving a five-year-old son. And she ended up adopting that five-year-old son, and by now her mom was older and so she had to care for her mom and her now five-year-old. She had this house built in Maryland, which is now a national, excuse me, historic landmark. You can go and actually visit this and see the area where she did her writing. And she started working on her book. That was published in '55.

During that time period, after she finished that second book, she received a letter from an old friend of hers who lived in Massachusetts. This friend, Olga Owens Huckins, had a bird sanctuary behind her house. In this area, they were spraying for gypsy moth to try and combat this invasive gypsy moth species. 

They were also spraying for mosquitoes. But in this particular area, it was part of the gypsy moth eradication program. She became very concerned because there were thousands of songbirds that dropped dead. And she wrote her letter to Rachel, her friend, and said, "Can you please help me to do something about this? Who do I contact? What do I do?" Because in this time period, there was just large-scale, indiscriminate spraying of pesticides without the need for gaining permission from any of the landowners.

It was that idea of the silencing of those songbirds that inspired her to write Silent Spring.

So in the couple decades before she wrote Silent Spring, there was large-scale use of pesticides. Now, the pesticides were developed, most of them during World War II. 

Some of them were actually developed as chemical weapons. So, many of the organophosphate pesticides started off as chemical weapons. Many of the hydrochloride compounds, like DDT, were used as insecticides to help save the troops from diseases like malaria, and they did a very fine job of that. So there was large-scale spraying during the war. Also direct spraying onto those soldiers, which actually kept them healthy for the short-term, and when they came back after World War II was over, there were these large stockpiles of all of these pesticides. And so there was this idea that that we could make a lot of money off of these pesticides. This is what the chemical companies thought, and they got together with all the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue, and they created a very large market for themselves.

No need to worry about training pilots because all of those pilots who had come back from the war were looking for work, and many of them drove those spray planes.

So, hundreds of millions of pounds were sprayed all across the United States to combat various pest species in the forests, on the crop fields, in prairies, in urban areas, and in suburban areas.

I would imagine there are people in here who could talk about following the spray trucks. 

I've met many people who have said that. 
(laughs)

Here is one at the beach. So people are running around playing in the spray at the beach here. This is a picture taken in Japan. They're spraying these children's heads. All these white spots are the spray on top of their heads to combat head lice. And I'm guessing not every kid had head lice. And if you notice, these guys who are doing the spraying, they have their coats on and masks, and yet they're spraying these kids' heads.

DDT was used on airplanes. 

In between when people would get on and off, they would spray down the seats. So it was really hard to avoid this.

In fact, they actually, this was new to me as of a week ago, they actually embedded the DDT into wallpaper. Anyone have that kind of wallpaper? I didn't know that existed. So we had all kinds of exposure from multiple routes, food, water, air, within the home, outside of the home.

Carson took a lot of time to meticulously research what had already been studied on the effects of DDT and similar pesticides. She was meticulous, took a lot of notes. She had piles and piles of note cards for herself. In the end, she needed to hire a secretary to help her keep organized.

She was able to gather the information from studies that were previously published, and there were actually quite a few of them. What made her unique was she pulled all of those studies together to make a bigger picture. And later, a more recent scientist, Theo Colborn, did the same thing, pulling together many studies that looked at chemicals that we now know act as endocrine disruptors. But Rachel Carson was the first to do this. She tried to get a bunch of data from the USDA, US Department of Agriculture. This was the agency that was doing a lot of the spraying, largely through their gypsy moth program. But they did not want to hand over that data. So they did not publish their studies, but they had a lot of data that they had collected. She was trying to get it. There were some employees who slipped her a lot of that information. 

It's sort of interesting. So she had worked for the Fisheries Bureau, which was under the Department of the Interior. This was the Department of Ag. They have very different missions, which you would expect. The USDA more multiple use, forestry, grazing, agriculture. The US Fish and Wildlife Service today is more concerned with conservation. And, interestingly, this dichotomy still exists.

About, let's see, 15 years ago now, I'm dating myself, I did a postdoc project for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and I was asked by the Fish and Wildlife Service to look at all of the data that had been collected on a particular pesticide that was still experimental, and it only had DRC-1339 designation. It didn't have an actual name yet; it still doesn't. That had been used as an experimental use pesticide for 30 years by the USDA. 

Now, that is largely unheard of. You're supposed to use it as an experimental use pesticide, do your studies, submit it to EPA, get it registered license for use. That never happened. And so there was a lot of concern. This was used as an avicide meant to kill birds, largely, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, brown-headed cowbirds in fields where they're growing either rice or sunflower seeds, and these birds will come in and eat all the seed. So they wanted to kill something like on the order of two million blackbirds one year, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service got very concerned about the migratory songbirds. And so I was asked to get all those data, and I ran into a similar issue where they did not want to give up the data, the USDA. They said if you want it, you have to come over and find it. So I went to this building in Fort Collins where they have a research center, and they pointed to these cardboard boxes on the floor and I had to take them down the hall and photocopy every individual page and bring it back. And one of the reasons, after looking at all of that, was that some of their studies consisted of, for example, dosing one owl and then seeing if it was dead the next day. 

If it wasn't, they'd increase the dose. No controls. I mean, it was just really crazy.

So Carson, in examining all of those data, found that the falcons, eagles, those top predators birds were showing the most effects. They were not reproducing. There was no recruitment back into the population. Now most people understand that the reason for that is that there was eggshell thinning. Even high school kids learn this story nowadays. But back then, that was something really new, to try and pin down what the underlying mechanism of that loss of those populations was. Knowing that all things were connected, having an ecological mindset, Rachel Carson herself thought all insecticides should really be labeled biocides. 

Herbicides should be labeled biocides because they do not only kill those target species.

In her book, she wrote about things that today's scientists, like myself and my students, sort of take for granted, but these things were new back then. And I'm just going to go through quickly three of them. One is that pest species can develop resistance. Now, this was in the literature at the time, but it wasn't common knowledge. The idea that when you keep hitting a population of pest species with the same chemical, ultimately you end up with a bunch of those pest species that can tolerate that chemical. It doesn't work anymore. This keeps the chemical companies in business, but it's hard for those who are farmers, and who actually really need the pesticide. So all it takes is a few individuals within the population that have that tolerance underlying genetic makeup by chance alone to survive. You can kill off 99% of them, but if 1% of them left survived, those are the ones that are going to reproduce, pass those tolerant genes on to that next population. 

This is still a huge issue. We have now also antibiotic resistance.

This was a newspaper article from the New York Times in 1949.

And I love the way they wrote back then in the newspapers. It was much more poetic than nowadays. An official of the Department of Agriculture predicted today that gypsy moths, prime enemies of New England forests, would be driven completely off Cape Cod by July 1st. They even put a date on it.

Such a victory would end a battle in progress since 1889, which is when the gypsy moths were released. They were brought over from China in Massachusetts.

At the end it says, "An Air Force of small planes and helicopters is carrying the burden of this fight." 

Now, this is interesting to me because 40 years later when I was an undergraduate working for an entomologist at University of Massachusetts on a gypsy moth program, our field site was on Cape Cod. They're still there.

Two, the effects can be passed on through the food web or food chain, and that chemicals can actually biomagnify. This means you can put a tiny bit, like .000003 parts per million DDT in the water, and if you didn't know better and you went out and you just measured the concentration in the water, you would think we have no problem. But what happens is the zooplankton that are taking in this water, it concentrates in their bodies. Then we have small fish eating the zooplankton, large fish eating the small fish, and then fish-eating birds of prey, or humans eating those large fish, the concentration goes all the way up to 25 parts per million. This is orders of magnitude increase in concentration. Hundreds of thousands of times increase in concentration at those top trophic levels if the contaminant does what we call biomagnify. And that's what DDT does.

And then, third, long-term exposure can lead to human health effects. 

This was something she dedicated a couple of chapters in her book, Silent Spring, Two.

These pesticides in particular that she was looking at cause liver damage. We know that they can result in chromosomal abnormalities if the concentration of the exposure is high enough. And certainly when people were exposed in multiple ways, that was probably the case for some people. It can also cause cancer. And, in particular, leukemia has been tied to exposure to DDT. So here's a woman spraying in her baby's bedroom. And here's a nice suburban neighborhood spraying down the street here.

So Rachel Carson wrote her book for the layperson, but she was smart. She didn't include footnotes all over the place. 

That's a big turnoff for people when they're reading a book. But she included 54 pages of references. All of the studies that she had so meticulously cataloged are all cited in the back. And that helped her in the end because when the chemical companies were calling her an alarmist, all of her data were right there, and other scientists were able to back her up.

Houghton Mifflin, who was the publisher of this book, and Rachel Carson herself knew this was going to be controversial, and so they kind of eased people into it. They actually ran a series in the New Yorker. It was like a, I think it was a six-part series. So here's a page from, I was able to find it online, the first page. It says Silent Spring under here. Reporter at large. 

This is a series, and then Silent Spring. This is the initial part of her book. Right away the chemical companies jumped on this and started attacking her. Even the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, wrote that because Carson was unmarried, and yet attractive, she was probably a Communist. 
(laughter)

So here's a newspaper article: Silent Spring is Now a Noisy Summer. Everyone was in a big uproar.

The truth is, and to this day, 50 years later, so 2012 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, there are articles out there that will blame Rachel Carson for the deaths of millions of African children because of malaria and because of the banning of DDT here in the United States. Now, the World Health Organization and many US scientists promote the use of DDT, using it judiciously in certain areas in Africa because it is one of our tools in our toolbox. Rachel Carson never called for a ban on all pesticides. 

What she asked for was a much more responsible, ecologically sound approach. Not indiscriminate spraying everything.

While the chemical companies were attacking her for being a spinster, one of them noted what does she know about genetics or chromosomal abnormalities when she doesn't have any children. 
(laughter)
 She was able to withstand all of this and remain calm. She went on TV, back then CBS Reports was the big show, and she talked with the reporter there and explained very calmly that she's not calling for a ban on all pesticides. Here is what we are concerned about. She testified before congress. In fact, Kennedy, President Kennedy asked his Scientific Advisory Committee to investigate potential ill effects of these pesticides, and they, in the end, filed a report that validated her claims. The academic community validated her claims. 

In the end, she was given a lot of honors.

She died less than two years later, after the publication of Silent Spring, of breast cancer.

She was only 56 years old.

And the truth is, she was struggling for a long time. When she testified before congress, she was wearing a wig. She was walking with a cane. This reporter on CBS Reports told somebody, it's documented, he said, "We've got to hurry up and get this done because she's a dead woman." That's how he referred to her.

She was told about the result of her biopsy months after they had the results. So this is very common where they wouldn't tell women the results of their tests, and they made decisions for those women. 

And by then, her cancer had metastasized. So she went through many painful radiation treatments and avoided chemotherapy because she wanted to be able to write. During the time she was working on her book, she suffered from iritis and would go for weeks without being able to see well enough to read or write, but her secretary would help her and would organize things for her so that when her eye sight came back she could continue with writing. So it took her longer to write this book than she had planned. She kept her illness private. She didn't want to come out and talk about the effects of pesticides and development of cancer and have cancer herself. She was very worried that the chemical companies would use that against her and consider her nonobjective. She wrote: "Too much comfort for the chemical companies." So she really kept this secret.

Her legacy lies in her ability to raise awareness to the public. 

Now, as a scientist, I know scientists tend to spend most of their time talking to other scientists, preaching to the choir. We go to conferences. We talk to other scientists who are studying similar things. We rarely go out and speak to the public, educate the public. It is the public that is going to make certain kinds of decisions, management-wise, voting-wise, and in their own homes, that may affect their own health, and so it's really important for these things to happen. As a result of Silent Spring and several other events, we had this whole environmental movement. And as an outcome of that, we had the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency. There was a lot of legislation that passed. The National Environment Policy Act, which put limits on the amount of contaminants coming out of point source discharges like wastewater treatment plants and factories. We had the Clean Water Act, and we had the Clean Air Act. 

In addition, ultimately certain pesticides were banned through these processes established with this legislation. So DDT was ultimately banned. Its cousins were also ultimately banned.

That's the first Earth Day. So we had the first Earth Day six years after she passed away.

So while DDT and its relatives are banned, the truth is I have job security because there are thousands of other chemicals that we have to deal with.

The EPA and other regulatory agencies in no way can keep up with the chemicals that are out there. We're talking about maybe 80,000 a year that people are interacting with on a regular basis, and we just cannot test with single species, single chemicals, all of those, gather all the data we need to determine whether they should be banned or not. So this is a huge issue in the field of environmental toxicology. We have chemicals in our couches. 

In the foam in those chairs there's probably flame retardants, which is one of the chemicals I've studied. Our frying pans, the Teflon. Polar bears up in the Arctic have Teflon in their bodies, Scotchgard in their bodies. And so these things are moving throughout the environment. Many of them are very persistent, just like DDT was.

Rachel Carson continues to serve as an inspiration for scientists like me and many others, others who have made really big impacts, like Theo Colborn. Theo Colborn got her PhD when she was in her late 50s, from the University of Madison. She ended up writing the book, with a couple of other authors, called Our Stolen Future. The focus of that book is on endocrine disruption. How the chemicals that we are swimming in, are basically affecting our endocrine systems, reproduction. 

The fact that in some areas downstream of treatment plants, we have primarily only female fish.

Dr. Sandra Steingraber wrote Living Downstream. She has tied many chemicals to the development of cancer. That has been her focus. Christy Morrissey is a relatively new PhD. She's working up in Saskatchewan. She also is looking at a whole new class of pesticides called the neonicotinoids. These are used on various crops and they are natural in that they're using nicotine as their prime active ingredient, but they are very deadly to specific organisms, including honeybees. And so as we have lost many of the bee populations for a variety of reasons, one of the key reasons, the key thing that they're looking at right now, EPA is determining whether they need to ban this newer class of pesticides. 

Because they're more specific, we thought it was an improvement over some of the older classes, but the truth is they are harming some of these very important pollinator species. And that's what she's looking at, and she's looking at, indirect effects on the bird population. So I think Rachel Carson would be pretty happy about that.

Thank you.

(applause)