Toms River (76 page)

4.
Today, the term
mountain sickness
is used to describe an acute condition caused by exposure to low-density air at high altitudes; Hesse and Härting applied the term to a very different set of symptoms.

5.
Before going to work for the German government, Walther Hesse took two trips to America as a steamship doctor. When he returned home, he married a wealthy, cultured woman he had met in New York and wrote one of the first papers on seasickness published in the medical literature.

6.
“Das Vorkommen von Primärem Lungenkrebs,” 160.

7.
After leaving Schneeberg, Walther Hesse studied with the famed microbiologist Robert Koch, just as Koch was about to identify the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis and cholera. Hesse spent the rest of his life working on the control of bacterial diseases; he is best known for discovering, with his wife, that agar is an ideal surface for growing bacterial cultures. Angelina Hesse had used agar, a gelatinous material derived from seaweed, to keep her jellies and puddings solid.

8.
Werner Schüttmann, “Schneeberg Lung Disease and Uranium Mining in the
Saxon Ore Mountains,”
American Journal of Industrial Medicine
23 (1993): 355–68, 361–62.

9.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
EPA Assessment of Risks from Radon in Homes
(June 2003), 64, table 20.

10.
“Amendment to National Oil and Hazardous Substance Contingency Plan; National Priorities List,”
Federal Register
48:175, pages 40658–40673.

1.
The staff reductions at the
Ocean County Observer
accelerated after 1998, when it was bought by Gannett Inc. On November 28, 2007, Gannett announced that it was switching the paper from daily to weekly publication, dropping all coverage outside of Toms River, merging it with a weekly newspaper and changing its name to the
Toms River Observer Reporter
. The paper had been known as the
Observer
since it was founded in 1850. Six months after Gannett’s announcement, Don Bennett accepted a buyout offer and retired from the newspaper he had joined thirty years earlier. His career as a working journalist in Ocean County spanned forty-four years.

2.
The first known attempt to induce tumor growth experimentally via transplantation occurred in 1775, when a Frenchman named Bernard Peyrilhe implanted a human breast tumor in a dog. The transplanted tumor did not grow, however. In 1889, a German scientist named Arthur Hanau finally managed to transfer squamous cell tumors from one rat to another. Researchers across Europe rushed to conduct their own transplants but were disappointed. Their experiments usually failed, and even successful transplants provided little useful information.

3.
For a brief but cogent summary of the theories of cell irritation, embryonal rest, and dedifferentiation, see Sadhan Majumder, ed.,
Stem Cells and Cancer
(Springer, 2009), 7–9. See also: Lorenzo Tomatis, “Cell Proliferation and Carcinogenesis: A Brief History and Current View Based on an IARC Workshop Report,”
Environmental Health Perspectives
101, Supp. 5: Cell Proliferation and Chemical Carcinogenesis (December 1993): 149–51; and Folke Henschen, “Yamagiwa’s Tar Cancer and Its Historical Significance—From Percivall Pott to Katsusaboro Yamagiwa,”
Gann: The Japanese Journal of Cancer Research
58 (December 1968): 447–51, 447–48. Another useful source is William Seaman Bainbridge,
The Cancer Problem
(Macmillan, 1918), which is widely regarded as an authoritative source of information on competing theories of carcinogenesis of that era.

4.
In addition to Henschen, “Yamagiwa’s Tar Cancer,” this chapter’s account of Yamagiwa’s life and accomplishments draws on the following sources: James R. Bartholomew, “Japanese Nobel Candidates in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,”
Osiris, Second Series
13 (1998): 238–84, 253–62; Murray J. Shear, “Yamagiwa’s Tar Cancer and Its Historical Significance—From Yamagiwa to Kennaway,”
Gann: The Japanese Journal of Cancer Research
60 (April 1969): 121–27; “Katsusaboro Yamagiwa (1863–1930),”
CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians
27:3 (May/June 1977): 172–73; and Katsusaburo Yamagiwa and Koichi Ichikawa, “Experimental Study of the Pathogenesis of Carcinoma,” an excerpt of their original 1918 study,
CA: A
Cancer Journal for Clinicians
27:3 (May/June 1977): 174–81. See also William Johnston,
The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan
(Harvard University Asia Center, 1986), 202–4.

5.
Waldron, “Brief History of Scrotal Cancer,” 395.

6.
At least two other researchers induced cancer under controlled experimental conditions before Katsusaburo Yamagiwa did in 1914, but their work was mostly ignored at the time. The French physician Pierre Edouard Jean Clunet in 1908 induced skin cancer in two rats by bombarding them with X-rays. The dosages were so high, however, that the other two rats in his experiment died, leading some scientists to question the validity of the experiment (though not the carcinogenicity of X-rays, which was already apparent from the illnesses that struck many pioneering radiation researchers). In 1911, the American pathologist Francis Peyton Rous identified the first cancer virus by demonstrating that cancer could be transmitted from one animal to another via injection. Working at what was then known as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York City, Rous ground up a sarcoma tumor from a chicken, passed it through a filter, and injected the cell-free extract into a healthy chicken, which then developed cancer. Rous’s conclusions were so far outside of the mainstream that few scientists tried to follow up on his work—including Rous, who shifted to other areas of research before returning later to cancer. In 1966, Rous was finally acknowledged with a Nobel Prize for describing what is now known as the Rous Sarcoma Virus, the first oncovirus. Today, viruses are thought to be responsible for 15 to 20 percent of all human cancer cases.

7.
For more information about the Fibiger-Yamagiwa controversy, see Carl-Magnus Stolt, George Klein, and Alfred T. R. Jansson, “An Analysis of a Wrong Nobel Prize—Johannes Fibiger, 1926: A Study in the Nobel Archives,”
Advances in Cancer Research
92 (2004): 1–12. See also Bartholomew, “Japanese Nobel Candidates in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” 257–62.

8.
Embarrassed by the 1926 fiasco, the Nobel Committee in Physiology or Medicine did not award another prize for cancer research until 1966, when Francis Peyton Rous was very belatedly acknowledged for his 1911 discovery that some cancers were virally transmitted.

9.
Mysid shrimp are also known as opossum shrimp, for the thorax pouch in which a female carries her eggs. The species typically used in toxicity testing is
Americamysis bahia
. Despite the name and superficial resemblance, mysids are not actually shrimp.

10.
Thomas Fikslin, biology section chief, New York regional office, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Biomonitoring Inspection Report—Toms River Chemical Corporation,” March 29, 1982, memo to the chiefs of the water enforcement and water facilities branches of the EPA regional office.

11.
By the late 1970s, the mutagenicity test the state wanted Ciba to conduct had become an important tool for toxicologists. The Ames test was named for the man who had developed it just a few years earlier: Bruce Ames, a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at the University of California at Berkeley and a major figure in environmental cancer research. His inexpensive and relatively simple test helped
pave the way for the banning of many mutagenic chemicals in 1970s. By the 1990s, however, Ames was infuriating environmentalists by arguing that traditional tests on laboratory animals, in which they are dosed with high concentrations of chemicals and then checked for tumors, are not a good model for predicting whether chemicals cause cancer in humans. He also argued that many naturally occurring compounds posed at least as big a cancer risk as the synthetic chemicals produced by industry.

12.
Leslie McGeorge and Tessie Wishart, Office of Cancer and Toxic Substances Research, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, “Chemical and Mutagenicity Analysis Report,” February 9, 1983.

13.
McGeorge and Wishart, “Chemical and Mutagenicity Analysis Report,” 2: “It is suspected that the mutagenic activity may be due at least in part to unidentified nitrogen-containing compounds. Numerous nitrogenous compounds have been shown to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic.” See also Attachment A of “Biomonitoring Inspection Report—Toms River Chemical Corporation.”

14.
The series by Don Bennett appeared in the September 30 and October 1, 1984, editions of the
Ocean County Observer
.

1.
Rose Donato died in 1996, at age eighty-three.

2.
Almost thirty years later, no one involved in the events of 1984 remembers exactly how Greenpeace first found out that Ciba-Geigy was discharging industrial waste into the ocean off New Jersey. Dave Rapaport does not remember getting a letter from Rose Donato about it, although Rose’s daughter, Michele, is certain her late mother sent one.

3.
Monkeywrenching
became a favored term of environmental activists after the publication of
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, by Edward Abbey (Lippincott, 1975). The darkly hilarious book, a counterculture classic, describes the adventures of four self-styled “environmental warriors” who blow up bridges, bulldozers, and other encroachments on wilderness in the American West. The phrase “throwing a monkey wrench” is much older, referring to an action that causes something to break down.

4.
This chapter’s description of Ernest Kennaway’s life and work is based on the following sources: Ernest Kennaway, “The Identification of a Carcinogenic Compound in Coal Tar,”
British Medical Journal
4942 (September 24, 1955): 749–52; James W. Cook, “Ernest Laurence Kennaway, 1881–1958,”
Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society
4 (November 1958): 139–54; David H. Phillips, “Fifty Years of Benzo(a)pyrene,”
Nature
303 (June 9, 1983): 468–72; Antoine Lacassagne, “Kennaway and the Carcinogens,”
Nature
191 (August 19, 1961): 743–47; and G. M. Badger, “Ernest Laurence Kennaway,”
Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology
78:2 (1959): 593–606.

5.
Despite not being able to participate directly in the final identification of benzo(a)pyrene in 1932 due to his worsening Parkinson’s symptoms, Ernest Kennaway lived until 1958 and was ultimately awarded a knighthood, among other high honors, for his work identifying carcinogens. He died in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the place where, almost two hundred years earlier, Percivall Pott had first drawn attention to the carcinogenic potential of coal pollution through his observations of
chimney sweep boys. Kennaway was seventy-six when he died, having stayed an active researcher for almost his entire adult life thanks to the assistance of his wife, Nina, who helped him dissect animals, keep records, and perform other tasks requiring a steady hand.

6.
Greenpeace’s coming-out party actually began a few days before the press conference, thanks to an attempted ruse Dave Rapaport cooked up with William Skowronski, a founding member of Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water. Rapaport asked to appear on a local radio talk show to discuss the organization’s pollution-fighting activities around the world. When it was time for outside callers, Skowronski dialed in and issued an invitation that he pretended was unrehearsed. “You don’t have to go to the South Pacific to battle pollution,” he told Rapaport live on the air, “you can battle it right here in Toms River.” Rapaport responded enthusiastically, as if he were hearing about the Ciba-Geigy factory for the first time instead of having spent the previous two months investigating the plant and even sneaking onto the property twice.

7.
The banner that Samuel Sprunt and Beverly Baker hung from the Ciba-Geigy water tower—“Reduce It, Don’t Produce It”—referred to a key element of Greenpeace’s toxics campaign that year. In addition to trying to shut down industrial discharges into oceans and lakes, the group was pressing companies to reassess their manufacturing processes to reduce the amount of waste they generated. In fact, as Dave Rapaport would later explain, the attempted shutdowns were just a dramatic way of attracting attention to Greenpeace’s real goal: reducing the use of toxic chemicals in manufacturing.

8.
Sam Sprunt and Beverly Baker did not have to return to Toms River to answer the trespassing charges because Greenpeace negotiated a plea bargain on their behalf. On October 24, 1984, the two activists pleaded guilty in absentia to four counts of trespassing. They were fined three hundred dollars each by a Dover Township municipal court judge, who agreed not to impose any jail time. Greenpeace paid the fines.

9.
The attempted theft of Greenpeace’s jar of effluent was mentioned in an August 5, 1984, editorial in
The Reporter
, a weekly newspaper in Ocean County. Its headline read, “The Greenpeace Show Ending Is Up to Us.” An accompanying cartoon, captioned “The Sludge That Ate Lavallette (A Ciba-Geigy Production),” showed a monster emerging from a pipe. The jar incident was also described by Dave Rapaport, Nancy Menke Scott, Michele Donato, and Samuel Sprunt in interviews. The identity of the pilferer is unknown, although all sources agree he was affiliated with the Ocean County Chamber of Commerce.

10.
Eugene Kiely, “Greenpeace Challenges Ciba to Water Tests,”
Ocean County Observer
, August 20, 1984.

1.
In a January 1980 letter to the state Department of Environmental Protection, a Ciba-Geigy manager estimated that the factory was burying 9,800 drums and 8,900 cubic yards of sludge in the landfill yearly.