Toms River (79 page)

8.
Elizabeth Delzell, Maurizio Macaluso, and Philip Cole, “A Follow-Up Study of Workers at a Dye and Resin Manufacturing Plant,”
Journal of Occupational Medicine
31:3 (March 1989): 276–77.

9.
Richard McDonald, “Union Won’t Sit Still for Outbursts,”
Ocean County Observer
, March 20, 1988.

10.
In addition to being hazardous, trichloroethylene is also devilishly difficult to clean up. The usual ways of cleaning up underground spills, by digging up contaminated soil or pumping up tainted groundwater, work poorly for compounds like TCE, perchloroethylene, and vinyl chloride. These dense solvents dissolve very slowly in groundwater but sink to the bottom of the water table, like the oil at the bottom of an unshaken bottle of salad dressing. As a result, the solvents, which can travel for miles in groundwater without degrading much, are treacherously difficult to pump up through recovery wells. Hydrologists call them dense non-aqueous phase liquids, or DNAPLs. Wherever DNAPLs turn up, including in Toms River, multiyear, multimillion-dollar cleanups follow.

11.
See three stories by Anthony A. Gallotto in the
Ocean County Observer:
“Taint Seen in Well of TR Water,” November 11, 1987; “Water Co. Followed Procedures,” November 15, 1987; and “DEP Has Done Little to Find Source of TR Water Taint,” November 17, 1987.

12.
Lauren Ascione, “Ciba Indicted Again by Grand Jury,”
Ocean County Observer
, February 17, 1988.

13.
Gillick,
For the Love of Mike
, 109–12.

14.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
EPA Superfund Record of Decision: Ciba-Geigy Corp., Operating Unit 1
, April 24, 1989, 31.

15.
Don Bennett, “DEP Rejects Ciba’s Plant Plans,”
Ocean County Observer
, October 25, 1988.

16.
Patricia A. Miller, “Ciba-Geigy Has No Plans to Expand Its Dover Plant,”
Asbury Park Press
, April 25, 1991.

1.
This chapter’s brief sketch of the life and work of Theodor Boveri is drawn from the following articles: Fritz Baltzer, “Theodor Boveri,”
Science
144 (May 15,
1964): 809–15; Ulrich Wolf, “Theodor Boveri and His Book
On the Problem of the Origin of Malignant Tumors
,” in
Chromosomes and Cancer
, ed. James German (John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 1–20; and Thomas Ried, “Homage to Theodor Boveri (1862–1915): Boveri’s Theory of Cancer as a Disease of the Chromosomes, and the Landscape of Genomic Imbalances in Human Carcinomas,”
Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis
50 (2009), 593–601.

2.
“Taking everything into consideration, I believe that the essential point can finally be approached,” Boveri wrote in a 1901 letter to a scientific colleague. “I feel beyond any doubt that the individual chromosomes must be endowed with different qualities, and that only certain combinations permit normal development.” See Wolf, “Theodor Boveri and His Book,” 7.

3.
Theodor Boveri’s book on cancer, published in 1914, was called
Zur Frage der Entstehung Maligner Tumoren
(On the Problem of the Origin of Malignant Tumors).

4.
As cancer geneticist Allan Balmain pointed out almost ninety years later, if a modern reader substitutes “gene” for “chromosome” (Boveri had no way of seeing the genetic machinery tucked inside chromosomes), Boveri in 1914 managed to foretell the identification of oncogenes, tumor-suppressor genes, and even telomeres, the protective “caps” at the ends of chromosomes that shorten each time a cell divides in an aging organism, increasing the risk of cancer. See Allan Balmain, “Cancer Genetics: From Boveri and Mendel to Microarrays,”
Nature Reviews Cancer
1 (October 2001): 77–82.

5.
“The connection between cancer and certain chemical irritants is ever clearer than it is between cancer and the physical agents I have mentioned. I need only refer to the cancers of paraffin works,” Theodor Boveri wrote. Boveri,
Zur Frage der Entstehung Maligner Tumoren
, trans. Henry Harris, reprinted in
Journal of Cell Science
121, Supp. 1 (2008): 1–84.

6.
This chapter’s brief description of Hermann J. Muller and his work is drawn from the following articles: Guido Pontecorvo, “Hermann Joseph Muller, 1890–1967,”
Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society
14 (November 1968): 349–89; Daniel J. Kevles, “Hermann J. Muller,”
Science
214 (December 11, 1981): 1232–33; and Tove Mohr, “Hermann J. Muller, 1890–1967: An Appreciation by a Friend,”
Journal of Heredity
(1972): 132–34.

7.
Hermann Muller once attempted suicide, via an overdose of sleeping pills, after hearing that a rival was awarded a Nobel Prize. The next day a search party found him, dazed, in the woods near the University of Texas.

8.
Thomas Edison, who developed one of the first X-ray imaging machines, or fluoroscopes, was also one of the first to notice that long-term, direct exposure to X-rays often led to cancer. One of his assistants, a glassblower named Clarence Madison Dally who had helped Edison invent the incandescent lightbulb, developed tumors and severe radiation burns on his hands from demonstrating the fluoroscope. His left hand and four right fingers were amputated, prompting Edison to declare that he would no longer work with X-rays. “Don’t talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them,” he told the
New York World
in an article published August 31, 1903. Dally died the following year from metastatic cancer.

9.
Hermann J. Muller, “Artificial Transmutation of the Gene,”
Science
66: 1699 (July 22, 1927): 84–87.

10.
Hermann J. Muller, “Time Bombing Our Descendants,”
American Weekly
, January 3, 1948.

11.
Hermann J. Muller, “Radiation Damage to the Genetic Material,”
American Scientist
38:1 (January 1950): 35–59.

12.
Peter Armitage and Richard Doll, “The Age Distribution of Cancer and a Multi-Stage Theory of Carcinogenesis,”
British Journal of Cancer
8:1 (March 1954): 1–12.

13.
Alfred G. Knudson, “Mutation and Cancer: Statistical Study of Retinoblastoma,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
68:4 (April 1971): 820–23.

14.
Alfred Knudson provides an insightful historical overview of research into mutation and cancer in “Two Genetic Hits (More or Less) to Cancer,”
Nature Reviews Cancer
1 (November 2001): 157–62. See also Ezzie Hutchinson, “Alfred Knudson and His Two-Hit Hypothesis,” an interview of Knudson,
Lancet Oncology
2 (October 2001): 642–45.

15.
The Ames test works by using Salmonella bacteria that have mutated and lost their ability to produce the amino acid histidine, without which the bacteria cannot grow. The tester applies the mutated Salmonella to a medium that includes a small amount of histidine as well as the chemical being tested. The bacteria will grow for a short while until the histidine is consumed but then will stop—unless the test chemical causes the bacteria’s DNA to mutate back into a form that can produce its own histidine. If the chemical is highly mutagenic, the Salmonella will mutate and thrive even in a histidine-free medium. Some versions of the test involve using bacteria with defective outer coats, which makes them more vulnerable to the chemicals being tested. Sometimes liver enzymes are added to the culture medium to simulate the effects of human metabolism, which often alters the molecular structure of synthetic chemicals after ingestion.

16.
The identification of mutagenic compounds is not always a clear-cut process and is heavily dependent on the assay being used. The compounds identified as mutagenic in this chapter are listed in two government sources: Walter W. Piegorsch and David G. Hoel, “Exploring Relationships between Mutagenic and Carcinogenic Potencies,” National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences,
Mutation Research
196 (1988): 161–75, 167–69, table 2; and “2007 Right to Know Special Health Hazardous Substance List: Mutagens,” available online from the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services.

17.
United States General Accounting Office,
Superfund Program: Current Status and Future Fiscal Challenges
, July 31, 2003.

18.
The author was able to identify and interview Lisa Boornazian thanks to Ellen Tracy, the director of oncology nursing at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In 2007, the author contacted Tracy, who had worked in the oncology ward for many years, to ask if she knew the identity of the nurse who had anonymously initiated the Toms River investigation more than twelve years earlier. She did. Tracy agreed to find the nurse and to ask her if she was willing to consent to an interview. Lisa Boornazian gave her consent, having decided there was no longer any reason to remain anonymous because so much time had passed and she no longer worked at the hospital. Her sister-in-law, Laura Janson, who still works in the EPA’s Philadelphia office, felt the same way.

1.
In America, the New York tycoon John Jacob Astor III built the country’s first cancer hospital in 1887 after his earlier effort to fund a cancer wing at an existing hospital was rejected on the grounds that it might threaten other patients with infection. See James T. Patterson,
The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture
(Harvard University Press, 1987), 23.

2.
The famous member of the Webb family was Thomas’s younger brother, Captain Matthew Webb, who in 1875 became the first person to swim the English Channel without floats or other artificial aids. Victorian-era matchboxes displayed his picture. Webb drowned in 1883 while trying to swim across the swirling rapids just below Niagara Falls in New York. His brother Thomas Law Webb, despite his contribution to the field of biostatistics, earns but one line in his brother’s two-page entry in the 2001 edition of the
Dictionary of National Biography
(60:104–5).

3.
For more about the life and work of Karl Pearson, see Helen W. Walker, “The Contributions of Karl Pearson,”
Journal of the American Statistical Association
53:281 (March 1958): 11–22; and M. Eileen Magnello, “Karl Pearson and the Origins of Modern Statistics: An Elastician Becomes a Statistician,”
Rutherford Journal
1 (December 2005).

4.
For a concise, if dated, recounting of the history of significance testing and the long-running argument over its importance, see Ronald N. Giere, “The Significance Controversy,”
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
(May 1972): 170–81.

5.
Karl Pearson, “On ‘Cancer Houses,’ from the Data of the late Th. Law Webb, M.D.,”
Biometrika
(January 1912): 430–35. Pearson cofounded
Biometrika
in 1901 after the Royal Society refused to publish articles on biostatistics, deeming the field insufficiently scientific. To test how likely it was that the 377 cancer deaths in Madeley were distributed randomly, Karl Pearson conceived of the following experiment: If a bag were filled with two thousand balls, numbered one through two thousand, and someone then drew a ball out of the bag 377 times, recording the ball’s number each time before returning it to the bag and picking again, at the end of the experiment how many numbers would be written down twice, or even three or more times? Writing numbers on two thousand balls would be a tedious task, so Pearson designed some less burdensome experiments to answer the question through the use of random numbers and the drawing of playing cards. He conducted five such experiments, and each time found that the distribution was very close to what he had predicted. In only one of the five experiments was a number selected more than twice, and it was never picked four times. But in Madeley, there were
six
houses with three cancer cases and one with four, an extremely unlikely result for a chance distribution.

6.
Karl Pearson wrote, “Dr. Law Webb’s data provide sufficient evidence to justify a demand for a thorough investigation of the subject, such as is not feasible in the case of the individual medical man. They do not finally demonstrate that cancer is more frequent in one house than a second, but they do justify a complete inquiry into the possibility that ‘cancer-houses’ are not wholly a myth, in other words, that immediate environment is in the long run a factor of the frequency of cancer.” See Pearson, “On ‘Cancer Houses,’ ” 434.

7.
In 1932, two French statisticians, Auguste Lumière and Paul Vigne, analyzed 6,703 cancer deaths in 5,027 homes in the city of Lyon over a twenty-year period, including one home in which there had been eight deaths. Instead of trying to use a statistical formula to estimate a normal distribution of cases, as Pearson had, Lumière and Vigne instead obtained 6,703 birth, marriage, and death certificates for the city and studied the distribution of addresses on the certificates. What they found was that births, marriages, and deaths in Lyon clustered just as much as cancer did. Their discovery strongly suggested, the Frenchmen concluded, that mere chance was at work, not a hidden cause. A description of Lumière and Vigne’s work in Lyon appears in Percy Stocks, “The Frequency of Cancer Deaths in the Same House and in Neighbouring Houses,”
Journal of Hygiene
(February 1935): 46–63. The Lyon study is also described on page 10 of the May 5, 1933, edition of
Science
entitled “Cancer House Disproved Statistically.”

8.
Stocks, “Frequency of Cancer Deaths,” 46–63.

9.
At the time, the CDC was known as the Communicable Disease Center. Since then, as its portfolio has expanded, its name has changed four times: National Communicable Disease Center in 1967, Center for Disease Control in 1970, Centers for Disease Control in 1980, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1992.

10.
Clark W. Heath Jr. and Robert J. Hasterlik, “Leukemia Among Children in a Suburban Community,”
American Journal of Medicine
34 (June 1963): 796–812.