I feel so lucky to have participated in the two-week advanced lecture and lab course Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Hazards and Opportunities (ECHO), which was held in beautiful Woods Hole, Massachusetts in May 2024. This immersive learning experience continues to enrich my writing and teaching, particularly as I continue communicating with the exceptional faculty who put so much energy into our group of thirteen mostly graduate students from various disciplines and universities, including Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and NYU. Although I was quite conscious of the carbon footprint of a course like this, there is really no substitute for having personal interactions with the people doing the science.
Dr. Joan Ruderman and Dr. Pat Hunt are the creators of ECHO, and Dr. Hunt credits Dr. Ruderman’s years at MBL, including two as its Director, with helping to establish ECHO at the MBL, where most seminars are not only highly selective but also highly specialized. ECHO is unique in its interdisciplinary, problem-based focus.
I’ve been thinking about Dr. Ruderman’s description of the cell signaling that occurs during fertilization. The egg is “a quiescent cell, like most of the cells in your body that stay that way until they get a signal, like a growth factor, to stimulate them to grown and divide. The egg will sit and sit and sit until the sperm comes – and it has this whole package just waiting to unfold. But you know the sperm hits, the doorbell rings, and the party is on.” Signaling in the body, as she says, is so complex and important and still not fully understood, even by those conversant in all the known pathways. I don’t think it is just a metaphor to consider that the incredibly intricate and transformative signaling within a body is like the comparably tessellated, reticulated signaling among all of us – microcosm to macrocosm. Certainly, the organisms of the Earth could be – and have been – compared to the cells of the body that is Gaia, our living, breathing planet. This rings true. One cell sending a signal to many others can revolutionize the project, can suddenly change a way of being, can spring from almost nothing into new life, just like the moment of fertilization. Potential becomes actual, matter becomes form. It sometimes seems that we are accomplishing nothing compared to the huge, daunting work of saving the planet and ourselves – but perhaps we are on the brink of that moment of inspiration, on the cusp of something entirely different.
After training at Barnard College and MIT, Dr. Ruderman had a long career as a Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. While there, she also served as Senior Science Advisor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. After going emeritus from Harvard, she moved to Princeton, where she currently is a Lecturer in the Environmental Studies Program at the University there.
I confided in Dr. Ruderman that I’ve come to regard these interviews as some people might view baseball cards – a collection on paper of the best and brightest – my own highly geeky collection of scientist heroes.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
JMK: Hey, Joan!
JR: Hi there! It’s wonderful to see you. I love all those butterflies behind you.
JMK: I love botanicals and things from nature. The watercolor behind you looks like an anemone or something.
JR: I think it’s meant to be a seaweed. I got it in Woods Hole a long time ago.
JMK: Thank you so much for the questions you sent me – they were very productive because I wrote a bit that I should probably include in the introduction.
JR: And I know you want to interview me, but I want to hear the answers to my questions. What is ethnography, anyway?
JMK: An ethnography is a methodology originating in anthropology that describes a system and culture. Traditionally, anthropologists would study “exotic” cultures, like Clifford Geertz….
JR: And Margaret Mead.
JMK: Yes – and Margaret Mead. They would try to account for that culture and describe that culture using stories and descriptions and observations, and it could include quantitative elements, but it was primarily qualitative.
The idea is immersing yourself in another culture. In ethnography, it is normal for the observer to join a new world and become what they are studying to some extent. The ECHO course was excellent for that – to see how you all work as scientists, and to feel that I was among you for a couple of weeks at least.
My immediate culture is the children and the parents and the families who suffer the effects of these environmental chemicals and our degraded environments, and the scientists and healthcare practitioners and activists who are devoting their lives to try to fix this terrible problem and counter the effects of systemic poisoning.
But I would say, my real community and culture is larger: US / Western civilization more broadly. Because if you just step back a few steps, it is astonishing that we have given these industries the social license to poison every single body, not only human, but every organism on the planet so that they can make money. And so the project is to see the strangeness and the bizarreness of that, trying to step out and back a little bit. I just wish I could get people to see how strange that is and to interpret that.
JR: That is a massive culture. And wouldn't it be wonderful to write yet another book about how that all came about? I mean, we have these toss-away phrases like Upton Sinclair’s: “It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
JMK: Yes.
JR: And so that was 120 years ago.
JMK: And yet, how much has changed? Not enough.
JR: So I was thinking what the biggest challenges that we face in this area are: greed, mostly corporate greed, as well as political greed by accepting big contributions from corporations, which they can do because of Citizens United. And then also feeding on that is consumerism, the more-is-more culture and the better-is-better culture. I have to think that that's got to be hardwired into us.
JMK: I think so, because we evolved in a scarcity environment.
JR: You talk about that a little bit in Environmental Legacies and to get people to reflect on that…. I don't think it's going to be easy. If you subscribe to the New York Times, you might see the Wire Cutter, which always promoting the best – they had the best dough scraper!
JMK: Oh, my goodness!
JR: You can use it to level off the flour in your measuring cup. And you think, wow! I love it – go to Amazon…. No – stop that finger, right?
JMK: It’s so easy to buy things. They have made it so there is no friction whatsoever to just buy something from Amazon.
JR: And we got very habituated during the pandemic – it was a lifeline for many people, and then so greed, consumerism, and then sort of lazy, short-sighted thinking are all factors. You may be familiar with the phrase that the economist Alfred Kahn said, “the tyranny of small decisions.”
JMK: I don't think I do know that -- I like that very much.
JR: Every day, you think. “Oh, I'm tired. I'll just get takeout, or I have this prepackaged meal in the freezer. I'm starving. I don't want to do any more dishes. I'll just microwave it in a so-called cardboard container,” which contains a lot more than just cardboard.
JMK: Yes.
JR: I see it with my grandchildren. They're cranky on the way home from daycare, so they get one of these fruit pouches.
JMK: I'm not lucky enough to have grandkids, and I don't know if I will. Already, I’ve resolved that if I do, I will keep my nose out of their business – except for environmental health. But there are so many things. It must be hard because you must want to tell them about everything.
JR: It is, and the way I've kind of gone about it is to say, “you know, I heard an interesting thing the other day” as opposed to, “You really need to listen and pay attention to this,” and then say, “you know, that kind of got me thinking, or I was concerned about how hard it is for some parents to cut back on those things.” But you know it's tough. You have to make a decision sometimes between your relationship and just getting them to try to do the right thing. I haven't got that game down.
JMK: I haven't, either, with my kids. I'm trying to eliminate plastic in the kitchen. So I've been buying them some Pyrex, so they at least don't use plastic containers. But yes, it's hard – and it's hard to know where that line is, because we can't any of us be pure. We're not going to avoid microplastics completely, for instance.
JR: No, it's impossible. If you avoid them at home, probably when you go out to eat in the restaurant, everything's canned beans and canned tomatoes. So you do the best you can. That’s my acceptance of the situation.
So who do you see as the main audience for your book? Who do you want to say, “wow, I'm going to pay money and buy this book.”
JMK: You asked that question – who would be my dream reader? I was jokingly thinking Kamala Harris or Oprah Winfrey. I want as many readers as possible, right? And that's probably not realistic. But what I've been really encouraged about is a lot of the people like yourself, who have a lot of influence and connections, are pretty enthusiastic about this project.
It's by necessity an academic contract, because I tried getting a popular contract, and that is not easy – and I couldn't get an agent. Because I have an academic appointment, I can get my foot in the door with an academic book. I haven't heard back from Johns Hopkins. I am not sure whether I should bother the acquisitions editor now or not. But that would be a dream come true. I have looked at their catalog, and they really are doing great things and trying to get cross-over readers. I’m writing it to get as many cross-over readers as possible. So you know Deceit and Denial by Rosner and Markowitz?
JR: Yes.
JMK: That's a model for where I'm pitching it because they are very scholarly, yet I think they do the trick that I've seen elsewhere, which is, they hide the footnotes at the back. They don't even put numbers in, just so it doesn't alienate a general audience. I want people to feel like they can read it. It's much less of a specialist audience I'm pitching it to than the first book.
JR: Deceit and Denial also has a really catchy title.
JMK: Yes it does.
JR: I think a catchy title is key, because if it looks like a bummer of a book, people are just going to say, “Oh, I'd rather read…. Didn't Mary Higgins Clark write one more book before she died?”
JMK: Yes.
JR: And the other thing that that book and some of the others, I thought, did successfully, was they broke out their storytelling into really short paragraphs.
And then every maybe 10 or 12 pages, they would have a bulleted box of the key points, so that if you didn't want to read the chapter on Lead Poisoning, which I really didn't, because I had heard that story for a long time, I could go to the box because I saw those points. However, I remember thinking, “oh, huh! I thought I knew it all, and I didn't know these three things, or that's an interesting way of thinking.”
So in the new versions of science textbooks, they use boxes a lot, both to help people step through the material, and also as a way to introduce material that they don't want to take space to talk about, that's a little bit off the main topic.
JMK: That's a great idea. One of my favorite books also does that – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver.
JR: I have not read that.
JMK: It's a great read. I teach it every spring, and at first, I wasn't even sure if I could put it in an academic course – because she has recipes in there. She's telling the story of how she and her family did local food for a year, and she has boxes for the scientific account of how we are using almost as much carbon to transport our vegetables and fruits as we are ourselves. And what is the impact of pesticides on our health? And what are we doing to soil? At the end of every chapter, she has recipes and other little things, and it does make it very digestible.
JR: I think that's key for students and for readers. It’s a real art writing for even a segment of a general audience, whether it’s academic or semi-academic or crossover. I had thought that I could use the syllabus for my course as a template for writing a book about what I wanted people to hear – and it just felt overwhelming and too hard to do, so I’ve given up that idea.
JMK: I loved your syllabus, and it seems like sections could really be chapters of a book.
JR: The number of research fields and researchers has exploded. The technologies have become impenetrable to almost anyone except those right in those fields, and it’s hard to cross over into those silos.
JMK: It is very hard. You know, I just interviewed Terry Collins, which was a delight. And I'll be publishing his blog soon. But he used the metaphor of having to drill down. You have to get very deep to really be any good at all in one or two holes. But, he said, you need to come back up and look around at the other holes, and so that's the metaphor he was using to say that.
It's wonderful that we have more information and knowledge every year. And that's one thing with this book – the last six months or so, I'm going to have to go through every chapter and make sure I have the latest data and yet be able to show that big picture. But it has been so helpful talking to so many experts in the fields who all have been thinking about the big picture. I will profit from that. I expect I may have almost a half a million words by the time I'm done.
So are you ready for your first question?
JR: I am. You asked me, how did I get into the field? What really prompted my interest in this? I came late to this field. I was an MIT-educated molecular biologist. I got my PhD in 1974. I was working on gene expression. Eventually I became a full professor in the Cell Biology department at Harvard Medical School. I was working on cell division – and this was in a time of enormous discoveries coming out in the field, including my field, my own lab, and new discoveries and new concepts were just gelling. It was really exciting.
And then I had lunch with my departmental colleague, Dan Goodenough, who was a professor who taught first-year medical students. He told me about a new course that he and three of his colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health had been putting together.
One was Eric Chivian, who was co-founder of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the organization that won the Nobel Prize in 1990; his colleague, Paul Epstein, who was an activist physician who had been heavily involved in environmental justice in South America and who then turned towards combating climate change; and Russ Houser, who was an epidemiologist at the school of Public Health investigating links between exposure to phthalates and BPA and infertility in humans.
They had several guest speakers come in and met once a week for three hours. One was Ross Gelbspan, who was an investigative journalist – he wrote late in his career The Heat is On, an exposé about how the Conservatives in Congress built the climate denial movement from the ground up.
Sandra Steingraber came….
JMK: One of my very favorites!
JR: Living Downstream, which I read start to finish in two days after her lecture. She had had a baby, and she brought in a bottle of her breast milk and said – this is the most polluted biological fluid on Earth, and that kind of struck me because we're always talking about how breastfeeding is the best thing you could do for your baby. I had never heard that before. So I immersed myself in the course and the readings and discussions, and it opened up a whole new world.
You may not know that Boston had a high concentration of endocrine disruptor field researchers, so I plugged myself into that. Ana Soto’s lab was one of those. Her work on nonylphenol and later on BPA was very important. It was in her lab that Laura Vandenberg got her PhD. So I would read their papers, and I would get further and further hooked into this field. And then in 2004, I was thrilled to be able to go to the Gordon Conference, where I met almost all the players in the then-field, which was then very small – and I was completely hooked. I wasn’t able to wean my lab over to do any work on endocrine disruptors myself, but I decided what I could do. I am a good teacher, and I decided I would create a course about this. I didn’t really know much about the field. I had to teach myself, and you may know that often, the best way to learn something about a new area is to teach a course in it.
JMK: Oh, for sure.
JR: You have deadlines every week, and you have to pull together the big concepts and get things going. The first course was small but included graduate students and postdocs from the Boston area, including Maricel Maffini.
JMK: That’s so great!
JR: She was a post-doc at the time in Ana Soto’s lab working on the effects of BPA on mammary gland development, as well as increased risk of cancer. There was an epidemiologist from Russ Houser’s lab working on phthalates and BPA and infertility – Joe Braun, he’s now a professor at Brown -- and several others. And Patrick Allard, a new post-doc from Monica Colaiacovo’s lab in the genetics department at the medical school, who after our conversations, became her first person working on endocrine disruptors in the worm (C. elegans). He is now a professor at UCSF.
Then when I went emeritus and moved to Princeton, and I got a lectureship in the environmental studies program, I created a new undergraduate course on endocrine disruptors. But I decided not to call it that, because I thought nobody would take it, and several students have confirmed that they would have blown right by that title. I called it hormone-disrupting pollutants. “Hormones” grabbed the attention of some people; “pollutants” grabbed others, so it got good interest from across the campus. I had students from everywhere – from molecular biology and geology to computer science and environmental engineering, and some from anthropology and English.
JMK: Great!
JR: In the later years, you could use it to fulfill one of two requirements in science. We had a lot of seniors who go, “Oh no – I need a second course in science.” This seemed okay, especially after the course got a good reputation – and then you could also use it to meet the requirements in society and writing. So I had a lot of people in engineering and chemistry. It was just a wonderful mix of people from across the campus, and we were all teaching each other as we went along. I’ve stayed connected to the field as an interested observer.
JMK: Yes – as am I.
JR. Yes. What else can I tell you about that?
JMK: Well, was there anything in your childhood or early training that got you into molecular biology?
JR: Like a lot of people, I had a great high school teacher. I took biology as a sophomore. It was a brand-new high school, so all the teachers were new, and most of them were young. Two had gone to an NSF summer seminar in molecular biology given at Brown University, and so they came back talking about what working scientists were doing, as opposed to dissecting the frog and cutting the planaria in half and studying leaf veins. We did a little of that. But they talked about experiments to find out about the origin of life, about gene expression. So I thought that was pretty cool. I went to Barnard College, not out of any great design. I was a biology major there, and the program wasn’t all that great. My husband was at MIT, and he was going to stay there for graduate school, and the MIT Department of Biology had a great reputation, so I applied there and got in, and it was an incredibly exciting time.
In October of my first year there, we were en route to hear a lecture by the microbiologist Salvador Luria and were listening to the news – and we learned he had won the Nobel Prize!
JMK: Oh my goodness!
JR: The class would start at 9 o’clock. There were a lot of faculty and staff lined up at the back of the lecture hall – everyone applauded, the staff left, and he gave his lecture.
JMK: Oh, that’s great!
JR: My second year there, I took a course in virology offered by David Baltimore, and maybe about three or four weeks in, he said, “You know, I’m not going to talk about rotaviruses.” So he said, “I’m going to tell you instead about some new experiments with results in my lab that we think are pretty important. And so he talked about the discovery of reverse transcriptase.
JMK: Wow!
JR: And there were a couple of postdocs in the department who knew something was up, and they had come in to sit at the back, and one of them said afterwards, “you know, he is going to win the Nobel Prize in five years.” And he did! It was just one thing after another. It was ground zero in the best possible sense.
And then I started working on fertilization. How does sperm activate the egg and turn on new and different proteins that start the cell developing and dividing – and that led me after a long period into cell division. And that is where my lab had its biggest impact.
JMK: I took developmental biology. And that is so fascinating – the development from fertilization to the blastocyst. It’s just amazing.
JR: It is. I mean this egg is sitting there -- it is a quiescent cell like most of the cells in your body, and it is going to stay that way until it gets a signal, like a growth factor in the cell. It will sit and sit and sit until the sperm comes – and it has this whole package just waiting to unfold. But you know the sperm hits, the doorbell rings, and the party is on.
In the sea urchin and clam eggs that I worked on, they would start dividing every half hour or hour. So unlike mammalian cells, which divide every 24 hours if you are lucky, in the process of an afternoon, you could go through four synchronous cell divisions using these embryos. So it was a perfect material for getting at some of their early answers to what proteins drive the cell division cycle.
JMK: That is so amazing, so interesting. And, as you say that, people hear “hormones” and wonder why is it bad that these chemicals mimic hormone signaling? I don't think people understand. I think we're still learning how important signaling is. As I think about the gut-brain axis, and the microbiome, and all these other complex factors that are really coming to the fore now. Signaling is just so much more complex than we used to think. And I don't think most people understand why that makes free-floating endocrine disruptors such a problem. Anyway, very interesting.
JR: Yes – there is the whole field of external signals coming to a cell and then triggering complicated, complex internal signal transduction processes, which have themselves earned several Nobel prizes. They have become almost impenetrable because they are so complex that only people who work every day with them can really remember who all the players are and all the subtleties.
JMK: Yes. I would love to think of a good metaphor to try to express that. That's hard.
JR: Yes -- the phrase signal transduction works for scientists, but it doesn’t work for the general public.
JMK: Yes, absolutely. Hmmm….maybe the metaphor would be trying to hear in a noisy room.
Okay. You have already talked about a lot of the really important findings in your career. But would you say there is one paper or one finding of which you are most proud?
JR: There are two. In my scientific career, working with clam eggs at the MBL, we discovered that when the sperm hits the egg, it starts making a whole new set of proteins. Two of those, discovered in collaboration with Tim Hunt, who went on to share the Nobel Prize for that work, are proteins called cyclins. These are proteins that get made, and they drive the cell into the last phase of mitosis. They organize the chromosomes onto the mitotic spindles, and then they trigger a molecular pathway that, when the chromosomes are all lined up, the spindles pull the chromosomes apart into the two daughter cells. And then the cyclins, which were pushing that process are abruptly degraded – and then the cell is allowed to go on to the next cell division and begin its replication of DNA.
So we cloned the two cyclins, cyclins A and B, and we showed that if you inject them into an egg that is just sitting there quietly, it will make them start to divide. And then we found out how those cyclins work. The cyclins bind to and activate a pre-existing kinase in the cell called CDK (cyclin-dependent kinase) 2. Without that kinase being activated, the cell will not go into mitosis, and once cyclins bind and activate the kinase, then it phosphorylates a lot of target proteins, and then those proteins have new and different activities, and they drive the cell into mitosis, ultimately forming the two daughter cells.
Figure 1: Hunt T, Luca FC, Ruderman JV. 1992. The requirements for protein synthesis and degradation and the control of destruction of cyclins A and B in the meiotic and mitotic cell cycles of the clam embryo. Journal of Cell Biology 116(3):707-24.
JMK: It's amazing because your work has basically made it into every biology textbook now taught, right?
JR: Yes.
JMK: Amazing!
JR: But I was one part of a pie that had lots of different kinds of pie slices. So we made these discoveries with clam eggs. At the same time, others were working with frog eggs. You could take cytoplasm from a dividing frog egg and inject into the quiescent non-dividing one, and it would make it start dividing. What that activity was at the molecular level, people didn’t know – they were trying to figure it out.
And then there were people working with yeast who identified the genes involved in the process, but they didn’t know what the proteins encoded by those genes actually did. So we had cherry pie, we had key lime pie (that’s me), apple pie, and a few other pie slices in there. Once you put those slices of pie together and put the crust over – and it went into the oven – I don’t know if this analogy works, but the whole idea gelled and cooked. Everything we learned from clam eggs, sea urchin eggs, frog eggs, and yeast was completely transferable to human cells.
JMK: So interesting. You think about people who are skeptics and who want to dismantle the scientific evidence and dismiss the evidence. They, of course, take different approaches. They will say that you can't use human epidemiological data because of the imperfections of that, and you cannot use animal models because they're only partially applicable to human models, but it sure seems like in most cases, the things that we are learning about animal models we are also seeing in humans; it seems a really good correlation between different ways of measuring the effects, when it comes to endocrine disrupting chemicals and other effects.
JR: So evolutionarily, all these different signaling pathways and proteins arose and were co-opted to work in different ways. When mammals came along, “Sure, let’s work with what we’ve got. Why spend energy inventing something new? We’ll just take flour, and instead of making cupcakes, we will make pasta – it’s not so different. You use cake in one part of your body and pasta in another. There were all these tools in the toolbox, so when apes and humans eventually evolved, they just thought, “Hey, this is working – let’s just tinker with it a little bit to make it do exactly what we want it to do.
JMK: Yes – I love to read Stephen J. Gould on those things – The Panda’s Thumb – the way evolution jury-rigs things. It’s really interesting.
I'm especially conscious of this, as you said, that “Poisoning Children” is kind of a downer. And so how do you get people to learn about this when it is an essential thing to know, and yet so productive of fear and guilt, and especially when it comes to children? How do you think it's best to communicate about an issue that's essential, but productive of anxiety?
JR: So it’s important to start simple where you don’t have to define a lot of words. And I think pesticides is a great place to start because everybody thinks they know what a pesticide is, and they think it’s very specific. And there are two types of food – pesticide supported or organic, pesticide-free. So that's already in their minds like, why is there organic, anyway? Why do some people find it worthwhile paying more for organic? So you can easily introduce the concept that most pesticides are neurotoxins, developed that way to kill insects – like DDT.
Everybody has heard about DDT. And then you say, it’s been known for more than 60 years that DDT also can mimic estrogen and block testosterone and interfere with thyroid hormone – and that was completely unexpected, that was a surprising result. Now we are worried that these valuable pesticides get into our food and often cannot be washed off – or we breathe them when they are sprayed or they are on our clothes – they might be messing with our hormones. So you introduce hormones into the conversation.
It is my experience that you have to repeat this five times over several different conversations – a pesticide can mimic or interfere with a hormone. But once they get it, then you can move on to the next thing, which is to be extra vigilant during pregnancy – this is the one time people will take care about what they are eating and drinking and change their habits. So you say, “during pregnancy and before, do what you can to eat as much organic food as possible. For the things you buy a lot of, buy organic versions. If you don’t eat a lot of broccoli, okay – conventional broccoli is all right.
Then, once the baby is born, the baby is also sensitive to these things for the first few years, much more sensitive than we are. And parents are very concerned about their children, so if you can get that conversation going – there’s a good chance that in the mom groups, they will talk about these things occasionally. There used to be a lot of good articles in the parenting magazines about pesticides and pregnancy, and then they starting carrying articles about BPA. Once they are down with pesticides, you can introduce BPA and the BPA-free baby bottle. It’s simple.
They ask, should I avoid all plastics? And then it gets more complicated. Not all plastics are the same, just like not all food is the same. And then you can tell them a little bit about BPA. It depends on where they are in their life. You could talk about BPA accelerating the onset of puberty in mice. Everyone knows that that’s not a good thing. If you have a four-year-old girl, that’s the last thing you want to be doing. In mice, it increases the risk of breast cancer.
So I would start with simple things that people have heard of and then, if they are interested, you can build from there. It’s a hard road, and frequently a dead end.
When I first started getting interested in the whole field, I gave a departmental lunchtime seminar for the other faculty – I thought I knocked it out of the park, and that’s saying a lot for a Red Sox baseball fan in Boston. On person out of the twenty-five was interested, and at the end, there were two kinds of comments: “if this is so important, why I haven’t heard of it already” and “Oh you know, if you worried about everything, you wouldn’t be able to do anything.” Which is actually sort of true. [We both laugh.]
JMK: Yeah….
JR: So pesticides, then BPA, which gets you into a conversation about plastics and food packaging and take-out. And then you could say, “you know, people who eat more take-out food have higher levels of phthalate and PFAS. PFAS is in the headlines these days, and everyone is talking about PFAS in their water. And there are lawsuits, and REI is not going to carry PFAS anymore.
JMK: Well, that’s good.
JR: I will actually send you my PFAS lecture.
JMK: Oh, I would like that.
JR: There is a lot happening. The companies are afraid of lawsuits, and the industry is paying attention. So we are going to see a lot more products labeled “PFAS-free.” But the problem is, how do you define the PFAS? They may say PFOA-free, but it could have PFOB, C, D, or X, Y Z in it. So you have to be a little carefully. That would get me to food packaging. And then you can talk about their cardboard cup – and it’s not just cardboard. If it were, it would be pulp in your hands after five minutes. It has a lining, right? And they go, “oh!” And then you talk about – if there is one habit change you can make it is not to microwave in packaging.
JMK: My internship for the MPH was going around to 210 different healthcare providers’ offices, especially OB/GYNs and pediatrics. I offered educational materials that gave 10 things you can do to prevent cancer, autism, ADHD, and lower IQs in your children, and that was one of them because that is a big one.
JR: Yes. It's really tough – my daughter and son-in-law both work long hours – they have two little kids, two and four, and they are exhausted. As my daughter says, we’re in survival mode. I can't cook every night. We don’t have a freezer big enough to cook things on the weekend and freeze things in glass containers. They do use glass containers, but some of their food still comes as take-out.
JMK: Yes. That must be hard for you to watch.
JR: It’s hard. I talked about it once, and I just don’t bring it up anymore.
JMK: Yes. You're not in control in that situation -- you've done what you can do. And hopefully, as they get a little more time as they don't have to wipe the bottoms as much, maybe they'll be able to do more.
JR: Somewhere along your questions you asked, how can you effect change or something like that? There are really three target audiences that are most promising.
One is the politicians – that’s the hardest one. In the course, we talked about the new findings about phthalates interfering with fetal development, increasing the risk for boys being born with smaller penises, undescended testes, and then, later in life, lower sperm count. So you hit them where it hurts the most.
JMK: Seriously.
JR: You hit the male politicians – because they have the power.
Then, parents can be powerful spokespeople. Someone got ahold of the research on BPA, and they started writing for the parent magazines and they demanded BPA-free baby bottles. They got what they wanted, but not exactly what they wanted because now, they are made with BPF and BPS, which have the same problems.
And then first and second graders.
JMK Huh! Well, that’s an interesting one.
JR: You probably remember when your kids are little – you tell them all these things – that it’s really important to not litter or waste food, and to recycle. They learn these things, and they are such sponges. They get to hear all this stuff in school, and they come home, and they talk to you about it – and then they see you not recycling – and they shame you. [Both laughing.]
JMK: Ha! That’s true. I had that in mind when my kids were little. I was head of just a little green team for them when they were in 4th grade or so, and I did hope that the kids would take it home to their parents. Yeah, that's smart. You're right. And it's interesting, because little kids have a sense of moral clarity.
JR: Yes. Small kids can have strong moral compasses – for them, things are right or wrong. It’s very complicated to explain to them that there might be special circumstances: it’s okay for Daddy to do this but not for you. They kind of get that there are adult things – but stuff that everyone can do, like recycling…. It’s awful when your kid calls you out on something and shames you.
JMK: Did that ever happen to you?
JR: Probably – and I almost certainly repressed all those memories. [Both laughing.]
JMK: Yes. I think maybe the question you're referring to is basically US policy: if you could single-handedly change U.S. policy regulating environmental chemicals, what would such a policy look like? How do we change going forward? And what can ordinary citizens do to help?
JR: It’s such a big question. The long-term goal is that all chemicals – even the ones grandfathered in, which make the majority of existing chemicals – have to be tested by the companies before they are using them – using a series of agreed-upon standardized protocols, even if they are just the old-fashioned tox protocols. But ideally, you would throw in some endocrine-disrupting assays that are easy to do.
They would have to do that and publish those data and give it to the EPA. They would have to be able to include confidential business information as part of the package transfer so that at least EPA knows the details. Let’s forget about leak possibilities or industrial sabotage. EPA would have to be under strong moral and scientific leadership, so they would have to have all the information.
Just talking this through, that might serve two purposes. One, it might prevent companies from polluting – they might just say that it’s not worth our using this particular chemical for this particular application. It’s given a lot of problems – it’s less than 1% of our business – let’s just use something else. It might prompt them to find better alternatives. You won’t get pre-emptive testing, but you could start with all high-volume production chemicals – whatever is produced at 1 million pounds a year – must be tested. It’s like with PFAS – there are more than 10,000 of them now – but we are going to start with the six known biggest offenders. You could lower the standards because we have scientific data already well in hand about that. You start with something that is a manageable goal.
JMK: It is so daunting at this point, now that the precedent has been set.
JR: Yes. I just read yesterday that tobacco has become a very high contributor to the Trump campaign. And other than the obvious reasons, why would that be? It’s because they don’t want Menthol cigarettes to be outlawed.
JMK: Sheesh!
JR: The other thing would be to overturn Citizen United.
JMK: Absolutely.
JR: This Supreme Court ruling allows corporations to donate unlimited funds to political campaigns.
And then coming up from the bottom, you could create additional compelling movies like Dark Waters.
JMK: I agree. I think that can play a huge role, even movies like Wall-E. A lot of my students connect to things like Wall-E, or possibly Avatar, and so fictions can play a role, as well as documentaries.
JR: The other thing you could do is write early young adult books. One of my colleagues – Janet Wylie – has written two books – about a couple of eighth graders in Maine stumbling upon rusting drums of chemicals in one of the nearby gullies.
JMK: A good mystery!
JR: Yes. It is a mystery – it’s not in-your-face political activism, but a good mystery. But it gets them thinking. Did you like reading mysteries when you were little?
JMK: I did. I loved Nancy Drew.
JR: I read Nancy Drew. I loved all of those. A lot of people like reading mysteries still. You could write a good mystery novel with chemical pollution.
JMK: That is a good idea. I once got very good advice from my dissertation director to try to write a dissertation like a mystery. She wrote mystery novels in her spare time.
JR: There is also an enormous genre of medical malfeasance mysteries and political malfeasance mysteries – how about chemical pollution malfeasance mysteries?
JMK: Yes. I love it.
The next question is about this central question that I've shared with you all and that both books are fastened on, which is that if we know we're poisoning our children and we're destroying the only climate that we know sustains life in the universe, and we know there are solutions at hand, why are we not doing anything about it? What is it about our culture that we're allowing this to happen?
JR: Well, what is our culture? We're embedded in whatever it is, and there's so much inertia. I go to Trader Joe's, which is a 15-minute walk, and there are so many interesting foods in the prepared freezer section.
JMK: Yes.
JR: And all of the fruits and vegetables come on these little so-called cardboard trays, coated with chemicals, and they are covered in plastic. It is just overwhelming.
JMK: Yes, it is. It's really daunting to think of trying to eliminate plastic in your kitchen. I've been known to buy 25-pound bags of rice and beans in paper, but there is likely something lining those as well.
JR: I don’t know how we do this. It has to come down from the top and up from the bottom, and somewhere they will meet in the middle.
JMK: Yes.
JR: I mean, BPA is a great example of that. General Electric and the other companies that manufactured BPA knew that BPA was estrogenic and leached out of plastic, yet they continued to market it.
JMK: And who would think something as innocuous as a baby bottle or a rubber ducky would be poisonous to children? I remember the day I got rid of all our rubber duckies. It was kind of sad.
JR: They are cute! They're an icon, right? You can use them in so many ways.
JMK: So the next question is prognostic. What do you think will be the status of children's health in the year 2050?
JR: Worse. Air pollution and asthma, unknown effects of chemicals on asthma, childhood cancers, and auto-immune conditions – early puberty, ASD, behavioral disorders – we know that is true for chlorpyrifos. There is well-documented evidence of neural effects of chlorpyrifos, and likely working through its neurotoxic effects, there could be other effects – thyroid effects as well.
JMK: Yes. You know, I was exposed myself, and I had neurological symptoms, and my thyroid's been gone since that time.
JR: You must have been exposed to a large amount, or a persistent amount.
JMK: They were spraying with it for mosquitoes, and we had no idea. And so we had our windows open because we thought we were getting fresh air that way, and instead, you know, it was on our carpets. We took up our carpets and put down hardwood floors, and that’s when the kids got sick with asthma-like symptoms, and Katherine came out of it with leukemia.
JR: What a tragedy!
JMK: It is, and I had been exposed to chlorpyrifos in an apartment before I was pregnant with her, which made me sick with the same acute symptoms, and I came out of it with no thyroid. It's astonishing to me that this is permitted – and on such a widespread level. For us, we had significant exposures, so we could know what had done it. But there are plenty of people who have subclinical exposures and some of the same effects, but they could never assign any sort of causality.
JR: And you had a discrete exposure with a time interval you could measure.
JMK: Yes.
JR: Whereas I don’t know what I am exposed to sitting here in New York City – or Brooklyn Heights, which is a little bit different. The windows are open because it’s lovely weather – but all sorts of stuff is coming right in. The building put down new carpeting on all the floors. I didn't have the energy or the heart to ask what that was because the old carpeting was so awful – so that was a small decision I made, and these build up.
JMK: It's exhausting. So you know, years ago I won the fight at my university for healthy lawns, except for the athletic fields. And then last Friday I went and witnessed them spraying the lawns. I went right to the President. And we're going to at least message that it's not as we had advertised – that the lawns were safe. But you know, it's predictable that people don’t see it as harmful, and so they just poo-poo those of us who are trying to make things safer.
So I have already talked to a lot of people you know.
JR: I know you talked to Pat and to Terry Collins.
JMK: And I just talked to Laura earlier this week.
JR: Oh! How fabulous!
JMK: Yes – it was delightful. And then I would like to talk to Tyrone Hayes. I think Laura said she would try to get me an introduction. And there are a few other people from among the faculty. But is there anyone else on the list that you think I should interview?
JR: I think Genoa Warner would be a great person. She has a very broad perspective. As we heard during the course, she started out in a green chemistry lab as an undergraduate at Yale, and then went to Terry’s lab to do sustainable chemistry in TAMLs, and then she went to a reproductive biology mouse lab with Jodi Flaws working on ovarian effects of endocrine disruptors. So she is in some ways the broadest person I know – the broadest person in the course in terms of actually having gotten her feet wet in the three arms that the course addresses.
JMK: I had thought of her because I really enjoyed her lectures.
JR: And she will bring in her work on microplastics – it was only at the end, when we had to juggle things around, that we had time for her to step in and talk about that.
JMK: I think that research is among the most – well, it is devastating – but it's also so interesting. I was among those who 10 years ago, 20 years ago, would have thought plastics were relatively inert, except for things that might leach out of them.
JR: So did I.
JMK: I didn't see microplastics coming, and I'm sure a lot of lot of professionals have not.
We're at the last question. Is there anything else you would like to know about my experiences or the project?
JR: How have your colleagues responded to your interest in endocrine disruptors?
JMK: You know, it's interesting. I get some people following my environmental tip of the week that I send out to everybody, and people are pretty receptive. I remember giving a lecture on pesticides, watching one of my friends sitting in the audience, who is a historian, whom I knew from his wife was still treating their lawn. I saw him just give a slight nod, and I think because we're a small university, and these are people who know me, they tend to be persuaded.
Actually, when I first started doing this, I started making my courses over to talk about cancer and environmental chemicals, but also other health effects related to these exposures. I just did it and then waited. I expected to get slapped down at some point because it wasn't a problem most people were looking at, and I got away with it. And then, they actually gave me an award.
I've done this work prepared for opposition because, of course, there's opposition at the city level, and there's opposition from industry. I had sent out information to every municipality in my county, and the company that sprayed the chemicals threatened to sue us for libel and slander. And so I was anticipating more opposition than I ended up getting. Actually, a lot of people don't know the information and don't know the details of it, but they are ready to be convinced because they can see in their own lives where cancer rates are increasing.
They can see the degradation of the environment to a degree. And they know climate change is happening. And they are educated people. So among my colleagues, people have been very receptive.
I thought people might say, “what the heck are you doing? You're a literature professor.”
But I guess people knew that I'd had the science background, and I've gotten so much more support for being interdisciplinary than I expected.
JR: I'm really glad to hear that.
JMK: yes. I think part of it is being a small institution.
JR: Right? So there may be a bit higher level of familiarity and trust.
JMK: Absolutely. And we're a small faculty. So I have bosom buddies who are scientists. And we talk across silos a lot more than at a large institution. Even in literature, I have to wear many hats. I cannot just teach medieval literature, nor would I have wanted to. But if I had gotten a job at an R1 institution, I would have been the non-Chaucerian medievalist for the rest of my life. Even doing other literature courses would likely have been verboten. The expectation that we would teach many things suited me because I have always felt interested in many things, not just one area.
JR: Great!
JMK: Well, I really appreciate your asking me questions – that was so helpful. And is there anything I didn't ask that you would like to tell me?
JR: You had a great package of questions. It made me think about some things, the question of what should be done single-handedly to recreate US policy was like – “Oh, gosh. I’m ducking under the table here for that one. Maybe she won’t remember that question.
Have you considered talking to Heather Patisaul? She would be excellent, especially since she is transitioning into her new role, though perhaps that prevents her talking.
JMK: I asked her right away, and she said she would ask, and she asked, and was told no, which didn't surprise me. Anybody I've wanted to interview at EPA has wanted to talk to me, and then been told they could not. Scott said he would talk to me. But we may have missed a window to schedule, because as the school year started, he was very busy. But I hope we’ll find time.
JR: I'm trying to think of people outside the course who are good to talk to, but I think you've got a good collection of people.
JMK: Some people collect trading cards of baseball players. I almost feel like I'm collecting. I'm a total fangirl for a lot of these scientists, and I'm collecting you and then posting the blogs.
JR: I like the idea of trading cards!
JMK: Right? I have your pictures and facts: Joan Ruderman, Harvard & Princeton, Cell Biology.
It was so good to talk with you, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
JR: Thank you, you too.
JMK: Thanks so much, Joan.
