Terry Collins, PhD: Hope for the Future in Novel Catalysts – TAMLs

I was so sorry to miss the opportunity to get to get to know in person Dr. Terrance Collins, PhD Chemist from Carnegie Mellon, at the two-week Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals Seminar that the Marine Biology Lab sponsored at Woods Hole in May. It was such a gift to have seventeen of the most illustrious scientists in the world on this subject teaching just thirteen of us cutting-edge research on EDCs and human health. Dr. Collins had to miss because of a personal emergency, but I was lucky enough to catch up with him last week via zoom.

A prolific researcher, Dr. Collins is the Teresa Heinz Professor in Green Chemistry and Director of the Institute for Green Science at Carnegie Mellon. He is primarily responsible for inventing green oxidation catalysts that are able to clean up endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in water and other matrices with a minimum of health risks themselves; the technology is heading toward pilot and demonstration trials. It was no surprise to me that in addition to being a great chemist, he is also at heart a great humanist.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

JMK: Good morning! It's so good to meet you. I love your background.

TC: That is a chapel over Lake Wanaka, in the southern part of New Zealand. That is a special place. There's a photograph of the chapel, and then the Milky Way above it at night that is just spectacular. If you get down to those places, you really do get to see the stars.

JMK: Wow! I had a friend who did an around-the-world tour after she retired, and she said New Zealand was the most beautiful place she visited.

TC: Well. I tend to play the Chamber of Commerce guy for New Zealand whenever I show a picture. This is one of many – it's a neat spot.

JMK: I know you earned your PhD in New Zealand and that you are from there.

TC: Well, I am kind of old. I got my PhD in 1978. We came to the U.S. on the Ides of March, 1978.

JMK: I'm so glad we have a chance to meet, because you haunted the ECHO seminar. Everyone was hoping so much to meet you. And I got to know your student, Debo, very well. That was such a pleasure, as was learning about TAMLs. It is so heartening that you are thinking about ways to clean up all these contaminants.

TC: Right? We have quite the party worrying about that.

JMK: Yes. Pat said two interesting things about you: first, that you became a biologist, which is so important. I was married for 26 years to a chemical engineer, and I know how little education chemists and chemical engineers typically get in biology. To be able to put those pieces together, I think, is just wonderful. And also, she said that you are the hope, the inspiration that they like to bring in because your work is not just examining the problems, but potentially fixing them.

TC: Well, we hope. But I will tell you. The problems are incredibly difficult; the more one learns, the more one knows, the humbler one gets.

But you know, what we've done with the catalysts is mind blowing. In essence, we have looked at the way the enzymes that are in us and all throughout aerobic life activate hydrogen peroxide very, very efficiently to do remarkable things, and we set out trying to mimic them in 1980, taking a very different approach to what people had done before.

We became successful through a slow, deliberate, iterative design process. Refining the catalyst succeeded in 1995, and ever since we've been using them and studying them, but also continuously iterating them.

The catalysts now are much more aggressive than the enzymes. They can destroy things that the enzymes will not touch. They can't destroy every chemical in water that's oxidizable – for example, PFAS compounds. That's a fundamental chemistry thing, because fluorine is the most electronegative element. In other words, it holds most tightly to its electrons, and when you attach it to carbon, it sort of pulls the carbon’s electrons in its direction. The next most electronegative element is oxygen. Oxidation is a big part of the bread-and-butter chemistry of life. In nature, it is mostly about oxygen and hydrogen peroxide seeing other molecules that have more electron density than they have that they can steal from those compounds – and in the process, usually releasing energy. Fire is like that.

JMK: Yes.

TC: And metabolism is essentially that – a big part of it is fire, where the individual steps are not all happening at once, producing a vast amount of energy as in fire, but incrementally, single steps occur in sequence. The energy is released slowly. You keep warm. Nature has figured out usually how to use the products in some way or other. Or maybe it's decided it wants to detoxify a chemical by just destroying it. And the big guns of nature, chemically, are these oxidizing enzymes.

They're basically the most powerful tools that aerobic life can pull out to try to change a chemical. So, if you make chemicals that are resistant to those enzymes, then they're likely going to be persistent in nature. And a persistent compound gets all the time it needs to shift through the chemical dimension of nature to find trouble that it can use.

JMK: Well, it's a shame – the fluorine compounds are so useful because of their enduring bonds, but yes – so pernicious for the same reason.

TC: So that's the thing we've got to come to grips with. And that's why the MBL course is so important. Because it turns out if you put a persistent compound into nature…. you’re playing with fire. We're wrestling with this right now; when I say look at what we can do and what we have done with our catalysts, it looks absolutely wonderful. But I look at it and worry myself sick about my catalysts potentially producing problems of their own.

And while they can eradicate problems, is it possible that we might just get rid of all the problems everyone knows about, but you are left with your own problems?

JMK: Right!

TC: So, in the future will we be looking at these damn catalysts, right?

JMK: Named after you! [We both laugh.]

TC: They are not named after me, fortunately. They are not likely to be problematic, but that is the worry, and so we have tricks we can play that almost remove that worry. So, for example, tying the catalyst to solid supports so that they're never free to wander through nature and the water that you're attempting to purify – you just simply pass the water with some peroxide over the surface of these composites, and the catalysis will happen, and you get rid of the problematic compounds. So, with water treatment, drinking water for sure, this is where I hope it will end up — so I won’t have to worry about potential downsides.

We had some barriers that we just conquered, probably the biggest single barrier a few months ago. And that is a really nifty thing in the most advanced catalyst, which was what I call a kill-switch. It's a part of the molecule that when the catalyst gets activated…. And by the way, I'm just talking, is this, okay?

JMK: No, this is great! I want to get all your stories.

TC: Okay. So what happens is hydrogen peroxide comes along and lands on an iron atom in the catalyst exactly as it does in your enzymes that activate hydrogen peroxide, and an oxygen atom binds to iron. And then the rest of the H2O2 bond ends up being broken, and water is thrown away, and you've got a lone oxygen atom sitting on the iron. That's the reactive species. And so what happens is when you make that reactive species, the oxygen pulls electrons throughout the molecule towards it, polarizes the electron density. And then out on the edge of the catalyst, there's a carbon that has a hydrogen on it, and that bond becomes more acidic. And so it releases H+ -- a proton – and it leaves the carbon as an anion, which, in the very oxidizing milieu of the catalysis, is vulnerable to rapid attack and breakdown of the catalyst. And so what we wanted to do was this. We've got catalysts; some have two of these sites, and some have one of them, and we wanted one that had none to see what would happen, because the prediction was the catalyst lifetime would go up dramatically. And in the last months, we have achieved that, and the degradation rate constant, which parameterizes how fast different catalysts decompose relative to each other, went down by a factor of a hundred! So if we're looking at a catalyst that would work for 10 hours, you just made that a thousand hours.

JMK: Wow!

TC: And so that is a triumph in catalysis and technical performance. I'm going here because you said, well, they're so useful – the PFAS compounds.

JMK: Yes, though so persistent too.

TC: They have absolutely extraordinary technical performance. And people can make them and make quite a bit of money in commerce from them. They have very high cost performance. And throughout the history of the chemical enterprise, high technical and cost performances have been the drivers of commercialization. Pretty much, that's it.

If you're commercializing a drug, people will worry about health performances in particular ways. They will want to be sure that the drug won't produce any adverse effects in you that are measurable. But they don't explore whether or not the drug might mess up a baby a mother might be carrying, or soon to carry. They don't assess with endocrine disruption assays where the adverse effects may manifest much more slowly, but where there can be truly terrible outcomes.

JMK: Absolutely.

TC: Typically, that's not even looked at. So, for the most part, the entire suite of compounds, which is in the hundreds of thousands, that we made and put into commerce, are not in any deliberate regulatory fashion assessed for endocrine disruption.

JMK: It's terrible, and I do think part of it is our mistaken view of nature, and what life is. We think if we put something in our bodies, it goes into our bodies. We don't understand that if we put something out into the world, it is also likely going to find its way into our bodies. I think that we have a basic misconception of nature, and thank you for worrying about your own catalysts, because we've had such a history of solving problems and the solutions to those problems causing more problems – and that is the cycle.

TC: That's my burden – to worry about.

JMK: Yes – that is tough.

TC: As things are turning out, we have now done the zebrafish and frogs and mice assays with world-leading people. And these are very sophisticated big studies. And they're developmental. In other words, you're looking at frog eggs being exposed and watching what happens to the tadpoles and the adult frogs to see if anything bad happened.

JMK: Is that with Tyrone Hayes?

TC: Yes – with Tyrone. And with Laura [Vandenberg], we are watching her doing the mouse studies, and so we were doing pretty well. So apparently, the zebrafish are clean and the frogs maybe also. And that's good because frogs are really sensitive. But Laura is finding effects in the mice.

JMK: I remember learning that.

TC: Now, are they bad? So up to recently, Laura was saying, well, the effects come and go. Typically, they're not appearing to be permanent. One might be associated with perturbation of the development of the immune system. But whatever happens, it seems to go away. But now she's saying, Oh, I'm finding breast tissue with fewer buds, and that's something more concerning. This is different. This is something we have to consider, and so would that be a showstopper? I don't know. Probably not because the chemicals aren't intended to go into people, and probably won't in any sort of serious way. And this is where this kill-switch that is a negative for technical and cost performances is so important and potentially valuable for the health, environmental and fairness performances. Because now you say, well, I can have a catalyst that lives this long, which is not very long under operating conditions. It lives a long time under non-operating conditions when it’s not activated by peroxide. And I can have one that lives a hundred times longer. That one is more likely to cause trouble just because of the longer lifetime than the other one, right? So you have this worry constantly. And you work to make the worry go away by iterative design of the catalysts, by, for example, adhering the longer-lived catalysts to solid support so the catalyst is never free to move around in the environment.

JMK: Yes.

TC: So coming back to performances, this is the way I frame the challenge of producing safe and sustainable chemical technologies.

And so back in the 1990s, it was a very heady time. Green chemistry was beginning. I started in 1980, trying to get a catalyst that would activate hydrogen peroxide so that you could disinfect water with hydrogen peroxide rather than chlorine to get rid of chlorinated disinfection byproducts by never making them in the first place in the disinfection process, which people were realizing at the time could be harmful.

JMK: Of course.

TC: And I thought, well, that'll sustain me if I can do that, and prevent those kinds of cancers. That's a really cool thing, and you're doing it as a chemist. And that sounds just totally fascinating.

And so then endocrine disruption came along and changed the picture. It became more important to get the endocrine disruptors out of water, and by that time we knew we probably could do this, and then went on to show we can do a really good job, much more cheaply and as good as the best, if not better than incumbent technologies, and much cheaper. And so we're working to bring that into the real world. But to come back to the intellectual framing of, how do you produce a safe and sustainable chemical technology– my mind often goes all over the place when I'm talking, so it will be a little difficult to follow the flow sometimes.

JMK: Mine does that too!

TC: So green chemistry came along. I was in the initial group. But my colleagues in green chemistry refused to address endocrine disruption. The reason was simple because they said that if you do, you’ll offend industry massively….

JMK: Yes.

TC: …And the field will die. It’s sort of true. But we had a question – do we kowtow to industry’s need for silence on endocrine disruption matters, which really meant that you would not even talk about endocrine disruption, because when you start talking about it and characterizing it, as with PFOA – if you’ve seen Dark Waters, you’ve seen that – if you start talking about it, if you let your mind go to the endpoint of the obvious, you’ve got to get rid of these chemicals. They have got to go.

JMK: Yes.

TC: Even the pharmaceutical industry clamped down and would have no discussion of endocrine disruption. Why? Because so many pharmaceuticals are powerfully endocrine disrupting. The birth control pill, which so many women take, is deliberate endocrine disruption in action. It disrupts a woman’s endocrine system to fool her body into thinking that she is pregnant.

The estrogen that's playing a large part in achieving that, ethinylestradiol, is harder for nature to destroy than native estrogen. So that means you can use less of it to get the same result. And there are typically 10 millionths of a gram, 10 micrograms, of ethinyl estradiol in a birth control pill. That’s hardly any, but it just emphasizes that hormones do their work at what chemists would typically regard as incredibly low concentrations—almost none at all. Typically, in a reproductive pill, what happens is that the woman takes the pill, and some of it escapes her degradation machinery – again these oxidizing enzymes – and so then she excretes it. It goes down through the sewer system to the water treatment plant, where it meets the bacterial soup we call activated sludge. These bacteria basically look at all organic matter coming in the sewer water and see food, and grow and reproduce on it into more bugs that we end up shoveling out of the plant tanks. In this process, the bacteria also destroy or absorb a lot of the toxic chemicals — and always remember you have to be careful of what you do with the solid bacterial growth because many persistent and dangerous chemicals are in there. We are seeing farmers lose their farmland because they used municipal excess bacteria as fertilizer and contaminated their land almost irredeemably with things like PFAS that the bacteria can’t degrade effectively. Ethinylestradiol is persistent enough, resistant enough from being oxidatively destroyed, to escape in part that bacterial treatment – and then it is goes out into the rivers when the wastewater is released from the plant, and even at one part per trillion, it will start to reshape the aquatic life of a river.

The fact is this is just one pharmaceutical product sold by the pharmaceutical industry for a particular reason. They distance themselves from it as a drug, but nevertheless, they make it, and the implications of estrogens in river water are astronomical – you start feminizing certain species of male fish at one part per trillion in the water. And the rivers of Europe, for example, are running multiple parts per trillion.

This one compound alone is enough to completely reshape the biotic life of natural waterways – which species will thrive and which will not – in the rivers of Europe and United States. And in particular, we have seen big impacts of estrogen contamination of natural waterways in the northeast.

There is a large game fish called the smallmouth bass, a freshwater fish. It’s a big fish with a small mouth. It used to be the principal game fish of the region. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, there used to be companies where you could take your family and hire a boat to take you out on the river to catch small-mouth bass. You would come back with a handful of these big fish, and it was a neat experience. Those companies have all gone because today there are insufficient smallmouth bass left in the rivers to sustain the industry.

The smallmouth bass (CC, 2024).

If you find a male smallmouth bass and open it up today in these rivers, you may find these sorts of things: The testes have eggs growing in them. A testis has become an ovary, or both testes have become ovaries. And so it’s not the only the estrogen in the water. But from studies many years ago at Brunel University in Uxbridge, West London, we learned that ethinylestradiol all by itself is enough to reshape the aquatic life. In a small lake in Canada, Karen Kidd held the water at 5 parts per trillion (ppt) of ethinylestradiol for two years. Her team looked at the aquatic life before spiking the lake with ethinylestradiol and after the spiking, and it found a reshaping of which species were there or not.

JMK: And then you add atrazine and BPA and all the other things.

TC: Most of the chemicals that have profound biological effects are highly suspect of impacting aquatic life when they are released to natural waters, and many of them are already identified – atrazine being one and BPA another – as serious endocrine disruptors.

So then you look at the question, “Why the hell are we using it?” The company that makes atrazine is headquartered in Basel in Switzerland – and yet Europe has banned it – or rather, it is not registered for use it in Europe, which is what I would call a ban.

But here we are putting it all over the corn fields of the Midwest – and it turns up in our drinking water. A very good friend of mine and Pete Myers’, Steve Tillery, is the lawyer that won cases requiring the industry to pay Illinois municipalities to get atrazine out of their drinking water. And so we have a few successes, but we have hundreds of those problems. Coming back to this framing, how do you produce a safe and sustainable chemical enterprise?

As I’ve mentioned, and as is fairly obvious, chemicals get commercialized if they have a high technical in doing something neat, and someone can make money from the commercialization. But every chemical also has a health performance because if you are sitting there, and you take a sip of PFAS or any synthetic chemical, you are different. And every chemical has an environmental performance and a fairness performance.

JMK: Yes.

TC: You’ve gone from Jean-Marie without the chemical to Jean-Marie with the chemical, and the question is, how does Jean-Marie with the chemical look different from Jean-Marie without the chemical?

JMK: Yes. We're doing an uncontrolled experiment on everyone.

TC: That's correct, it's everyone. And the point is that we now know that a large number of these chemicals are harmful at low concentration in water or low doses in living things. If you take the chemical and drop dead, someone will ban it; if there are near-term dramatic health consequences, we can handle that. Our regulatory assays are set up to detecting these calamities. If it’s going to subtly change you or affect a child you might be having two years later, we’re not going to know about that – until we see the adverse effect manifest typically at the population level decades later.

As I said, every chemical has a health performance; every chemical has an environmental performance; and every chemical has a fairness performance.

This fairness performance is something that is not in our standard thinking about chemical safety, but it turns out to be very important. And you can see it in a whole variety of ways. The most obvious thing is if you are producing chemicals with biological effects, the fence-line communities are going to suffer. That’s obvious and, today, it’s talked about a lot —it is wickedly unfair. And to come back to what we do, if you are producing technologies for water treatment that can only be used in wealthy cities, that’s not fair either.

JMK: Sure!

TC: Right? So very often, chemical technologies give benefits to a small part of the human population while injuring everybody – and nature. And so, the fairness performance of chemicals is a real biggie. I put this into the literature and want to see it thought about a lot more. We need to learn how to measure fairness performances and integrate these into the value propositions of chemicals. And we need to do the same with the health and environmental performances which every chemical also has. Currently, the technical and cost performances have dominated the commercialization choices.

So in actual fact, the business of building a field of safe and sustainable chemistry is that you don’t have to worry too much about technical and cost performances of chemicals, because we know how to evaluate these. Chemists are really good at developing chemicals with superior technical performances, and business people are really good at assessing chemicals for their cost performances – that’s what they do every day. We have to bring into the value proposition health, environment, and fairness performances that can either be negatives or positives and somehow convert these into measurable things that everyone accepts. We have a money-first civilization. Continuation of that short-term focused drive will kill our civilization. We have to have a sustainability-first civilization. We have to learn about how to think well in the long term. So you do that by integrating all five performances that are critical to a safe and sustainable chemical technology into its value proposition. This sounds obvious, but it’s a whole new way of parameterizing authentic value, and we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to do this well.

You are at a Catholic University. This takes us now to a step up to a much higher level of thought that I would think should be a natural focus of a Catholic University, or a university that is grounded in any religion for that matter. And the person who taught me what I am about to explain died in the 1990s. His name was Hans Jonas – and he wrote The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics of the Technological Age. Hans Jonas was absolutely brilliant, a brilliant, brilliant thinker, many decades ahead of his time because he was lecturing about this in the 1950s. His central point was that all our prior ethics have a short-range projection in time and space. So, in the Christian frame, you can think about the 10 Commandments and, for example, the “don’t commandments.” And anyone watching you break one of these commandments and the person you were doing it to, would know immediately you had done something bad – you had broken a key commandment. Everyone understood that.

Jonas taught us to reflect on the fact that those commandments are inadequate to contain the powers of science and technology, even with Christ’s addition of the Golden Rule. Though you can project sustainability values from the Ten Commandments, they are simply inadequate as rules of thumb. People can get to the end of their life and say “I feel like I have lived a good life, because I was tempted, but I didn’t break the Ten Commandments – I controlled myself.” However, you might have done that while you consumed unbelievable amounts of carbon, as the most obvious thing. In actual fact, your footprint on the future – and we all have this – might have been terrible. 

Consider an example close to us both. Every time we go to the Marine Biology Lab (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA for this course you attended – it really does make a difference when people are together – but we are not overtly integrating the impact on the environment of bringing people from all around the world to that course. They get a level of comprehension that might be good for sustainability out of that. Maybe they will go on and do great things that make the investment in carbon well worth it. But we can all see we’re coming up against a very hard wall with the climate.

JMK: Yes, we are.

TC: We’re there, and we still have clowns like one of our candidates for president talking absolute, utter nonsense about it with a lot of people apparently believing him.

JMK: Well, he talks nonsense about everything. You would think people would start to make a generalization from that. But yes, it's unbelievable.

I think about the carbon footprint problem a lot. According to Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, if the good people who are trying to do things to improve sustainability, limit their actions by limiting their carbon footprint, is conscience self-eliminating?

TC: Yes – this is a key point. And I get queasy just thinking about it. Because you are self-estimating your own value to the future. I had to go to Europe twice between now and the end of the year. I just cancelled one of the trips. I have a wicked awful carbon footprint. And I am worried about catching the new COVID that the current vaccines can’t handle very well, at least as of today. And I just thought, well, this isn’t meant to be. I can continue this other work I’ve got to do that this trip would interrupt – and then there is the carbon problem. That trip was to further what feels like a really important sustainability goal. But it turns out that a similar project needs to be developed in the United States. So I focused locally and let others handle the international dimension for now.

But then I do have to go back to Europe for other work I think is really important– but, you have to look at everything now, and ask, is this really worth it? Or are you just kidding yourself and exaggerating your own importance? But the point you are making does give some solace to that line of thought. So it is a good thought.

Coming back to Jonas’s ethics, there needs to be a new golden rule – which is to act so that you do not compromise the future for human life.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, ethics are too focused on humans – if you dig deeper, the environment is in there, but superficially. The Catholic Church trained everybody to be superficially anthropocentric, perhaps so they could be told what to do by the priests for centuries. Nature has to have rights as well; whales, for example, have to be accorded rights.

JMK: Yes – that is Aldo Leopold’s land ethic – from Sand County Almanac.

TC: Yes, that’s right. It is inspiring and heartwarming thinking, and critical, I think, to sustainability, that we lose our anthropocentricity, hopefully quickly. Looking at our situation, you can go through a lot. The people who run the chemical companies that are totally technical and cost performance-focused are worried about money for the investors, and salaries for the employees, and their own wealth and importance, and all of these sorts of things. They can also tell themselves that they obeyed the Ten Commandments. But they may have done unspeakably bad things by not wanting to comprehend or acknowledge the downsides of their chemicals by putting the money first over these other performances. If we have people like Charles Holliday, Jr., who ran DuPont as the CEO depicted in the movie Dark Waters, making or being responsible for decisions like those the movie depicts, we will just continue this downward slide over low-dose adverse effects that we are currently in the grip of. Charles Holliday, when the PFOA problems in the DuPont company town of Parkersburg, WV came to the fore and DuPont was losing the lawsuits, left DuPont. Where did he go? He went to join the Board of the Bank of America and then became the Board Chairman. And then he moved on to become Chairman of the Board at Royal Dutch Shell in 2014. That move is probably why ten miles from here in Pittsburgh, we have a mile-long cracking facility making polyethylene that the world doesn’t need from fracked natural gas, with so many people in the area getting sick from it.

That’s what happened to him, whereas the other protagonists in the film had anything but a velvet-lined landing pad. The farmer Wilbur Tennant got cancer and died. His wife got cancer and died. You see what happened to Tennants’ cows. The people who have been exposed to that PFOA-contaminated water – you can’t imagine they will have as a good future as Nature might otherwise have intended. The biggest epidemiological study of all times conducted on people in the Parkersburg, WV region showed increases in testicular and kidney cancer and problems of the GI tract and other things – nasty things. So the people got these burdens, and what happened to the guys at the top of the DuPont decision tree? Well, he lived a life of expanding luxury. The number two guy, Thomas Connelly, Jr., ran the fluorine business for a decade through much of the period when the decisions that led to the poisoning of Parkersburg were made and then went on to be Senior Vice President at DuPont. He also left. And he went on to become the CEO of American Chemical Society (ACS). And when he went there, he took this history of inadequate regard for endocrine disruption – because that’s certainly part of what is going on – into this most powerful position for the professional discussion of chemical matters.

JMK: Yes. It is just terrible. It’s difficult to think about how to dismantle the structures when there's so much power and so much money there. It is truly daunting.

TC: I decided in 2003 that we American academics have tenure for good reasons, and while it might be cutting my throat research-wise, that it was just completely unacceptable to know this stuff and not do anything about it. And so all this started with a presentation. I was on the Board of the American Chemical Society’s news magazine about chemistry and chemical engineering, C&EN – Chemical and Engineering News.

JMK: Yes – I read that.

TC: You do?

JMK: Well, my former spouse is a chemical engineer, so I often will take a peek.

TC: Okay – so well, they often publish great articles, and I know many of the reporters quite well—great people! For three years, I sat on that board, and then stepped down. I could have stayed longer but didn’t want to. Madeline Jacobs, who was the editor-in-chief of C&EN in the early 2000s – she later became the CEO of the American Chemical Society before Connelly – asked me to speak about sustainability. She came to Pittsburgh to talk about this presentation to the Board. And I said, well, if I speak about this, I will be going after the chlorine industry. And the industry was represented on the Board – a vice president of the chlorine industry, of Dow, was to be in the room. And I asked, do you really want that – because I’m going to be very blunt? And she said, “Yes – I think we need it.” So I gave my talk and criticized the chlorine industry over dioxins that are just such deadly developmental disruptors, which have fascinated me since my days as a student at the University of Auckland.

I was particularly going after the fact that Saran Wrap was polyvinylidene dichloride (PVDC) at the time. Today, after S.C. Johnson and Sons bought the brand from Dow and reformulated the plastic, we don’t have the worry I am about to articulate. The Dow Saran Wrap was made of ethylene with two chlorines on one of the carbons and two hydrogens on the other. So Saran Wrap, if you picked up a packet of the old stuff, is very heavy because it had all this chlorine -- it was more than 70% chlorine by weight. And so whereas normally with polyethylene, you know, its C2H4. With polyvinylidene dichloride, it’s C2H2Cl2 with those two heavy chlorines taking not much more space than the hydrogens, but compared with the hydrogen, chlorine is ca. 35 times heavier.

And so, something about Saran Wrap was really worrying me at the time. If you burn Saran Wrap, you make dioxin. And what I had noticed by going to barbecues is that people would bring out their marinated foods on plates or in bowls covered with Saran Wrap. Sometimes they would peel the Saran Wrap off and put the stuff in a garbage container. But sometimes they would actually throw the used Saran Wrap on the fire to get rid of it.

JMK: Oh my goodness! [Head in hands.]

TC: This meant the obvious – you have to assume people doing this would be contaminating the food with dioxins. If a pregnant woman were to eat that food there would be potential for serious developmental impacts on her child. If you give 5 parts per trillion (ppt) to a pregnant rat on the thirteenth day of estrus, which is key for the male reproductive development of her progeny, they will come out with 75% sperm count compared to the controls. If you give 60 ppt, they will be reproductively devastated.

So my thought was at the time was, well, Americans do a lot of barbecuing. I was giving quite a lot of lectures in chemistry departments at the time, so I would stop and say, who uses Saran Wrap? Almost every hand would go up. “And who puts it over their meats while they are marinating?” And a large number of hands would go up. “Who throws it on the fire to get rid of it on the barbecue?” Every single time, a few hands went up – not many, but they would go up. And I would say, “Well, you have to assume you contaminated your food with dioxins when you did that,” and talk about the potential consequences a bit.

I ended up having a formal Point-Counterpoint debate in C&EN following that meeting of the board of C&EN where all this was discussed with a representative of the chlorine industry about dioxin.

That squabble was complicated for me because about that time the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) put out a book on dioxins. I read the book, but the Executive Summary was almost something completely different from the content of the book – downplaying the dangers of dioxin massively. And I was stuck having to downplay my language because, well, who was I? The Academy ostensibly got together a lot of experts whose Executive Summary I believed I had to honor, dyslexic and all as it was. Well then, it turned out there was a major conflagration shortly thereafter. Some committee members attacked the NASEM process arguing that the chair got together a small group to produce an industry-friendly executive summary, which is what people read primarily, of course.

JMK: Right!

TC: It misrepresented the content of the book according to the protesters, and unfortunately, I got caught up in feeling it was the authoritative word even although I strongly disagreed with the opening part that downplayed the dangers. I resent having to be much softer because of this publication. Some people on the committee supposedly went ballistic over it. The net result was we had this squabble. If you read it, you would say, well, about a draw, but I landed some softer punches only because of this damn executive summary. It think it would have been a knockout otherwise.

JMK: Wow! It's interesting to hear that backstory. Because I have long wondered why scientists weren't being more forthright about what is obvious. If you have epidemiological studies that show that these chemicals are associated with diseases, it means that these diseases are preventable. We are causing these diseases. And yet, yes, people hedge the language.

TC: These were overt discussions – I talk about them because they are an important part of history. People in Green Chemistry would say years ago, “Well, Terry, if we talk about endocrine disruption, we won’t get any money.” Or they would give talks defending industry that had no substance for the defenses. And that is an obnoxious way to get cookies for yourself. 

So, in my evaluation, what happened to Green Chemistry is that it set itself up to be industry friendly, based on a set of principles that are inadequate for protecting life from chemical injuries. They direct chemists to clean up reactions, to change the solvents, to do the same process with less and more efficiently. But I actually published the first principles of Green Chemistry and I wish I had not let them go.

JMK: Wow!

TC: When these so-called Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry came along, I let mine fade away. We needed to get along to build a field together, and I liked the people. I thought the vital content in my principles that is not in the 12 Principles would make its way into the field naturally. My principles were in an encyclopedia as part of a larger description of Green Chemistry, which hardly anyone reads; I sent this entry in draft form to one of the authors of the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry several years before the book containing his principles was published.

Mine, in précis, were (i) that the objective of Green Chemistry is never to imperil beneficial life forms, (ii) that Green Chemistry has to be interdisciplinary because chemists don’t know how to do that, and, (iii) that Green Chemistry needs to have a unique way of being funded because this is very different to anything else that we had done up to that point in the mid-1990s.

We don’t have much experience of supporting massive cross-disciplinary activity with the object of protecting life through chemistry. I believe my principles are way better because they assert that what nature cares about is not so much how chemicals interact with each other in flasks and test tubes, but rather how chemicals interact with the biomolecules of living things when the exposures follow in the footsteps of commercial development. The twelve principles of Green Chemistry focus on the chemical reaction. My three principles of Green Chemistry focus on how chemists must design chemistry to protect life and get a lot of help to do this.

And so the social dynamics of all this are complicated. But at the end of the day, you realize you shouldn’t worry about what people think about you in this territory. You should worry about what future generations think about you.

JMK: Absolutely. I could not agree more.

TC: Because we are being highly recorded.

JMK: I don't know how some people live with themselves now, much less how their legacy will seem to others.

I have a follow-up question about the TAMLs. You were talking about trying to secure them from going into the environment with the kill switch. I assume you're also looking at breakdown products?

TC: Yes, we do. Recently an expert in water treatment who runs a blog in this area interviewed Roger Berry. Roger is the CEO of Sudoc, which is the CMU spin-off company for TAMLs, where this topic comes up. The interviewer is a French water expert, Antoine Walter, who knows a lot. He's quite young. He's very energetic, and I was impressed that he clearly does understand water. And Roger and he met at a water conference, and so he ended up interviewing Roger.

We assessed TAMLs themselves in the assays Sudoc carries out with world leading EDC specialists, (EDC = Endocrine Disrupting Chemical), but not the breakdown products in as much detail directly that way so far. So, it's a very good question. The way you perhaps best catch everything is to assess the health of the river where you are applying the water treatment before and after turning on the TAML process. And through my academic work, we have collaborated with great EDC leaders, Fred Vom Saal and Julia Taylor, to look at the impact of breakdowns products in prepubertal female mice and found no observed adverse effects.

We are using TAML catalysts in the low parts per billion. These catalysts open a totally new kind of chemistry that we call sustainable ultra dilute oxidation catalysis. That's where the name SUDOC comes from. Because we have almost no catalyst there, and it still does this incredible chemistry rapidly, when it decomposes, we have vastly less of whatever it was because it is now broken down into a whole bunch of things. Going in and identifying compounds is something we are doing by looking at higher concentration processes. But the outcome at high concentrations might be different than at low concentrations. We know how certain TAMLs break down. But if you do it at high concentrations, the outcome is different from low concentrations. So it’s quite a tricky study.

So, we know how certain TAML catalysts have broken down, no question about it. We know what the product was. That catalyst would never be commercialized. So there's no point in studying the toxicity of the degradation product. What you really need is the best possible windows into the process because if you look at the catalyst itself when it’s actually decomposing other things, there can be interactions between the catalyst materials and the other things that might also produce problems. So looking for river impacts is important.

The question you asked about the catalyst is incredibly difficult, and the analytical techniques that you need to study it, we didn’t have in our lab. Ultimately, I aim to have one of those instruments myself, and that will help a lot, but it’s a half a million bucks. And then you have to pay maintenance contracts, which I’m guessing are about $50,000 a year. I think we will eventually get there – particularly as the success of the catalysts in commerce intensifies. This will liberate royalty streams, some of which come to the Institute, which will make my life a lot easier.

JMK: That’s good. What piece of equipment is it?

TC: It’s an HPLC-MS – a high-performance liquid chromatography mass spectrometer. Essentially, what you are doing is you use an HPLC column to separate the compounds into individual species, and when they come out of this column one by one, the mass spec then assesses and identifies them. We’re very good at doing the HPLC part of that because we have our own always-clean instruments. These cost ca. $150,000, but the mass spec detector that you put on the end of these things is another half a million, and then I have to hire an expert operator.

So, all of this locally is hopefully in our future if I hang around long enough to get there, but that is certainly something I want to see happen. In the meantime, if we come back to the question that we started with, of the catalysts and the mouse studies, when you go into this, no one has ever done this – no one has subjected a chemical they wanted to commercialize to this diverse battery of animal studies by top-level experts trying to find a problem before or during commercial development – and publishing the results.

JMK: No – I am sure that’s true.

TC: Laura [Vandenberg] is free to do whatever she wants with her results. Sudoc contributes to Laura’s lab to have it done, but is hands-off. We have expert meetings about it in the company with the academics, but we don’t interfere with the science in any way. You need to keep that part of it clean. Laura is finding reduced bud density in breast tissues of female mice that have been exposed to low doses of a TAML from preconception by exposure of their parents onward. The work asks all kinds of other questions that will be thought about deeply and written about. And then of course, we have to do multi-generational stuff, which we intend to do – that takes more time and money.

Let’s suppose you do get results that are consistent with endocrine disruption effects, does that stop the commercialization of a catalyst that decomposes in use that will do things like get many very serious EDCs out of water vastly cheaper and simpler than anyone else can do it? And so the questions are not typically straightforward. The results are probably not going to be black and white.

JMK: This was actually a learning moment for me at the seminar because I had questioned those results with the breast tissue. And it was just very interesting how Laura responded, saying, just the way you did, that it's not necessarily going to be perfect, but you cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, right? And if you're such a purist that you can't reduce the problem…. It's difficult, because we all want to be pure, right?

TC: I certainly want to be. But it it's never escaped my thought processes that when you throw a chemical, particularly a powerful catalyst that can do all kinds of things, at life and expect nothing is going to happen…, well, that’s a lot to ask for. We have also done the high-exposure things that the EPA demands.

This is a tangent, but it’s worth mentioning. The EPA takes so long to do a safety analysis of the compound, that a start-up chemical company is at risk through that time period, because you can’t sell to the public where higher volume sales reside. Everything we have done – and we have fabulous technologies – is business to business until they make their decision, but we can’t get into a big market to get big profits.

My answer to this slowness issue is that the EPA should be better supported so that they can do their job faster – I don’t want to complain. The world needs them to be able to do their job. And if anything, they have a bigger job to do because they too need to be assessing endocrine disruption and trying to understand what the regulatory boundaries should be.

We have had incredible investors who believe in the technology. Hunter Lewis and his son, Henry, launched Sudoc investment-wise. And the Dutch funds Momentum Capital and PureTerra Ventures have come in recently and started supporting Sudoc. The Netherlands encompass the Rhine River delta. All the micropollutants in the water from up the Rhine and all its tributaries end up passing through the Netherlands. And they also have massive agriculture, so they do more than their own fair share of polluting their water, and they know they have water contamination problems to solve.  Their participation in Sudoc is a wonderful thing because we deeply share common goals, and the Netherlands is spectacularly set up to study water problems.

PureTerra has investment money from the European Union (EU) and the Dutch government, and we are able to honor that investment by putting the EU flag on the company. I love this because Europe is the best place to treat the water simply because they are aware of the problems and trying really hard to find solutions. They act on those sustainability performances much better than we Americans or other large jurisdictions do. There are a lot more people in Europe on a smaller piece of real estate, and their rivers are likely more polluted. So, all of that comes into play. They want to treat their water. We want to treat their water. The EU spent hundreds of millions of Euros assessing what the best technology was, and they ended up with ozone. But ozone is too expensive for any plants serving populations less than 100,000 population equivalents – that’s people plus industry outputs that are equal to a certain number of people. Europe has 375,000 water treatment plants with less than 2000 people, and that’s a total of 75 million people. Ozone will never work for any of those plants. It doesn’t even work for medium-size cities. You need a big city for it to be cost effective.

TAML/peroxide water treatment is likely to be much cheaper than ozone to deploy and use. It is so simple. All we do is mix two solutions into the water. The amount of catalyst and peroxide is always very low. And as you lower the catalyst concentration with the current catalyst that has what I call a kill-switch, each catalyst molecule does more work before it dies. The kill-switch is a valuable molecular asset for catalysis that we discovered in TAMLs and have developed into a design element that can be used to give you greater control over the catalyst lifetime.  If you lower the catalyst concentration from 100 parts per 1 billion down to 10 parts per 1 billion, you get 6.4 times the amount of work out of each catalyst molecule.

JMK: That’s amazing!

TC: Right? We actually had great water treatment processes several years ago. But we had not totally optimized the concentrations of catalyst and peroxide to get the best results. And we have just published a paper describing this phenomenon. I think it's very important. You now can treat water comparably to ozone where you are working at the low end of ozone concentrations with hydrogen peroxide. This just makes it so much cheaper. You don't have to have sophisticated operators. You don't have to have a sophisticated plant.

You have to have pumps to mix solutions of the TAML and of peroxide into the water. You have to make sure everything is mixed well. If you want to do it for minutes, you can. If you can let the process run for hours, you can run it at lower concentrations of peroxide and catalyst. It’s going from low to really, really low concentrations by waiting longer before releasing the water.

I think we have processes that can be applied pretty much anywhere, because these should be so easy to install and operate.

JMK: And hydrogen peroxide – we feel pretty safe about.

TC: Hydrogen peroxide under enzyme activation is what nature uses to destroy pathogens and toxic chemicals. Hydrogen peroxide is a commodity chemical. If you look in the literature, the world is thought to make on order 5 million tonnes (MT) of hydrogen peroxide per year. But if you talk to the Chinese, they just laugh at that because they make much more that doesn't get reported. So, I imagine it's on the order of 10 to 20 MT of hydrogen peroxide made every year, and I could see one of these small plants buying even bottles of hydrogen peroxide, and having something like Amazon deliver them a half a kilogram of the catalyst for not very much money. I won't say what it will be, but at scale it will not be very much money, and that this will last them for a year.

JMK: Oh, that's wonderful! And that goes to your fairness component of ethics, right?

TC: That is a big part of it for me, the fact that this is not just for the rich. We prefer to make this cheap and accessible to everyone.

I have the Sword of Damocles hanging over me in case some nasty toxicity turns up. But assuming the Sword continues to hang there and doesn’t fall, it will help the animals live life more as nature intended. It will do the same for the fish. It’s the entire aquatic system, eventually all over the world, that will be more natural with far fewer synthetic chemicals changing development. If I can allow my mind to say “Yes, you would be able to do this in India, in China, and pretty much anywhere,” it’s just thrilling – so long, of course, as the sword continues to hang there securely. The promise is that Sudoc will improve the existence of all aquatic creatures – and birds are in the mix because they eat the fish that are contaminated – and suddenly you realize that every living thing could have a better life. That is, you are dramatically reducing endocrine disruption pressure on the entire environment, if this takes off in the way that we hope it will. And I have a plan for the sword if it does fall to basically take it out of the picture by design.

JMK: That is just incredible! What an amazing legacy that would be! And you know, it does feel chancy to hope for things, right? We've been disappointed in the past, and yet – look how much better we have done with DDT. The eagles have come back. And in many ways, we have cleaned things up. When I teach global environmental health, I tell them so much bad news. And then I try to lard that every once in a while with pictures of how air looked in the 1970s compared to now. Wow. That’s really inspiring to consider.

TC: Well, this project has evolved over more than four decades. And we have been especially diligent to search for swords. But yes, failure is a contingency. You talked about DDT. Have you read the book How to Sell a Poison?

JMK: No – I don’t think I have.

TC: Well, it’s incredible. It’s by a Berkeley historian, Elena Conis, and she tells the DDT story. And I know Pete so well, and DDT was covered in Our Stolen Future. I also knew Theo Colburn very well. She said, “I have two sons, Terry, in academia – you’re one of the them, and the other is Lou Gillette.”

JMK: Wow!

TC: I was so honored by that. But anyway, she was completely amazing.

The intensity of the struggle against DDT is unreal, and it is told to scholarly perfection by Dr. Conis. The heroes and heroine and their stories – Dr. Conis showed the rich tapestry of the DDT story, and the people are absolutely incredible. And so we see the result. We think, Ruckelshaus got sensible and did something reasonable when the EPA was created by President Nixon in banning DDT, and it all looks relatively straightforward. But if you actually look at the ferocity of the pushback from industry and the push forward from people who said, “Look at what this stuff is doing to my animals, to the birds, to the bees, to everything.” A lot of people basically burned up their lives fighting DDT to get to the point we are at today. We owe them a great debt of gratitude.

JMK: Absolutely. And this is why I'm so interested to talk to all of you. In my book proposal, which is under consideration at Johns Hopkins right now, I argue that we have the wrong people as heroes in our society. I have some candidates for heroes – people who, like you, are just working away with almost no recognition – and including those like Tyrone Hayes who are being bullied by industry, but who are pushing and working, and really for nothing but the common good. Some people think that scientists are in it for the money, but they just don't know what scientists are paid. I think that is right. And I will definitely have to look up that book, because that's the kind of project I am interested in.

TC: You will love it, and I recommend it on audio book. I'm just going to send Pete Myers a message because I'm supposed to be on a meeting with him and a group of other people.

JMK: Oh, I completely understand.

TC: I'll just say tell him that I’m in an interview with Jean-Marie, and surprise, surprise! It’s taking a while, so I won’t make the Global EDC call this morning.

JMK: It is very kind of you to give me this time!

TC: No, no, no – they will do just fine without me.

JMK: That's wonderful. You know, I did have a list of questions, and you've answered so many of them. But one question that I suppose remains unanswered is how did you first get where you are now? I mean, you said you started this work in the seventies and eighties, and you started being interested in green chemistry. But was there something in your childhood or early training that predisposed you to want to look for these solutions?

TC: I started my independent academic career in 1980. Well, I grew up in New Zealand, and I grew up in one of the first houses in what is now a very beautiful suburb. And I interacted with nature a lot.

And that area of Auckland had a sewage problem that was getting out of hand in the 1960s or so. They built oxidations ponds there. We lived on the edge of a large harbor (the Manakau) with a small mouth out to the Tasman Sea, and there was an island in the middle of this called Puketutu Island (a Maori name). And the city put multiple causeways out to the island, making large ponds.

So rather than go to the expense of a sophisticated wastewater treatment plant they couldn’t afford, they piped all of the wastewater of the city into these oxidation ponds. And so coming to the first one, the bacteria in there would chew away on the waste with sunlight causing disinfection, and then the water would come off the top into the second one, then into the third one and the fourth one, and then eventually into the harbor. The water was cleaner, but the area often stunk. And it supported immense amounts of insect life so that you could go outside and get a faceful of annoying midges.

I spent quite a lot of time, roaming near that island and seeing these negative effects of humans on what was meant to be a beautiful environment. Decades later, in the late 1990s, they started building a much more sophisticated water treatment plant. They eventually dredged all the muck out of the oxidation ponds and buried it.

And if you go to where they buried it – it’s a large space, and there are still breather pipes because there is still a lot of chemistry going on down there. They want the bacteria to continue degrading the stuff.

But this area went from being a smelly area to now, one of the most beautiful places to live in the City. It’s really gorgeous. The process impacted nature hugely. So, when I was at the University as either an undergrad or a grad student, one of the professors was a great bird watcher. I remember one day walking down to the beach, and I saw this funny looking black bird with a red beak, and I told him. “Oh, I saw this bird,” I said, and described it. He said, “Oh, I'm going immediately.” He went out to see it. It turned out to be an Oyster catcher, which I had hardly ever seen, and I'd lived there for many years.

But if you go back there now, and go for a walk on this flat large green space around the waterfront road called Kiwi Esplanade as I did several years ago, I found there were thousands of these birds standing on the grass. And it’s become New Zealand’s biggest bird wetland. So when you take human pollution pressure off the environment, it can clearly be very beneficial to nature.

I don’t know why the birds were discouraged before, because there were lots of insects for them to eat, but they were. But as you walk around this area today, you will encounter unbelievable amounts of native birds everywhere. This is what putting in a much safer and more sustainable technology can do for cleaning up.

So, you asked, how did I get to where I am today? Well, I had that sensitivity. I remember early student reading about toxicity – I was in the undergraduate labs, and we were doing experiments that required us to use benzene. There was this big warning that you could not use benzene until you read this stuff about its hazards. So I went and read about the toxicity of benzene ….

And then, that summer I worked at this refrigerator production company called Fisher and Paykel – you can still buy their fridges in America, or their dishwashing machines, which are very good. And so, it's a very successful New Zealand Company.

I went to work there, and my job was to move fridges in cardboard cartons and other things onto trucks with dollies. I was having lunch with the guys who were assembling fridges, and they were talking about the terrible headaches and nosebleeds they were having all the time. So I went to where they worked and realized what was happening.

A fridge has an outer container and an inner lining. In those days, they would wrap the cooling coil around the inner lining, and then they would dip the inner lining in tar to seal it. Then they would pull it out and put it in the outer container. And then they would put a foam between the two. Somewhere in the process, they would plumb in the pumps that drive the refrigeration. It is the tar that is most relevant to this story.

What was happening is these guys who were doing the dipping, at the end, they had to wash the white surfaces that got splashes of tar with rags soaked in a solvent to remove the tar spots on the inner surface of the fridge. You could go in there and smell – I’ve got a very good nose – and I was sure I could smell aromatics like benzene.

So, I called up Shell, which was selling them the solvent, and I pretended I wanted to buy some, and I said that I wanted to know the composition, and I learned from that call what was in there. After a while, they said, who are you? And that was the end of the conversation.

But I found out that the liquid they were using – Shell X5, I think it was called at the time – was 5% aromatics – benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes. All of these are bad actors, benzene in particular.

They were literally every day taking a rag, dipping it in the solvent with their hands, wiping the black tar off and getting the classic headaches and nosebleeds of aromatic hydrocarbon poisoning. After I read the material for the experiments in the physical chemistry lab back at the University of Auckland and did a bit more reading because they gave references – and learned what aromatic poisoning was, I thought, this is just awful. These guys are potentially going to be killed by their job exposures. They were getting heavy-duty exposures.

I went to see the plant chemist who had a master’s degree in chemistry. And I asked him, “Do you do you realize what's going on there? These guys are breathing this stuff and wetting their hands with it, and it's really bad? And he said, “Oh, you just can't tell them.”

“We tell them they have to wear gloves, but they'll never do anything we tell them – it's just so hard. But don't worry because we are going to go to a gel cleaner to get rid of this problem. We're aware of it.”

I was about 19 – so I was thinking, “Oh, okay, they are probably going to fix it.”

But nine months later, I went back and checked, and nothing had changed. I knocked on the door and asked the chemist where he was with his team. He saw me, and he had that sort of deer in the headlights face.

I said, “you haven’t changed that. These guys for all of these months have been breathing large amounts of aromatics, and you have done nothing about it.” And he said, “Oh, well, don't worry about it, we will.”

So I went back to the University and xeroxed all the critical references on aromatics. It was a stack about a foot tall, I and went back to the plant with these. And he said, “oh you again.” And I said, “Here are all the references on what you are doing to those people.” And then I went to the chair of New Zealand Institute of Chemistry, who happened to work at the community college where my wife-to-be was a secretary. So I had gotten to know him and went and told him the story. And he said, “Terry, there is nothing we can do about it. They (the fridge company) are too powerful. If we start raising a fuss, we won’t be able to do anything about it.”

So I thought, “Well, that’s gutless.” And I didn’t do anything more at that time. But a series of these really, really personal, very unsettling things about poisoning people through industrial chemistry came along, and I got a close-up look at what was happening.

My next story was that we had this small town in New Zealand, called Te Kuiti. It’s a farming town, and there was this one week where two babies were born in the town with spina bifida. One mother remembered aerial top-dressing of a field near her house on the edge of the town in the first trimester of her pregnancy.

This was post-Vietnam war. If you were using these herbicides – 2,4,5T – it had dioxin in it – and spina bifida is a signature dioxin injury – there were starting to be worries. There was a professor at the University, Robert Mann, and a parliamentary member who were writing leaflets about Vietnam and dioxin and distributing these around the university. We had a debate about it at the University, and a sage medical professor came along and said he had read this report from America, and in a public presentation, he said that it was just bad luck – that we had gotten struck by a comet, basically.

He said the statistics were very unlikely – but it just happened – it had nothing to do with 2,4,5 -T and dioxin – it just happened. And another professor or activist got up, yelling and banging, and said “no, that’s not right at all. We are harming our children with these things.”

And so my PhD advisor – who was fantastic and very conservative – said, “Nonsense!”

I said that I didn’t think that it was all nonsense. It sounded like that is real – because also in the Oregon forest, something similar had happened– large numbers of women miscarrying when they were doing spraying with 2,4,5-T, the pesticide that was contaminated with dioxin.

And so I kept reading about the dangers of dioxin in Vietnam, which evolved over into my young professor hood and into my middle professor hood – where I started teaching about it – it is totally disgusting. The companies knew about the dangers of dioxin and continued to sell it to the military and spread it all over Vietnam and Cambodia while causing exposures of US soldiers. 

So this was another case that built my eventual challenging over Saran Wrap and dioxin and that point – counterpoint in C&EN News.

Then I started teaching a course in green chemistry in 1992, the first such course anywhere. And I thought it was going to be a technical course. But how do you teach a field that is just starting with intellectual material that isn’t collected anywhere? And so I read what I could find and called around and said to people – it looks like you are doing something like green chemistry – and asked for advice and more materials. Very clearly, shifting refrigeration from CFC refrigerants to others that decomposed in the lower atmosphere so that less reached the stratosphere was green chemistry, for example. But jumping ahead over years of reading. I came to realize the main problem isn't the chemicals. The problem is like what you see in the Mark Ruffalo movie Dark Waters.

The problem isn’t the chemicals – it’s what people do with chemicals. They are prepared to essentially take off the table health and environment and fairness performances, as I term critical sustainability performances, for the sake of the money. And so my course continued to evolve. I read Deceit and Denial – have you read that one?

JMK: Yes.

TC: So Deceit and Denial is bone chilling. Basically, if you take Felix Wormser, Robert Kehoe, Joseph Aub, Thomas Midgely, Jr. and several others – you come to realize from the material in the book that this handful of people acted in ways that led to the mass poisoning of Americans with lead. The first bans or restrictions on lead in France, Belgium, and Austria were in 1909. We didn’t get to anything effective with household paint in America until the mid-1970s. We didn’t get lead out of gasoline until the mid-nineties. And the scale of the lead-induced human health injuries that Deceit and Denial details are very sad to contemplate.

JMK: Yes.

TC: I came to believe that the reason civilization isn’t sustainable is primarily cultural, not technical. So, I changed my course. Now students read great books, watch Dark Waters, and write essays about what impact the reading has on them. They read Deceit and Denial. They read Our Stolen Future. They read Countdown.

JMK: That sounds wonderful. I'm so glad that you're bringing that interdisciplinary aspect into a chemistry course.

TC: What has happened is – in our local environment…. I learned to always say what I think is true about these great sustainability issues. That’s one of the things that these experiences lead you to do. You are either a coward or you say what you think – and gee! you can’t be fired. I realized in the late 1990s that I have got my mind and my reading – I might lose my research group, but I can’t be fired. In the end, my research flourished in unique ways where my speaking and writing frankly about the sustainability issues of chemicals was probably responsible for this success.

This takes us on another tangent. Why do we have tenure?

JMK: Well, so we can say what we think. That's the idea, anyway.

TC: Yes, do you know the history of it?

JMK: No – I don’t know that history.

TC: It’s fairly simple. If you go back to the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, there were professors speaking publicly about people we call robber barons today and their labor practices, putting little children in mills and all sorts of social injustice things. And there were people talking about evolution. And most of these universities traced their roots back to religious groups. And so they were either challenging trustees who at the time consider evolution heresy, or they were attacking trustees who at the time were often the robber barons.

JMK: Right!

TC: They were getting fired. And so the Association of University Professors had a critical meeting in 1915, and they decided that they had had enough. They borrowed the concept of tenure from the Germans. Germany codifies things carefully, and they have rules. So the Germans had a set of rules to guide teaching called Lehrfreiheit, The Freedom to Teach. This meant that you could say absolutely anything you wanted in your area expertise, and nobody could punish you for it. But the Americans went for a more blanket free speech.

Then you saw the Universities buying in over time. There was a big test of tenure in the McCarthy era. New Hampshire is a very conservative state, and they had a law on their books the State Attorney General could demand to see the course materials of any public-school lecturer who was suspected of subversion.

There was a guy by the name of Sweezy, who actually wasn’t a professor but went to give a talk there, and somehow, the attorney general got the idea he was committing communist subversion in a presentation to students and demanded his see his lectures notes. Sweezy refused to give them over. So he was found in contempt of court, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided in favor of Sweezy, and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was a Republican Governor of California before he became a justice, wrote really beautiful prose in dicta about what tenure has to mean. People are trying to erode tenure today in all sorts of ways in places like Florida, but it’s still holding. It's certainly very strong at Carnegie Mellon.

JMK: That is wonderful, and it surprises me sometimes that more professors don't use that power.

TC: So that's the point – the point that it is a use it or lose it thing.

People may not have thought well enough about what a privilege and responsibility tenure entails, I think. Because, on the whole, tertiary education is not doing a good job of addressing the big sustainability challenges of our time where endocrine disruption is a prime example. And if everybody was more clued into the obligations inherent in academic tenure, I think things would be different.

What has happened, particularly in areas of science and technology that can bring in a lot of research money, is that universities have selected for faculty who are successful in putting out results and bringing in money.

The work itself – in the case of chemistry – is indeed very beautiful and wonderful. But if in pursuing it, you suppress much of the rest of your mind and turn away from vital questions about how chemicals impact sustainability all because your engagement with these facets may complicate your ability to raise research money, well then, your local system will not be able to confront the really technically tough, politically difficult challenges that commercial chemicals present to sustainability.

Your university will be weak in the most important area that the people need it to be strong in today. Because America is staring down the barrels of multiple sustainability cannons where the fuses have already been lit.

And because our civilization looks to its universities for leadership on scientific matters of far-reaching importance, the quest for sustainability competence in universities requires of academia not only the examination of topics such as how to avoid endocrine disruption in chemicals by design, but also that issues of unsustainable human behavior, such as we see in Dark Waters, be analyzed and broadly seen for what they are: wicked bad and lethal to the good future of life on earth.

JMK: Yes.

TC: So the question, then, is how is the energy generated by spinning the classical hamster wheels of the chemical enterprise contributing to solving sustainability challenges? If you are brutally honest and critical, as I think I tend to be on myself, most of what is getting done across chemistry doesn’t matter much to sustaining life on earth. But the choice of the chemical enterprise to stop ignoring and engage with solving endocrine disruption issues will matter massively in a positive way to life on earth.

JMK: I can attest to that. You know, I lost a child to these kinds of chemicals.

TC: I didn’t know – really?

JMK: I thought maybe my biography had gone out to you all. But yes, that's what motivates all the work I've been doing for the last 22 years. My daughter was – well, we were all sprayed with chlorpyrifos, sprayed for mosquitoes without our knowledge or permission, and she developed leukemia. She relapsed, and then we found out about the exposures. I have every reason to believe that was the major factor.

TC: Well, sure. So when you get into the law, it’s not, do you have scientific proof.

JMK: Right.

TC: I mean in a legal case about causality of an illness, the standard in some jurisdictions is, is it more likely than not that an exposure caused an illness? And I'll tell you right away from what I have read about chlorpyrifos that I consider there to be weight to the argument that causality was associated with the exposure you described.

JMK: Yes.

TC: When your court case….

JMK: And no, I couldn't win the court case. I actually looked into that. The lawyers basically said – they apologized for saying this – but they said there weren't enough dead children.

TC: There weren’t enough dead children?

JMK: Yes. There were perhaps eight in the area who had cancer. But you know, spraying is done so much, and there is no control group. And most people don't even realize it's being done. So, when I first was looking into the science, and then realizing what was happening, I sent out an annotated bibliography of the research to every municipality in my county, and then the spraying company threatened to sue me for libel and slander. And so I backed off until I got the credentials I needed. My PhD is actually in literature.

I earned a master's in public health (MPH), building on my science background. I was premed and worked in a neurology lab but chose the doctorate in literature over medical school. So I have gone back to that now -- focused on environmental chemicals and human health. The provisional name of the book is Poisoning Children: An Ethnography of Environmental Health.

I want to tell the stories of the children and the suffering of the children and the families who are affected by these chemicals and pair that with the stories of you all – the people who have not been swayed by pressures from the chemical industry and who are working away, not only showing that it is the case that these chemicals cause disease, but also working on solutions. And I do think it's an inspiring story. I want to make people understand it, feel it, regret it, and change it.

TC: I am so sorry to hear that about your daughter, Jean-Marie. That is a real burden. And I could see how it would fire you up. Your goals are wonderful, and I hope will turn your loss and pain into an immense benefit for future generations.

JMK: Yes – thank you.

TC: So we have a civilization that is not able to deal well with these problems, at least not adequately. The chemicals are everywhere. The whole civilization is literally based on chemicals. In the living room, I look around, and there is no TV without the chemical enterprise, no paints…. well, the paints we might have had, but no photography, no dyes on the carpet. Virtually every single thing we do is underpinned by chemicals.

And then certain endocrine-disrupting chemicals at the commodity level, like BPA and phthalates, are produced in large volumes and go into so many products. And then there are the plastics themselves, which are completely foreign to nature, and which nature is telling us very clearly, “I can’t handle this garbage – stop it.”

JMK: Right?

TC: So we are leaving the kids something that looks and feels good, but that is actually eroding them massively – all the way to killing some of them.  

We have the burden that the reproductive component of endocrine disruption is the flagship for endocrine disruption in the human population because it is hard to talk about it. People get very uncomfortable. But it’s the flagship for endocrine disruption because sperm counts and sperm quality are easy to measure and observe, and you can comparatively easily gather the information on large numbers of males – as we see through Shanna Swann’s work analyzing this literature and running experiments of various kinds. We now have one in six young couples not being able to have a baby the old-fashioned way. And if you project Shanna Swan’s line of the decline in sperm count with time on the male side and project it out in time, the mean sperm count asymptotically approaches zero by 2045. That means people are universally sterile long before 2045, perhaps by 2030 or 2035 because the cutoff point considered for fertility used to be 40 million sperm per milliliter (ml). Now it’s been dropped to 20 million sperm per ml. SO what happens as more and more males of reproductive age drop below this level?  And on the female side, the women are being hit with endometriosis and polycystic ovarian disorder, and other devastating things that are harder to characterize and measure.

Nature is nature, and if you are infertile, you are infertile. At 20 million sperm per ml, a male may not be able to have a child without artificial fertility assistance.

So, we’re looking at something nature probably has to do because of the chemical enterprise – which is to get rid of people to get rid of our chemical assaults.

I’ve been very public about this. I don’t keep it quiet. It makes a lot of people get hostile. I don’t care. What has happened around me is interesting – because you have to tell people stuff like this 20 times over years before they begin to accept it – but it looks like in my local environment, key people are catching on. Some people will go “right, that’s really interesting” and look into it, but those are really rare.

JMK: Yes.

TC: Most people seem to have to hear about endocrine disruption time and time again – and then they have to hear from multiple sources. Now what I have learned from Theo Colborn, Pete Myers, Fred Vom Saal, Laura Vandenberg, Tyrone Hayes, Tom Zoeller, and many others and started talking about in the late 1990s is turning up in all sorts of newspapers – like the Guardian – and we are seeing it all over the place.  

I’ve heard that MIT is trying to raise a billion dollars for sustainability-related research. So it is one of various institutions that are beginning to see that there are real opportunities for getting support to address sustainability problems. If you can get the money in to do the research rather than stating the problems to see instead the money being cut off, the right kind of research and education will start flourishing – the way the system has been working is lamentable.

Both Pete Myers and I have irrevocable family trusts. With the income that we would get from our ownership positions in SUDOC, 100% of Pete’s money and 90% of mine goes into funds to support EDC science and communication. We really need a National Science Foundation to handle chemical sustainability that isn't national.

If Sudoc takes off in areas like large-scale water treatment or any technology where peroxide and some other oxidants are involved, TAML catalysts have the potential to make the processes better and cheaper. And the potential will come with such achievements to make a lot of money for this fund to help the world deal better with endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

We have products out there currently in the business-to-business space for such purposes as mold cleaning, And they are magical. You take a little packet that is sealed down the middle with oxidant on one side and the catalyst on the other side in a washing powder or something like that. The products, which you mix with water before use, use much less oxidant than the conventional products, and come in much less volume so take up much less storage space. They can be stored for a very long time. And people using them claim they are much less likely to get injured by chemical burns than with the classical products.

They go in and spray our Dot product on moldy surfaces, and the black mold stains go to clean wood very quickly. But if they get any on them or if they breathe in any of it, the testimony is that the impacts are much less than the classical products. One of the mold company owners told me that one of his workers sprayed him accidentally in the eye. It was the most terrifying thing he’s ever had because he thought his eye was going to burn out. He thought he was going to be blind. It didn't turn out that way, but it was very traumatic.

JMK: That is amazing. I have to go teach at 11, so I wonder if I can ask one more question.

TC: Okay.

JMK: Clearly, we could talk for several hours.

TC: You see I can talk! [We both laugh.]

JMK: I have a million more questions, but I will take it down to one because this is something I’m puzzling over myself, which is, we've talked about how daunting the reality and the science are, and the more you learn, the scarier the situation is for human health and for all ecosystems, the entire earth. So what do you think will happen? I am more focused on children's health. But do you think we're going to pull this one off? Do you think we will save civilization? What do you think it will be like in 2050?

TC: On a good day, I am optimistic. I can imagine a high-tech civilization without these problems. But massive change will be required to save our civilization, and we are going to have to be very creative to lead the peoples of the world toward sustainable chemical technologies while dumping unsustainable ones. And the possibilities for more mistakes lie in abundance in every valley, and on every mountain and hill, and on crooked paths and rough places, alluding to the biblical text in Handel’s Messiah. So that’s what’s on the chopping block – our civilization. I tried to capture this in a talk I gave at the Plastic Soup Foundation meeting in Amsterdam in 2021.

To capture what we are losing, there is this guy by the name of Andre Rieu. He’s a Dutch impresario who runs enormous concerts of popular classical music; it’s exquisite what he does. In one concert, he’s in London and presents the Platin Tenors singing "Jerusalem" – it’s wonderful. And the cameras are panning around the audience. And there is this elderly lady with tears running down her face at the end. And if you think about it, that’s what we are losing. There will be no one to cry those tears at the beauty of what our civilization has produced.

JMK: Yes – I love the way you put that. Why am I devoting my time and attention to this, rather than literature, which I love so much? There is no literature if there is no sustainable civilization.

TC: That’s right. Without civilization, there is no appreciation of Shakespeare. It’s the net collection of human talent and insight that we can look at to be totally inspired by. I happen to think human life is better by a huge amount when confronted with the experiences of great art and literature. Science and technology at its best just make this much more possible and extend our capabilities. So you can go onto YouTube today and watch Andre Rieu concerts almost as if you were there. If you make use of it in the right way, it is just unbelievably inspiring and uplifting.

And so this is what we are going to lose. It is in the tears of that lady that I see the distillation of all the best things about our civilization. I supposed you have seen Civilization – Lord Kenneth Clark’s history from the 1960s – both a book and a TV program – and it’s unbelievably superb. It’s a little dated I guess – 60 to 70 years on. Lord Clark looked at civilization through the lens of art. He starts off saying that civilizations write their histories in three books – the Book of their Words, the Book of their Deeds, and the Book of their Art. And the only one you can really trust is the last – the art really reflects where the civilization is, and then he goes on to look at our Western Civilization through its art. He uses art as a lens to see what people were valuing and what they were thinking and what they were experiencing over a period of 2000 years.

JMK: I will put those on my list.

TC: There are thirteen one-hour episodes. And you can get them for sure online. They are incredible. I watched that in my late teens and found it completely inspiring, and that had a big impact on me. And I went to get things like the Great Treasury of Western Thought. It’s a doctor of philosophy we get – not a doctor of chemistry.

JMK: That is true. I am not surprised to learn that you have these varied interests because you are really a rare person in chemistry. It’s such a badge of honor that Pat says you are now also an honorary biologist.

TC: I don’t think I am a much of a biologist, but I can make a crude approximation of somebody who seems to have some idea of what’s going on in endocrine disruption, because I find it so incredibly fascinating and have such superb mentors like Pat.

Clearly, we click. So this is what I want our students to understand. But it is really hard to dig out of the drill holes. You probably have to leave.

JMK: I do have to run. I hate to leave, but it’s been such a wonderful conversation.

TC: It is so hard – because we take everybody and say, “Well, go down this drill hole,” and you literally have to go down it to be any good.

JMK: Right.

TC: And people career-wise stay there in their comfort zones. And what we have to do is have them come back up to the surface and look around and go and look down other drill holes to see that the real meaning of things resides in no single drill hole, including endocrine disruption. Doing that can give enough of a picture about how to build a sustainability chemical-based civilization I believe.

I'll let you go. Good luck with your teaching. Thank for listening to me for all this time.

JMK: Thank you so much! Bye!