by Dan Fagin
All of those competing theories would eventually be shown (after major modification) to have at least some validity for certain types of cancer, but unless some yet-undiscovered microbe was to blame, they all failed to address the big question: Why does cancer begin? What type of catalyst could trigger Virchow’s cell irritation, activate Cohnheim’s embryonic rest, or cause specialized cells to begin regressing? As the twentieth century began, no one could say. Like an apparition, cancer seemed to arise out of nowhere, with no discernible initiator. Moving cancer research from field observation to laboratory experiment had yielded nothing but frustration and intense disagreement among the champions of various theories of tumor formation.
Katsusaburo Yamagiwa of Japan knew about those conflicts firsthand.4 Born in 1863 into a noble family of the samurai class that had lost most of its wealth, he proved to be such a brilliant medical student that the Japanese government in 1892 sent Yamagiwa and two other young scientists to Robert Koch’s lab in Berlin to study tuberculosis. They were not made to feel welcome. The precise reasons are obscure: The delegation may have shown up on Koch’s doorstep uninvited, Koch may have blamed them for the Japanese government’s mistreatment of a friend, or they may have found the work uninteresting—or perhaps all three. It surely did not help matters that the young scientists came from a nation viewed as uncivilized by many Europeans of that era, though there is no proof that attitude was shared by Koch, who later visited Japan and posed for photographs in a kimono. Whatever the reason, the Japanese quickly dispersed to other laboratories, with far-reaching consequences for cancer research because of where Yamagiwa ended up: at the Berlin laboratory of the great Virchow, the champion of cellular irritation theory and no friend of the upstart Koch and his focus on microbes.
Yamagiwa thrived under Virchow’s tutelage and fully embraced his mentor’s irritation theory of carcinogenesis. Virchow knew about the case studies from the Schneeberg mines and the aniline factories suggesting that some pollutants might be carcinogenic. He also recognized the possibility that chemical exposures might provoke the irritation he believed led to malignancies. But Virchow had never tested that idea experimentally. It is likely that his new protégé Yamagiwa, during his sojourn in Berlin, resolved to try if he ever got the chance. Returning to Tokyo in 1894, Yamagiwa was initially assigned to study diseases that were hindering the expansion of the Japanese Empire. But his service ended in 1899 when he contracted tuberculosis, a disease Yamagiwa surely thought he had left behind when he departed Koch’s lab seven years earlier. For the rest of his life, he suffered from a hacking cough, shortness of breath, and chronic exhaustion. Confined to his Tokyo laboratory after a long and intermittent recovery, Yamagiwa returned to the consuming passion he had developed during his time with Virchow: the search for catalysts capable of initiating cancer via cellular irritation.
The suspected carcinogen Yamagiwa decided to study was, in many ways, an obvious choice. It was coal tar, the original industrial pollutant—bane of chimney sweeps and chief elixir of the chemical revolution ever since William Perkin used it to create the first synthetic dye in 1856 in his parents’ attic. Tar was already a leading suspect based on a long string of observational studies, from Pott’s chimney sweeps to reports of cancer in workers in the dye and kerosene industries, both of which relied on tar derivatives. In 1907, before there was any laboratory evidence that coal tar was carcinogenic, the British government formally recognized scrotal cancer as an industrial disease, declaring that “men engaged in handling pitch or other tarry products” would qualify for workers’ compensation if they developed scrotal cancer.5
Yet by the time Yamagiwa began his coal tar experiments in 1913, European scientists had given up trying to use it to induce cancer in animals. Several had reported failures after painting tar onto the ears of dogs or injecting it into rats; others had smeared azo dyes and kerosene onto the skin of rats. Most of those experiments had triggered lesions in the affected areas but no cancerous tumors. Coal tar research seemed to be at a dead end, especially after a dramatic announcement in 1913 from Copenhagen: A former student of Koch’s named Johannes Fibiger declared that after six years of research, he had discovered a parasite that caused cancer. While dissecting wild rats infected with tuberculosis, Fibiger had noticed that many had stomach tumors. He eventually concluded that the cause was a microscopic nematode worm he called Spiroptera carcinoma, which lived in the stomachs of cockroaches that were then consumed by rats. (The nematode originated in South America and the Caribbean but was carried to Europe in the cockroach-infested holds of sugar ships.) Fibiger fed those infected cockroaches to mice in his laboratory and reported that he could reliably induce tumors in the rodents’ stomachs and esophagi. Fibiger even claimed to have transferred the stomach tumors from one mouse to another. The Danish scientist had seemingly won the race to confirm the first carcinogen—and it was a cancer microbe, not a chemical pollutant.
Word of Fibiger’s apparent breakthrough reached Tokyo after Yamagiwa and his assistant, Koichi Ichikawa, had already embarked on their coal tar experiments. Mindful of his mentor Virchow’s ideas about chronic irritation of epithelial cells, Yamagiwa made two choices that distinguished his work from that of his failed predecessors: He chose to experiment on rabbits because the insides of their long ears provided plenty of accessible epithelium, and he decided to paint those ears with coal tar over many months, not just a few weeks. Beginning on September 1, 1913, Ichikawa painted tar on the animals’ ears every two or three days. (Yamagiwa was too weak for the laborious work.) After 112 days, tumors appeared. On April 2, 1914, Yamagiwa excitedly reported the results to the Tokyo Pathology Society. But his audience, aware of the failed European experiments, was skeptical. The growths Yamagiwa saw on the rabbits’ ears were merely inflammation, not malignancies, several of his colleagues asserted.
Undaunted, Yamagiwa and Ichikawa secured a grant to purchase sixty more rabbits and began the process of repeating their lengthy experiment. Things were going well until, during the summer rainy season, an infectious disease swept through the cages and killed almost all of the rabbits. Among the few survivors, however, two developed the same tumors the researchers had seen before, so Yamagiwa decided not to abandon the project. Instead, he bought more rabbits. By the time he formally presented the results to the Tokyo Medical Society on September 25, 1915, Ichikawa had painted coal tar on the ears of 137 rabbits over 250 days and had documented the presence of cancerous tumors on the ears of seven of those rabbits. This time, Yamagiwa got a much more favorable reception. To celebrate his success, Yamagiwa penned a haiku poem, famously translated into English as: “Cancer was produced! Proudly I walk a few steps.” He wrote up his results in a paper he dedicated to the memory of his mentor Virchow, who had died in 1902.
It was a historic moment, but few scientists were paying attention.6 While Johannes Fibiger’s fame spread quickly, Yamagiwa’s achievement got much less attention because of Japan’s remoteness. By the early 1920s, however, scientists in Europe and the United States (including Fibiger) were replicating Yamagiwa’s coal tar experiments in mice, rats, and dogs, confirming the carcinogenicity of tar and developing a template for testing other suspect compounds. Fibiger’s nematode experiments, meanwhile, could not be replicated. Even so, they were acclaimed as the synthesis of the two major schools of thought on carcinogenesis: Fibiger’s nematodes were microbial but allegedly caused tumors via irritation of the stomach and esophagus of their animal host, which is why his results excited disciples of both Koch and Virchow. Fibiger was repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Prize, finally receiving it in 1926, after the prize committee rejected splitting his award with Yamagiwa.
It was, in hindsight, one of the biggest errors in the history of the Nobel Prize. As was already becoming clear in 1926, Fibiger’s nematode was not the direct cause of the growths he saw in rats. By the 1930s, research had demonstrated that the stomach lesions Fibiger saw in rats were benign and appeared only in animals fed
a diet deficient in vitamin A, which was the crucial cause.7 The nematodes were, if anything, merely a contributing factor because they caused tissue irritation (a realization that belatedly lent more support to Virchow’s irritation theory). Microbial carcinogens, both parasitic and viral, would not be confirmed until the second half of the twentieth century.8 By the 1950s, Fibiger’s name had disappeared from many histories of cancer research. When his work was included, it was often as an illustration of experimental error.
Yamagiwa’s discovery, on the other hand, launched modern experimental cancer research, setting the stage for the identification of hundreds of chemicals that, at sufficient doses, cause cancer in lab animals. After Yamagiwa, cancer could no longer be dismissed as a vague threat confined to dangerous places like mines and factories, or as an uncontrollable illness that struck randomly and without apparent cause. The era of the carcinogen had arrived.
When Stephanie Wauters heard Ciba-Geigy’s Jorge Winkler describe the chemical composition of his factory’s wastewater as “ninety-nine percent water and a little salt,” she was furious. A former high school science teacher who had just started law school in 1984 (she would eventually become a prosecutor and then a judge), Wauters was no shrinking violet. She and her husband, John, an accountant, lived on Tunesbrook Drive, about a quarter-mile west of the site of the pipe leak. Like many of their neighbors, the Wauters had their own water well in the backyard, and Stephanie was upset when she learned that her children’s drinking water had come from the same shallow aquifer the leak had contaminated. She wondered how long the pipeline had been leaking. Then she heard Jorge Winkler’s comments, which made no sense to her at all. “Our motive initially was just to find out what was going on and to protect our children,” she recalled years later. “Then we heard that the waste was from Ciba, and that Ciba was claiming it was just diluted effluent. But how could it be just water and salt, especially if they were accepting waste from all those other companies in violation of their permit? They weren’t being honest. I felt we had to get more involved.”
She and her husband, along with some of their neighbors, invited four science-minded friends over for coffee. Three were high school science teachers: William Skowronski and Peter and Susan Hibbard. The fourth, Stephen Molello, worked at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant south of town. They decided to form a group, which they later named Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water, with Stephanie Wauters as the leader. The group’s mission would be to push for stricter water testing and for full disclosure by Ciba-Geigy of the types and quantities of chemical waste it was discharging into the ocean, burying in landfills, and sending up its smokestacks.
These were daunting goals, considering Ciba-Geigy’s local clout and penchant for secrecy. Within a few weeks, the group got even more ambitious. From Don Bennett’s articles in the Observer, Wauters learned that Ciba-Geigy’s ocean-dumping permit had expired and that the state Department of Environmental Protection would be conducting hearings to decide whether to renew it, and if so, under what conditions. That permit was absolutely crucial to Ciba-Geigy because the company had no other way to get rid of the almost two billion gallons of wastewater it discharged every year—a total that would surely rise after the pharmaceutical manufacturing operation moved from Rhode Island to Toms River. Without the permit, there would be no pipeline to the ocean; without the pipeline, the Toms River factory would have to close.
Stephanie Wauters and her friends realized that the expiring permit created a rare opportunity. Ciba-Geigy had little incentive to pay attention to a few science teachers, but the company would have to listen to the state Department of Environmental Protection. If the citizen’s group could force the agency to take a tough line with Ciba-Geigy, the company would have to compromise or risk its entire Toms River enterprise. No one in Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water had a clear idea about how to accomplish that, but they were ready to try. The group’s core members were all Democrats accustomed to outsider status in Toms River, so they took an outsider’s approach that bypassed Roden Lightbody and rest of the local power brokers. Instead, they published letters in the local papers and sought allies among reporters. At the Observer, Bennett obliged with detailed coverage of their activities. In the beach communities, meanwhile, Mayor Gorga spread the word about the new group. Soon, a few dozen people were crowding into the Wauters’ living room for meetings.
Cancer was not yet a key point of attack for Ciba-Geigy’s critics, but it was always lurking in the background. Many people in town had heard murmurings about illnesses on Cardinal Drive and in other neighborhoods near the chemical plant, as well as among its workers, but the general feeling was that nothing could be proved. The company would not even divulge the names of the chemicals in its waste, so how could anyone hope to connect the plant to a specific pattern of illnesses? “From Day One we were concerned about cancer in the community, but we didn’t have the resources to look into it,” Wauters remembered. “We were taking on the whole social structure of the company and the politicians and agencies; we felt we couldn’t fight the cancer fight, too.”
Even so, new information about cancer was trickling out, and none of it was good for Ciba-Geigy. Back in 1981, the same year the company applied for a new ocean discharge permit, a team of inspectors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had visited the plant, collected samples of treated wastewater, and brought them back to an agency lab, where saltwater tanks filled with tiny bug-eyed sea creatures were waiting. These were mysid shrimp, which were often used in tests to see whether polluted water was harming marine life.9 For years, Ciba-Geigy had refused to conduct those mysid tests, preferring instead to test its effluent on a much hardier animal, the sheepshead minnow. (The company’s critics would later call the minnow the “cockroach of the sea” for its ability to survive even in highly toxic environments.) The reasons for the company’s reluctance became clear as soon as EPA technicians poured various amounts of Ciba effluent into the mysid tanks and waited the requisite four days to see what would happen to the animals. Ciba-Geigy’s effluent, the agency concluded, was “highly toxic” to the mysid, more than half of which died in every mixture the EPA tested—even the most diluted, which consisted of just 6 percent effluent and 94 percent salt water.10
The agency also conducted a second test that Ciba-Geigy had long refused to undertake, one that was directly relevant to the cancer issue.11 It was aimed at seeing whether the company’s treated wastewater triggered genetic mutations in bacteria. That was important because mutations, alterations in DNA, frequently lead to the uncontrolled cell growth of cancer; mutagenic chemicals often, though not always, are carcinogens, too. The results from the second test were even worse for Ciba-Geigy. Its wastewater was more damaging to DNA than any effluent that had ever been tested at the EPA’s New Jersey lab, according to a summary of the tests prepared by the state Department of Environmental Protection. Ciba-Geigy, the report concluded, should not be permitted to continue to discharge “such a clearly mutagenic wastewater.”12
Ever since there had been a chemical plant in Toms River, its executives had refused to disclose what was in its waste. With the new EPA tests, agency officials finally knew enough to put the lie to the claims that only water and salt were going into the ocean and that the company’s new treatment plant was removing any hazardous compounds before discharge. Now regulators knew that even after treatment, and even in diluted form, the more than five million gallons of wastewater Ciba-Geigy discharged every day into the Atlantic was still hazardous enough to kill living things and scramble their DNA. That was a shock because, under the traditional approach to regulating pollution—one chemical at a time—the company’s effluent had always been acceptable, or nearly so. Now it was clear that the mixture, even when diluted, was toxic.13 By the time officials realized how misguided their assumptions had been, the company had already sent more than thirty billion gallons into the ocean—and billions more into the river, before 1966.
The 1981 test results were a disaster for Ciba-Geigy, but its managers could at least console themselves that no one outside the regulatory agencies knew. There was still a chance that the company could get a new permit for its pipeline without public scrutiny and thus keep making chemicals in Toms River. But on the morning of April 12, 1984, with the discovery of the leak at the corner of Bay and Vaughn avenues, all hope of a quiet accommodation vanished. A state source tipped off Don Bennett about the results of the 1981 mysid and mutagenicity tests, which he promptly splashed all over the Observer. By the summer of 1984, Bennett was writing articles about all of the chemicals used at the factory. Thanks to the information the company was forced to provide on its application for a new permit, the composition of its waste was no longer a trade secret. Instead, the people of Ocean County were reading about it every day. Bennett even wrote a two-day series featuring detailed descriptions of twenty-two hazardous chemicals in the company’s wastewater and 109 others used at the plant.14
The list was devastating, but by the time it was published, Ciba-Geigy had bigger worries than another damaging story in the local paper about cancer-causing chemicals.
CHAPTER NINE
Hippies in the Kitchen
There were hippies in Rose Donato’s kitchen. She was seventy-one years old and stood less than five feet tall, and she liked to keep a clean kitchen. It was the brightest room in her beachfront bungalow, the place where she sipped her morning coffee and watched the sun rise over the surf as she paged through the morning’s Ocean County Observer. And now hippies were there—and on her front lawn, too. Their sleeping bags were crowding her perennials.
