by Dan Fagin
8. According to National Cancer Institute estimates for 2002–2006, the average yearly cancer incidence rate per year for people under age 65 was 221.1 cases per 100,000 people. For people over 65, the rate was 2,134.3 cases per 100,000.
9. William B. Ershler, “Cancer: A Disease of the Elderly,” Journal of Supportive Oncology 1, Supp. 2 (November/December 2003): 5–10.
10. The estimate of thirty-eight newly diagnosed cases of childhood cancer per day in the United States is derived from the National Cancer Institute’s incidence data for 2002–2006 for children under twenty years of age: 16.6 cases per 100,000 children per year. Also according to the institute, there were 12.9 new cases per 100,000 children and teenagers in 1975, compared to 17.6 in 2005, a 36 percent increase. Overall cancer incidence (for all ages) rose from 400.38 per 100,000 in 1975 to 459.94 in 2005, a 15 percent increase.
11. Because he was so young, Michael Gillick’s chance of surviving was somewhat greater than the overall rate of 5 percent. For reasons that researchers do not yet understand, neuroblastoma tumors in infants are much more likely to undergo spontaneous regression compared to those in older children. Michael’s tumors did not disappear, but their rate of growth slowed. Today, the overall five-year survival rate for late-stage metastatic neuroblastoma is greater than 50 percent and is nearly 90 percent for infants. Current treatments include a combination of surgery, drugs, radiation, and antibody therapies to stimulate the immune system.
12. James Crane and N. Morley, “Waste Clarification and Solids Separation Study,” November 14, 1968, 2.
13. The 1970 merger of Ciba and Geigy allowed the Swiss to finally (if temporarily) surpass their longtime rivals in Germany and the United States and become the largest dye manufacturing company in the world. One of the merger’s most important proving grounds was Toms River, where the two companies had worked closely together since 1955. Before the merger, Ciba owned 58 percent of Toms River Chemical and Geigy 21 percent. The other 21 percent was owned by Sandoz, which merged with Ciba-Geigy in 1996 to form Novartis.
14. The estimate of 8,800 waste drums per year dumped into the unlined landfill comes from Morris Smith in “Pre-Proposal Visit: Toms River Chemical,” an August 6, 1968, memo from J. R. Lawson of Roy F. Weston Inc., page 4. The description of the “cliff” is in “Final Project: New Chemical Dump,” an October 21, 1971, report from William Bobsein to Toms River Chemical executives, page 1. Describing practices at the old dump, Bobsein wrote: “At present, those waste chemicals which are suitable for burial are packed into ‘scrap’ steel drums. These drums are transported by truck to a dumping site at the southern side of the plant property, along the edge of an abandoned lagoon which formerly comprised part of the wastewater treatment facility. The drums are then dumped over the edge of the ‘cliff.’ Most of the contents are spilled. At intervals of three to four months, some drums are crudely rearranged and the pile consolidated by the use of a crane. Sand is then spread over the drums, and the working ‘face’ of the dump is thus advanced.”
15. William Bobsein, “Disposal of Combustible Wastes Status Report,” October 17, 1969, memo to Philip Wehner, 4.
16. “Pre-Proposal Visit: Toms River Chemical,” 3.
17. William Bobsein, “Hazardous and Solid Wastes,” a 1969 presentation, 1–10.
18. “TRC Teach-In on Control of Pollution Attracts 1,100-Plus,” TRC News, December 1970.
19. What came to be known as the “Refuse Act” is actually a section of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899. More than twenty federal rivers and harbors laws were adopted between 1882 and 1970, their primary purpose being to keep the nation’s waterways navigable to boat traffic, which was crucial to commerce. The “refuse” section in the 1899 version that would eventually become so important as a tool of environmental enforcement was an afterthought even to its sponsors, one of whom (Senator William P. Frye of Maine, the chairman of the Rivers and Harbors Committee) described it as a mere compilation of existing laws with “very slight changes to remove ambiguities.” In the Refuse Act’s heyday in the early 1970s, some legal scholars objected that Congress had never intended for its criminal penalties to apply to polluters, only to physical barriers to boat traffic such as dumped rocks and soil or illegal bridges. The controversy faded when new federal laws, including the Clean Water Act of 1977, became the primary tools for enforcing water-quality standards. For more information, see Diane D. Eames, “The Refuse Act of 1899: Its Scope and Role in Control of Water Pollution,” California Law Review 48:6 (November 1970): 1444–73; and William H. Rodgers Jr., “Industrial Water Pollution and the Refuse Act: A Second Chance for Water Quality,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 119:5 (April 1971): 761–822.
20. Toms River Chemical had a 1965 construction permit from the Army Corps of Engineers for its ocean pipeline but not an operating permit, so the pipeline was operating with state, not federal, approval.
21. Philip Wehner, “Meeting with Representatives of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency on the Mercury Problem at TRC,” September 15, 1971, memo, 1–3.
22. To settle the case, U.S. vs. Asbury Park, the offending towns agreed to barge their sludge to dump sites farther offshore; wastewater discharges through ocean pipelines continued unabated.
23. A January 18, 1977, quarterly report to Toms River Chemical’s board of directors included this assessment of the company’s talks with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, on page 15: “Considerable progress was made with EPA in regard to the effluent limitations for the new treatment plant. Litigation against EPA in regard to these limits will probably not be required. It appears that limitations will soon be adopted which are feasible and attainable by careful operation. Those limitations in the originally-proposed permit issued in October of 1976 could not have been attained.”
24. J. Richard Pellington, “206 Count Indictment Astounds Officials,” Ocean County Observer, July 17, 1972. See also “TRC and Pollution,” unsigned editorial, Ocean County Observer, July 20, 1972.
25. The current Environmental Protection Agency standard for many industrial organic compounds is just five parts per billion, and New Jersey’s current limit for some organic solvents is just one part per billion.
26. Bob De Sando, “State Finds Contaminants in Water Company Wells,” Asbury Park Press, January 10, 1975. “A lot of people were very angry at me after that first story,” recalled the reporter, Bob De Sando. “They thought it was inflammatory and would get people scared, and that then things would spiral out of control.”
27. Bob De Sando, “Wells Held Safe: State Contends Phenol Levels Not Hazardous,” Asbury Park Press, January 11, 1975. The article quotes Steven Corwin, a special assistant to the state environmental protection commissioner: “We feel there is no problem.… Phenols are not desirable by any means and could contribute to a taste and odor in some instances. But at those levels there is no physical detriment.… We sure wouldn’t let people drink anything that would be dangerous.” The article, which ran on the front page, essentially contradicted the story that appeared the previous day.
28. Gillick, For the Love of Mike, 94.
Chapter Seven
1. Don Bennett, “Lab Found More Problems,” Daily Observer, September 16, 1984.
2. Among those who noticed occupational clusters of scrotal cancer was the Scottish surgeon Joseph Bell in 1876. A stickler for close observation, Bell was Arthur Conan Doyle’s teacher and the chief inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. “A Brief History of Scrotal Cancer,” 395.
3. The chapter’s description of the Schneeberg mines and Walther Hesse and Friedrich Härting’s “mountain sickness” studies is drawn from several sources: Walther Hesse, “Das Vorkommen von Primärem Lungenkrebs bei den Bergleuten der Consortschaftlichen Gruben in Schneeberg,” translated as “The Occurrence of Primary Lung Cancer in the Miners of the Consortium Mines in Schneeberg,” Archiv der Heilkunde 19 (1878): 160–62 [NIH Library Translation NIH-90-394]; Dieter H. M. Gröschel, trans., “Walthe
r and Angelina Hesse—Early Contributors to Bacteriology,” American Society for Microbiology News 58:8 (1992): 425–28; Margarethe Uhlig, “Schneeberg Lung Cancer,” Virchow’s Archive for Pathological and Physiological Anatomy 230 (1921): 76–98 [NIH Library Translation NIH-90-58]; and M. Greenberg and I. J. Selikoff, “Lung Cancer in the Schneeberg Mines: A Reappraisal of the Data Reporting by Härting and Hesse in 1879,” Annals of Occupational Hygiene 37:1 (1993): 5–14.
4. Today, the term mountain sickness is used to describe an acute condition caused by exposure to low-density air at high altitudes; Hesse and Härting applied the term to a very different set of symptoms.
5. Before going to work for the German government, Walther Hesse took two trips to America as a steamship doctor. When he returned home, he married a wealthy, cultured woman he had met in New York and wrote one of the first papers on seasickness published in the medical literature.
6. “Das Vorkommen von Primärem Lungenkrebs,” 160.
7. After leaving Schneeberg, Walther Hesse studied with the famed microbiologist Robert Koch, just as Koch was about to identify the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis and cholera. Hesse spent the rest of his life working on the control of bacterial diseases; he is best known for discovering, with his wife, that agar is an ideal surface for growing bacterial cultures. Angelina Hesse had used agar, a gelatinous material derived from seaweed, to keep her jellies and puddings solid.
8. Werner Schüttmann, “Schneeberg Lung Disease and Uranium Mining in the Saxon Ore Mountains,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 23 (1993): 355–68, 361–62.
9. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Assessment of Risks from Radon in Homes (June 2003), 64, table 20.
10. “Amendment to National Oil and Hazardous Substance Contingency Plan; National Priorities List,” Federal Register 48:175, pages 40658–40673.
Chapter Eight
1. The staff reductions at the Ocean County Observer accelerated after 1998, when it was bought by Gannett Inc. On November 28, 2007, Gannett announced that it was switching the paper from daily to weekly publication, dropping all coverage outside of Toms River, merging it with a weekly newspaper and changing its name to the Toms River Observer Reporter. The paper had been known as the Observer since it was founded in 1850. Six months after Gannett’s announcement, Don Bennett accepted a buyout offer and retired from the newspaper he had joined thirty years earlier. His career as a working journalist in Ocean County spanned forty-four years.
2. The first known attempt to induce tumor growth experimentally via transplantation occurred in 1775, when a Frenchman named Bernard Peyrilhe implanted a human breast tumor in a dog. The transplanted tumor did not grow, however. In 1889, a German scientist named Arthur Hanau finally managed to transfer squamous cell tumors from one rat to another. Researchers across Europe rushed to conduct their own transplants but were disappointed. Their experiments usually failed, and even successful transplants provided little useful information.
3. For a brief but cogent summary of the theories of cell irritation, embryonal rest, and dedifferentiation, see Sadhan Majumder, ed., Stem Cells and Cancer (Springer, 2009), 7–9. See also: Lorenzo Tomatis, “Cell Proliferation and Carcinogenesis: A Brief History and Current View Based on an IARC Workshop Report,” Environmental Health Perspectives 101, Supp. 5: Cell Proliferation and Chemical Carcinogenesis (December 1993): 149–51; and Folke Henschen, “Yamagiwa’s Tar Cancer and Its Historical Significance—From Percivall Pott to Katsusaboro Yamagiwa,” Gann: The Japanese Journal of Cancer Research 58 (December 1968): 447–51, 447–48. Another useful source is William Seaman Bainbridge, The Cancer Problem (Macmillan, 1918), which is widely regarded as an authoritative source of information on competing theories of carcinogenesis of that era.
4. In addition to Henschen, “Yamagiwa’s Tar Cancer,” this chapter’s account of Yamagiwa’s life and accomplishments draws on the following sources: James R. Bartholomew, “Japanese Nobel Candidates in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” Osiris, Second Series 13 (1998): 238–84, 253–62; Murray J. Shear, “Yamagiwa’s Tar Cancer and Its Historical Significance—From Yamagiwa to Kennaway,” Gann: The Japanese Journal of Cancer Research 60 (April 1969): 121–27; “Katsusaboro Yamagiwa (1863–1930),” CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 27:3 (May/June 1977): 172–73; and Katsusaburo Yamagiwa and Koichi Ichikawa, “Experimental Study of the Pathogenesis of Carcinoma,” an excerpt of their original 1918 study, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 27:3 (May/June 1977): 174–81. See also William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 1986), 202–4.
5. Waldron, “Brief History of Scrotal Cancer,” 395.
6. At least two other researchers induced cancer under controlled experimental conditions before Katsusaburo Yamagiwa did in 1914, but their work was mostly ignored at the time. The French physician Pierre Edouard Jean Clunet in 1908 induced skin cancer in two rats by bombarding them with X-rays. The dosages were so high, however, that the other two rats in his experiment died, leading some scientists to question the validity of the experiment (though not the carcinogenicity of X-rays, which was already apparent from the illnesses that struck many pioneering radiation researchers). In 1911, the American pathologist Francis Peyton Rous identified the first cancer virus by demonstrating that cancer could be transmitted from one animal to another via injection. Working at what was then known as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York City, Rous ground up a sarcoma tumor from a chicken, passed it through a filter, and injected the cell-free extract into a healthy chicken, which then developed cancer. Rous’s conclusions were so far outside of the mainstream that few scientists tried to follow up on his work—including Rous, who shifted to other areas of research before returning later to cancer. In 1966, Rous was finally acknowledged with a Nobel Prize for describing what is now known as the Rous Sarcoma Virus, the first oncovirus. Today, viruses are thought to be responsible for 15 to 20 percent of all human cancer cases.
7. For more information about the Fibiger-Yamagiwa controversy, see Carl-Magnus Stolt, George Klein, and Alfred T. R. Jansson, “An Analysis of a Wrong Nobel Prize—Johannes Fibiger, 1926: A Study in the Nobel Archives,” Advances in Cancer Research 92 (2004): 1–12. See also Bartholomew, “Japanese Nobel Candidates in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” 257–62.
8. Embarrassed by the 1926 fiasco, the Nobel Committee in Physiology or Medicine did not award another prize for cancer research until 1966, when Francis Peyton Rous was very belatedly acknowledged for his 1911 discovery that some cancers were virally transmitted.
9. Mysid shrimp are also known as opossum shrimp, for the thorax pouch in which a female carries her eggs. The species typically used in toxicity testing is Americamysis bahia. Despite the name and superficial resemblance, mysids are not actually shrimp.
10. Thomas Fikslin, biology section chief, New York regional office, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Biomonitoring Inspection Report—Toms River Chemical Corporation,” March 29, 1982, memo to the chiefs of the water enforcement and water facilities branches of the EPA regional office.
11. By the late 1970s, the mutagenicity test the state wanted Ciba to conduct had become an important tool for toxicologists. The Ames test was named for the man who had developed it just a few years earlier: Bruce Ames, a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at the University of California at Berkeley and a major figure in environmental cancer research. His inexpensive and relatively simple test helped pave the way for the banning of many mutagenic chemicals in 1970s. By the 1990s, however, Ames was infuriating environmentalists by arguing that traditional tests on laboratory animals, in which they are dosed with high concentrations of chemicals and then checked for tumors, are not a good model for predicting whether chemicals cause cancer in humans. He also argued that many naturally occurring compounds posed at least as big a cancer risk as the synthetic chemicals produced by industry.
13. McGeorge and Wishart, “Chemical and Mutagenicity Analysis Report,” 2: “It is suspected that the mutagenic activity may be due at least in part to unidentified nitrogen-containing compounds. Numerous nitrogenous compounds have been shown to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic.” See also Attachment A of “Biomonitoring Inspection Report—Toms River Chemical Corporation.”
14. The series by Don Bennett appeared in the September 30 and October 1, 1984, editions of the Ocean County Observer.
Chapter Nine
1. Rose Donato died in 1996, at age eighty-three.
2. Almost thirty years later, no one involved in the events of 1984 remembers exactly how Greenpeace first found out that Ciba-Geigy was discharging industrial waste into the ocean off New Jersey. Dave Rapaport does not remember getting a letter from Rose Donato about it, although Rose’s daughter, Michele, is certain her late mother sent one.
3. Monkeywrenching became a favored term of environmental activists after the publication of The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey (Lippincott, 1975). The darkly hilarious book, a counterculture classic, describes the adventures of four self-styled “environmental warriors” who blow up bridges, bulldozers, and other encroachments on wilderness in the American West. The phrase “throwing a monkey wrench” is much older, referring to an action that causes something to break down.
4. This chapter’s description of Ernest Kennaway’s life and work is based on the following sources: Ernest Kennaway, “The Identification of a Carcinogenic Compound in Coal Tar,” British Medical Journal 4942 (September 24, 1955): 749–52; James W. Cook, “Ernest Laurence Kennaway, 1881–1958,” Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society 4 (November 1958): 139–54; David H. Phillips, “Fifty Years of Benzo(a)pyrene,” Nature 303 (June 9, 1983): 468–72; Antoine Lacassagne, “Kennaway and the Carcinogens,” Nature 191 (August 19, 1961): 743–47; and G. M. Badger, “Ernest Laurence Kennaway,” Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology 78:2 (1959): 593–606.
