All situations, events, and persons depicted herein are fictional. Any similarity without satirical intent is purely coincidental. All opinions are solely those of the author. Copyright 1996, 1997 by Steven J. Milloy. All rights reserved. Portions of this text may be reprinted for book reviews. October 1996.
Lesley Stalled: Dr. Theo Ree, can you briefly describe how you came to study endocrine disrupters?
Dr. Theo Ree: At the Conservation of Truth Foundation, I was working on a project to review and report on the ecological state of the Great Lakes. As I reviewed the scientific literature, even I was having a hard time denying that tremendous improvements in the Great Lakes had been achieved since the 1960s.
But then after spending two months reviewing scientific literature and having a couple of conversations with other biologists, I developed a strong gut feeling that the proclamations of recovery were premature.
Lesley Stalled: You mean two months of reading was all it took to figure out the ecological state of Great Lakes? Wow... you must be really smart!
And to think that you spent seven years getting your Ph.D. That's quite a lesson for budding scientists. Would you then say that staying in school was a waste of time?
Dr. Theo Ree: Clearly in my case it was. After all, I could read before I went to graduate school and all that science stuff that they try to teach you just gets in the way of effective fearmongering.
Lesley Stalled: Please go on...
Dr. Theo Ree: As I was saying, I had convinced myself that the Great Lakes had not yet recovered. So next, I made the logical leap that human populations around the Great Lakes must be in danger as well.
I gathered all the public health information on populations around the Great Lakes that I could. Much to my dismay though, I found that the human populations surrounding the Great Lakes were not experiencing higher cancer rates.
Edit Broadley: You mean you were disappointed because you couldn't find a cancer problem?
Dr. Theo Ree: Of course! Researchers who don't find something frightening to report soon find themselves out of work.
Lucky for me, though, one day I had a meeting with two veteran researchers with the Canadian Wildlife Service. They had a theory that the pollution in the Great Lakes had affected the pre-natal development of female gulls to the point where it caused female gulls to nest together in sort of a lesbian relationship.
I knew I had something with the gay birds.
Edit Broadley: Excuse me,... near the end of Our Swollen Future you state that human sexual orientation is a complex phenomenon, just like most human behavior. You doubted that any single factor, nature, endocrine disruption, or nurture would prove to be its sole determinant.
So what you're saying is that, in humans, sexual orientation is complex, but in birds it is simply a matter of exposure to manmade chemicals. Sounds a little too politically correct, doesn't it?
Dr. Theo Ree: Edit... you just don't get it, do you? Anyway, the gay gulls got me thinking about hormones which led me to believe that pollution affected the endocrine system.
Since I didn't know anything about endocrinology, I bought a couple of textbooks and taught myself.
While learning just enough about endocrinology to be dangerous, I was able to come to the conclusion that the gay gulls' hormones must have been disrupted by something at some time.
And since I had already decided that manmade chemicals were bad, I thought they'd make the best villain.
Edit Broadley: Amazing. You say that YOU taught YOURself endocrinology. And based on what YOU taught YOURself and a couple of politically correct decision rules, you decided that manmade chemicals are disrupting our hormone functions.
Do you think if you had pursued your original angle--cancer--for another couple of months and maybe read a couple of biochemistry textbooks, that you could have cured cancer also?
Mike Walrus: Heh-heh...he's just kidding, Dr. Theo Ree. Don't pay any attention to him. Tell us how the study of the children whose mothers had regularly eaten Great Lakes fish supported your theory. That'll shut him up.
Dr. Theo Ree: Oh yeah, I almost forgot. In the course of scouring several thousand scientific articles, I came across ONE study that associated polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) with developmental problems in the children of mothers who had relatively high levels of PCBs in their bodies from eating Great Lakes fish.
Edit Broadley: Dr. Theo Ree, I have some questions about that study.
First, that study was conducted by two PSYCHOLOGISTS. While psychologists may be qualified to evaluate children from a psychological standpoint, don't you really need qualified epidemiologists and toxicologists to make judgments about cause-and-effect relationships between PCBs and human health?
Second, the subjects of that study were asked to recall how many fish meals and what kinds of fish they consumed during the six years preceding their pregnancies. Six years!!
These recollections formed the most important data in the study, yet they are likely to have been very inaccurate. I can't remember what I had to eat last week, let alone last year or six years ago.
Additionally, a meal of lake trout was assumed to contain five times the dose of toxic chemicals as did a meal of brook trout.
Dr. Ree, can you accurately recall how many meals of fish you've had during the past six years, and how many of them were lake trout as opposed to brook trout?
Dr. Theo Ree: I've got lots of fish stories to tell... You know, I told Dumbasanoxski that we shouldn't have put a reference section in the book. All I need is people checking my research and criticizing my spin on the science!
Mike Walrus: Our Swollen Future also relies heavily on the work of biologist Frederick vom Silly. You claim that vom Silly showed in a series of experiments that small shifts in hormones before birth can matter a great deal. How did he show that?
Dr. Theo Ree: When vom Silly was a young postdoctoral student, one of his jobs was breeding mice. In constantly working with and observing the mice, vom Silly noticed that some females were more aggressive than others.
Mike Walrus: Sounds pretty normal so far. Aren't some people just naturally more aggressive than others? Why wouldn't the same be true for mice?
Dr. Theo Ree: Well, vom Silly figured that since the mice had been inbred for generations and were virtual clones that they should all act the same.
Mike Walrus: How could he expect that? Even identical human twins don't necessarily act the same.
Edit Broadley: Sounds like this guy spent too much time with mice and not enough time with people.
Dr. Theo Ree: Vom Silly kept his mice six to a cage. He reported that in each cage of six mice, one female mouse was typically more aggressive than the others. Vom Silly was bent on coming up with an explanation for this "phenomenon."
Vom Silly observed that some female mouse pups are sandwiched in the womb between two male pups. Conveniently, he decided that one in every six female pups was so sandwiched. And voila! He had his theory.
Female pups sandwiched between male mouse pup are more aggressive.
Edit Broadley: Interesting theory, but did he have a biological reason for this?
Dr. Theo Ree: Of course. Vom Silly theorized that sandwiched female pups get bathed in the testosterone secreted from the testes of the male pups. The bath of testosterone makes the females more aggressive.
Edit Broadley: Uh, excuse me... I hate to rain on your parade but if I'm a male mouse pup in the womb and my testes are secreting testosterone, that testosterone stays in my body. It doesn't flow out of me, into the womb, and then into my sister.
If what vom Silly concluded was true, wouldn't the womb be just one big soup of hormones which, over time, would masculinize female pups and feminize male pups? To the point where mice would essentially be genderless and incapable of reproducing?
Didn't vom Silly spend time BREEDING mice? Didn't he notice that the BREEDING mice had no problems reproducing themselves!
How could you have relied on this research?
Dr. Theo Ree: Edit, I'd say you were more of a rat than a mouse.
Copyright © 1996, 1997 Steven J. Milloy. All rights reserved. Site developed and hosted by WestLake Solutions, Inc.