DR. MICHAEL McCALLY

MOYERS: You told me several months ago when I saw you that you were sure you would find chemicals in my body. So what's the news?

McCALLY: Well, the good news is you're an average American and you've got chemicals the way most of us do. The bad news is that there are a lot of chemicals in your body.

MOYERS: How many?

McCALLY: We tested for 150 different industrial chemicals, and you have 84 of those 150.

MOYERS: Wow. 84.

McCALLY: Eighty-four.

MOYERS: I don't know whether to get up and go make my preparations or what.

McCALLY: Well, you're going to likely live your normal life span, and it's not a matter of a health emergency for you as an individual, now, because of these particular chemicals. But it is a health emergency for all of us in the developed countries with big chemical industries and lots of chemicals in our environment.

MOYERS: So from those blood tests you did of me, you found 84 man-made chemicals?

McCALLY: That's correct. And just to pursue that, there are thousands of these chemicals in commerce. There are probably 80,000 of them in this country alone. A number of them distribute themselves globally and are manufactured globally.

There are at least 600 or 700 that we know or suspect are going to be there if we could measure for them. There are some of them that we don't even know what they are yet. They are metabolites ­ or byproducts ­ of manufacture. We know they're there, we can see the peaks, but we don't know specifically what the chemical is.

MOYERS: If you had tested me 60 years ago when I was six years old, would you have found those chemicals?

McCALLY: No. With one exception.

MOYERS: What's that?

McCALLY: Lead. We've been poisoning ourselves with lead since, you know, practically the cave ages. It's sort of the first metal; it melts at a low temperature and we made stuff with it. So I would have found some lead, but that's about the only one.

MOYERS: So 83 of these 84 chemicals you found in my blood are there because of the chemical revolution.

McCALLY: That's correct. It's a huge departure.

MOYERS: How do the results of my test compare with others around the country?

McCALLY: Well, I wish we had more data. I wish I could give you a clear answer to that. We suspect from the very few studies of general populations -- big numbers of normal Americans -- we have some limited data, and your numbers are sort of in this normal range.

MOYERS: How do the results of my test compare with the other population you tested at the same time you tested me?

McCALLY: Well I'll mention a couple of specifics. You were in the middle on most of these, so you're average among average. You did have a couple of organophosphate pesticide residues that are there in most of us, through one way or another -- food applications at home, outdoors, gardening. But there are 600 of these pesticides around, so you know, that's not too surprising.

We measured a number of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, and these are very specific compounds. Because we banned them, we stopped making them in 1977, and we made them as electrical insulators. You'd think there aren't much of them. There are millions and millions of pounds of this stuff. It layers the bottom of the Hudson River.

And the remarkable thing about these compounds, is that they're incredibly persistent. They stay in the environment, and once they're in your body, they stay there.

You have more than any of the other nine, but somebody has to be number one, so it's not too --

MOYERS: Thanks.

McCALLY: -- remarkable. You know, you -- and everybody has some.

MOYERS: Tell me about the people in the survey. Who were they? What kind of people were they?

McCALLY: This is what we called a convenience sample. When you're starting out on a new idea and a new study -- which this is -- the testing is obscure and it's very difficult and quite expensive. So we actually spent $7,000 per person on this testing. So that's one of the reasons that there isn't more information. It is because it's difficult to do.

MOYERS: Were any of these people, people who worked with chemicals, like --

McCALLY: No.

MOYERS: -- plant workers, factory workers?

McCALLY: No. The data that we have about these body burdens, about these normal trace levels of chemicals are from people who are not occupationally exposed. That is, if you are a worker likely to be exposed, a farm worker, a chemical plant worker, you wouldn't be included in this kind of a study.

MOYERS: I consider myself a thoughtful consumer. I consider myself careful in my buying habits, in my food consumption. Would the others be in the same category as me? Are they thoughtful about their food consumption, thoughtful about their buying habits, so that they wouldn't be just going out and inviting these chemicals into their blood? Would they be careful about this?

McCALLY: This group of people we thought would be particularly careful because they sort of know the issues.

And if you asked the question, "Well, how can I minimize this?" One way is to avoid pesticides, and one way to do that is to purchase and eat organically grown foodstuffs. That means where they don't use chemicals in their production.

So we assumed that these nine folks would be, you know, organic food eaters. But when we got right down to it and asked folks, I think that American eating patterns are fairly common.

So some said, "Yes, I buy organic when I have a chance. " But that's one of the lessons ­ that what we eat is a major way that we take in chemicals, and attention to how our produce gets to us, and in particular the option of buying organically prepared foods, because not only does it lower sort of the risk to us, but if all of our foods were prepared this way, our use of pesticides would be much reduced, and that would be a social benefit from a number of dimensions.

MOYERS: Let me talk about some of the specific chemicals that you found in our bodies. You tested for some pesticides.

McCALLY: Yes.

MOYERS: What are those?

McCALLY: Well, there are two classes that we looked at, and one are called organophosphates and the other are called organochlorines. We separated them because they act differently. The organophosphates -- malathion is one we may have heard of because we're spraying it here in New York because of mosquitoes.

MOYERS: I used to spray malathion on my yard in Long Island.

McCALLY: That may explain why you have some traces of these materials.

These agents were prepared as basically nerve gas. They inhibit a transmitter and the nervous system runs away, because now there's no inhibition to nerve transmission, so it's an excitatory stage.

Remember, these things are all made as poisons that are supposed to kill something -- in this case, they are supposed to kill insects and hopefully not us. So you had traces of organophosphates there. We also measured organochlorine pesticides. The best known is DDT. DDT hasn't been produced in this country for several decades.

MOYERS: So where would I have gotten that?

McCALLY: Did you ever, you know, watch them spray the trees when you were a little kid?

MOYERS: A young man. And I lived around places that had used it.

McCALLY: Well, that's enough, because, again, like PCBs, these are very persistent chemicals. The body doesn't metabolize them, doesn't break them down into little pieces and get rid of them. So they persist for long periods of time.

MOYERS: Was I unusual in the presence of these pesticides?

McCALLY: No. Again, we -- from the studies that have been done of general populations -- that is, people representing sort of all the ages and all the communities and both genders of Americans we know most people are going to have a residue of DDT, actually.

MOYERS: So what are the implications of these particular pesticides in my blood?

McCALLY: The immediate health implications for you are, I would say, probably small

But you have one in particular chemical that I would mention, methoxychlor. Standard, still used, it's quite toxic. They've cut back its use, but it's still used agriculturally. And it is a likely carcinogen, but at these very small levels, it's not a cancer risk to you. More important, that particular agent, like a number of these, acts on the developing organism; that is the fetus, the infant before it's born. So there's a notion here that timing, timing is as important as dose.

We usually think of dose, so these are tiny doses. Well, big doses are bad and little doses are probably not so bad. But there's another notion that tiny doses, if given at the right time, can be terribly effective and terribly injurious. So for example, if you have some pregnant mice and you give them very tiny doses of methoxychlor, there's a particular little window where this very tiny dose, the offspring rats will have hugely increased prostates. Very specific, just the moment that the prostate is developing, you hit it with this tiny dose.

And your doses were much less than the ones that produce big prostates in offspring male mice, but nonetheless, they were in the ballpark.

MOYERS: And are the possible implications of that prostate cancer downstream?

McCALLY: Possibly. We don't have the data here. This is where the present construction of the industry and the agencies that are trying to regulate it come into play, because we have large numbers of these chemicals out there and very limited toxicology testing, very limited testing and monitoring of these agents. And that's really something that has to change.

MOYERS: How might I have been exposed to this particular chemical?

McCALLY: Again, it had multiple uses. Directly exposed if you happened to be in an agricultural area where they were using it, exposed to your food where it was applied.

MOYERS: So if I had lived near a farm or farms that had been spraying with this or using this chemical, I could have been an indirect "beneficiary."

McCALLY: You could have. But I would make the point that the search for how did I get this is not as important as the notion that you have it and that the materials are ubiquitous.

MOYERS: They're everywhere.

McCALLY: They're everywhere.

MOYERS: You tested for methylmercury.

MOYERS: Methylmercury is inorganic mercury.

McCALLY: Right.

MOYERS: Why did you test for that?

McCALLY: The mercury comes from combustion processes. It goes up in smokestacks. The fish get it because the mercury falls on the water and it goes down into their food supply, and they eat it and it builds up.

And that's why we have fish advisories in streams all over the Northeast, and that's why the state of New York is trying to get the big power plants to continue to refine their scrubbing and reduce their emissions, so that it doesn't go up in the air from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, and go from here across New York to Canada.

MOYERS: I told you at the time of my blood test that I regularly eat seafood, although more so since I had heart surgery six years ago, and I told you that I had recently, just before I saw you, eaten some sea bass.

McCALLY: That could well account for it, because it's fairly short-lived. But if you were eating fish in the preceding couple of weeks, that might have been the source.

As I say again, these are not large amounts. They aren't a reason to stop eating fish. It gets quite quantitative. Advisories say that pregnant women should limit their intake to a fish a week.

But there are women in the Great Lakes areas and certainly up in the Arctic who live on fish, and for them, it's a real issue because it's part of their foodstuff. And for the Inuit up near the Arctic, it's part of their lifestyle. And so it's not an option for them to limit their fish or to eat fewer if they are pregnant. So it's a serious public health issue in particular communities, particularly among subsistence fish eaters.

MOYERS: You said I had the highest level of PCBs among the group you studied. One PCB, one kind of PCB? Two kinds of PCBs?

McCALLY: Thirty.

MOYERS: Thirty--

McCALLY: Thirty-one.

MOYERS: Different kinds of PCBs?

McCALLY: Yes. There are, in fact, 209 different PCBs. And there are various industrial formulations that are mixtures of them and some are more toxic than others. So you may have gotten this from different sources, because, again, PCBs have many uses.

But you didn't have the highest levels, you just had the most of these discrete chemicals.

MOYERS: Why might that be?

McCALLY: Well, again, these are very persistent chemicals. They are all over the place. And it's probably a function of where you lived. You lived in some locale where PCBs were in the environment, and you got them into you through the air you breathed. Some of them get down in groundwater. Some of them get coated on food. There are multiple and somewhat obscure ways. You didn't get them sort of in one afternoon because you ate a poisoned apple.

MOYERS: It's a dreaded term, PCBs. It's like cancer or, you know, Frankenstein or something like that, probably just from folklore or from common reading. I read about the Hudson River.

Are PCBs carcinogenic?

McCALLY: PCBs are considered carcinogenic as are some of the dioxins. It depends on which ones. But the issue is not that there's a huge cancer threat lurking out there, that there's a cancer epidemic at the bottom of the Hudson; most of the scientists involved think that the more real threat and the one more poorly understood is the effect on the reproductive cycle, on pregnancy, on the developing fetus, because there, very small whiffs of these compounds can, we understand from laboratory experiments make a big difference in the outcome.

So you have populations with slightly bigger prostates or, even more important, they have the same kinds of developmental effects on the brain.

We do have some human data here from the offspring of persistent fish eaters in the Great Lakes, and those children who had, through their maternal circulation, through the placenta, and through breast milk, had higher levels of PCBs -- they were abnormal at birth and had abnormal reflexes, motor patterns, developed somewhat more slowly. And by the time they were 11, the PCB levels in those kids were associated with significant reductions in IQ and intelligence. So, I mean, it's real stuff.

MOYERS: All this despite the fact that PCBs were banned in 1977.

McCALLY: Right. They're still here because they are not quite permanent, but almost.

MOYERS: Where do they hide? Where do they lodge?

McCALLY: They lodge in the ground, in water supplies -- typically at the bottom of bodies of water ­ because they fall into it and sink to the bottom and are covered up. And some engineers and health folks argue that you ought to leave them there kind of like asbestos, and not mess with them. So there is a science debate about how best to deal with where they are.

MOYERS: And the fish eat the PCBs and I eat the fish --

McCALLY: Right.

Now, we can catch the fish and monitor the fish and keep track of things, but any change in the flood patterns in the upper Hudson stirs all this up. The fish get it, and then the fish are more dangerous.

There are also spots where these things have leaked into the ground around old plants. There's several here on the Hudson, scattered around the country. And we have a dickens of a time getting rid of the stuff.

MOYERS: I've also read that PCBs are bio-accumulative. What does that mean?

McCALLY: That's the story we were just talking about with the fish. What that means is that there's a food chain, okay? And the bigger things eat the little things. So the PCB falls in the water, it sinks to the bottom, little bitty, uni-cell organisms take it up, and the six-cell organisms, and then crayfish, and then, by the time you get to a big fish, it has really -- "biomagnified" is really the word ­ because it's permanent.

Each level that it goes up, the concentration gets higher. So by the time you get to that fatty fish at the top of the food chain, or the human at the absolute top of the food chain, then the levels are really quite high where the level in the water is quite dilute. So you dump it in the water, it's very dilute, and the biological system amplifies it.

MOYERS: So that's why we don't find aliens coming here eating us.

McCALLY: Right. Exactly. Right.

MOYERS: But reassure me. What does it mean that I have more than 20 PCBs in my body?

McCALLY: Probably, as we presently understand it, for you as an adult, fully-formed male, probably not a lot. But we don't understand a lot about cancer.

For example, we just learned in a major epidemiological study of twins that was able to look at cancer in twins and sort of answer this question, how much of the likelihood of one twin with cancer, another twin having cancer -- is due to genes. Because you've got the twins, or the environment. The environmental contribution was much bigger than we had previously imagined.

MOYERS: Meaning?

McCALLY: Meaning that issues like these little bits of PCBs may be significant, but we don't know that yet. The science can't quite tell us.

MOYERS: What about dioxins? I know from other documentaries I've done that dioxins are said to be among the most toxic of the chemicals ever made by human beings. What about dioxins?

McCALLY: They have that claim and they deserve it. The Environmental Protection Agency, after years, many years longer than many folks thought it should have taken them, finished a reassessment of dioxin, and among other things that they found was that it was more carcinogenic than the data had previously suggested.

MOYERS: Meaning?

McCALLY: Meaning that the risk of cancer from a given level of dioxin was greater. So instead of one in a million, it was one in 100,000 or one in 10,000.

MOYERS: And they're also persistent chemicals?

McCALLY: They are very persistent chemicals. It's a group, dioxins. There are a hundred different ones, and some are more toxic than others.

MOYERS: What's their source?

McCALLY: They're the product of combustion. Any time you burn organic material in the presence of chlorine, you get some dioxin.

MOYERS: So when you burn plastic?

McCALLY: Essentially, you burn anything, if there's some chlorine around, you're going to get a little bit of dioxin. So there have been traces of dioxin since the beginning, but really traces, and you couldn't measure it until the industrial revolution, because now we began to burn stuff on a big scale. And we began to burn stuff that contained chlorine and incinerate materials, so incineration is a process that is very suspect. I mean, we ought to find ways of disposing of waste and of making cement. Cement kilns are also a source of dioxin. There are lots of industrial sources.

But a big contributor is plastic that contains chlorine, because PVC plastic is 50 percent chlorine by weight. It’s almost, it's pure chlorine. So when you burn it, you get a lot of dioxin. That's why there's a lot of attention on that particular part of the plastics industry.

Plastics as a category, you know, most of them are okay things.

MOYERS: Right.

McCALLY: But the PVC plastic, the ones that have chlorine in them, because these organochlorine chemicals are required to make them, and workers get exposed, and it gets into the drains and gets into the water and gets into our bodies, and when you get rid of them, when you burn them, you have this terrible problem. They really are a class of chemicals that ought to be regulated, that ought to be just minimized.

MOYERS: I remember good Saturday mornings 30 years ago when I would take our kids down to the town incinerator and throw our trash away and watch them burn it, and I could look into the pit where they were burning the town garbage and I would see one Clorox jug after another that we had all tossed in there.

McCALLY: You were watching it.

MOYERS: When you burn those, they produce dioxin?

McCALLY: The bottom line is that combustion processes produce dioxin, and one of the fuels is chlorine-containing plastic, PVC.

MOYERS: Aren't dioxins regulated?

McCALLY: No, amazingly enough. You have to regulate them indirectly, you have to regulate the processes that make them. It's not like a chemical that someone makes and you can say, okay, DDT. No, that's a bad chemical, we won't have that anymore, we'll ban that.

You can't ban dioxin because no one deliberately makes it. It's a byproduct of industrial combustion. So your work to minimize it is to change the industry, and that's why there is pressure on the chemical industry to change some of its behaviors and to take a more public health stance and to recognize that it's contributing to these problems and to acknowledge that it has a responsibility for the toxicologic testing of the materials that it makes, and that it has a responsibility to look at some chemicals as classes.

Organochlorine chemicals as a class are bad guys. They're primarily pesticides, the materials that go into the production of PVC plastic and that result from it, and we have to begin to think about sort of looking at that as a whole group. Right now, we do sort of one chemical at a time and say, "Well, that's a bad chemical," and so then the chemical industry changes two molecules and then say it's a whole different chemical and ten years later, you say, "Well, that's a bad chemical, too."

We've got to short-circuit that. And that's the kind of thing that the industry could do if it really wanted to come at these issues from a fresh approach, from a public health approach.

MOYERS: We did ban DDT, right?

McCALLY: Yes.

MOYERS: So there's no more danger from DDT?

McCALLY: Well, there's danger from DDT in two ways, so there is danger from DDT. When we banned it, that was a good thing to do. But it's very persistent, and so you still have traces of it.

MOYERS: So I have DDT in my blood?

McCALLY: Yes. Yes.

MOYERS: Even though we did ban it?

McCALLY: Yes. And that's because it's persistent. It just doesn't break down. Your body doesn't have mechanisms, enzymes that break down DDT. It stays in place in fat, it goes into fat and it's stored in fat. Organochlorines tend to like fat and so they end up there. So it's in your blood, but it's in the fat part of your blood, so that's the one part that's still there.

The other is that we still manufacture it in this country. Even though we ban it in this country, we still make it and we sell it abroad.

MOYERS: We sell a banned product like DDT overseas?

McCALLY: Yes.

MOYERS: And we make it in this country?

McCALLY: And we make it in this country.

MOYERS: So people are still being exposed to it.

McCALLY: Yes.

MOYERS: Even though it's banned.

McCALLY: Yes.

MOYERS: What we acknowledge is not safe for Americans we sell to foreigners?

McCALLY: Yes. Now, you can make that seem not quite so harsh -- that's pretty harsh, in fact, and some folks have called this the circle of poison, that we manufacture it here, send it to South America where it's used and workers there are exposed to it, but the circle is complete when the foodstuff is sent back and we eat the foodstuffs from Guatemala with DDT in it. So there is that circle.

But it is important to point out that DDT is viewed by public health folks in many parts where there is endemic malaria as a very good control agent for malaria, and they want to keep that. So there is a real public health dialogue about its limited use.

MOYERS: What are the possible effects on the human being of DDT?

McCALLY: Well, the important one coming back to this story about the developmental effects, the burdens that you carry are probably biologically less important than if you were a 21-year-old woman who was in her ninth week of pregnancy. And then the fact that you were circulating some DDT might really be important.

So, for example, as another one of these mouse offspring stories, if you give some DDT to a pregnant mouse, you can produce male mice who have diminished sperm counts.

MOYERS: 'm told that DDT can be linked to prostate, breast cancer, to liver cancer? Is that right?

McCALLY: Yes. And the problem here is that we don't have the kinds of human epidemiologic studies that we would like to have. We have some DDT studies that appear to link DDT to breast cancer in women and some others that are equivocal. There are some studies that associate it to prostate cancer in men; others that are equivocal. We need better studies.

There is a very interesting recent study on DDT and duration of lactation in women with higher DDT levels. They have shorter periods of lactation.

MOYERS: We have done DDT studies in mice?

McCALLY: Yes.

MOYERS: And what do they show?

McCALLY: They show these kinds of developmental effects that I've just been describing. These materials cross the placenta and they do interfere with reproductive development in mice, so that you could have reproductive systems of the offspring mice are abnormal.

MOYERS: Did you find the phthalates in me?

McCALLY: We found some phthalates, and if you ask the same questions again, now we've got even less information. Phthalates are a class of chemicals that we have really just overlooked. They are remarkably common. We make huge amounts of phthalates , we use them in consumer products, in cosmetics, in can liners, in plastics --

MOYERS: Children's toys?

McCALLY: Children's toys. And we are just beginning to really look in detail at the toxicity. At least two of them that we know are carcinogens and oughtn't be in children's toys. And in recent years, we have moved effectively to get manufacturers to stop using them in children's toys.

They're in children's toys through this same compound, PVC plastic. PVC plastic, when you make it, is hard and you have to soften it, so phthalates, among its many other uses, is a plasticizer softener, and you mix it in with the PVC and it's then part of what gives your bath shower curtains their new smells, the inside of your car its new automobile smell. But they aren't chemically part of the PVC, so you can squeeze it out, you can chew it out. So children who suck on these toys are getting dosed with phthalates .

The industry decided that it was kind of a bad idea ten years ago and took the carcinogenic one out and used another one, which now there's evidence is also carcinogenic. It's this business of sort of getting the chemical next door, but not really solving the problem. So we've made some real progress there, but we don't really know what the significance for you as an adult is.

MOYERS: But aren't there some tests that show that phthalates can effect the male reproductive system?

McCALLY: Yes, in laboratory animals. We don't have much evidence in human beings.

MOYERS: Are they regulated, phthalates ?

McCALLY: Again, it's this business of one chemical at a time. So when somebody says this is a bad actor, then the regulatory mechanisms come into play.

But this is a problem that some people have called the reverse onus. What that means is that the blame is backwards.

Instead of a chemical manufacturer having to be responsible for his or her product and have tested it in advance and be able to say, we believe this is a safe product before they put it out, it's the other way around. It goes out and is used like in PVC plastic toys, and when somebody says, "Well, gee, by the way, isn't some phthalates squeezing out of this and isn't phthalates a carcinogen and shouldn't we be doing something," then it starts a whole regulatory process that, after a while, gets some action. But the process is backwards.

This is something the chemical industry could do if it would take these issues seriously and say, you know, these are our products, we're putting them into the environment, that's a major imposition. We have the opportunity to, we don't want to turn the world into a chemical laboratory where everybody is, sort of subjects in our grand experiment to see who gets sick. "We are responsible for these agents," they ought to say, "and we will do our very best to certify they're safe before we put them in the environment. " That would be the correct way. That's the way the pharmaceutical manufacturers have to operate.

MOYERS: But the chemical industry's attitude is and our society's assumption is these chemicals are innocent until proven guilty.

McCALLY: That's the current standard, that's the way we set it up.

MOYERS: And those of you in public health would like to see it reversed. You'd like to say before they release a chemical, they must demonstrate to themselves that it's safe.

McCALLY: That seems logical to me. That's certainly the case. Those of us in public health would like to see the order reversed.

MOYERS: Let me just sum up the test you found -- the test you did on me. Let me just rehearse -- go back over that a little bit. What should all of us conclude from these tests?

McCALLY: There really are two things to conclude. One is that as a member of global population, you carry these chemicals around with you. You have a huge family of them. And they are likely to have individual significance for you.

We've talked about how we don't have the science yet to really specify that, but they are part of your medical history.

But the larger part is that these are the products of a large chemical industry that, if it chose to, could change our exposures to these chemicals by picking different ones, by managing their production better.

MOYERS: Is it fair to say from all of this that we are, as human beings, being unwittingly exposed to hundreds of toxic chemicals which have been tested enough just to know that they're toxic, but not tested enough to know the risks?

McCALLY: That's absolutely correct. That's a fine summary of the current state of affairs, that we know these agents are toxic as classes, as individual chemicals that we've tested in animals, and we know that we carry them inside of each of us, but we've not yet done the science, we don't have enough information to say what the risk really is, whether it really is, and we believe it is, much more specific to children or to immune-compromised persons or older persons. We just haven't done that research. We need to do it.

But I do want to make the point we could mitigate the need for some of the research if we lowered the exposure to the chemicals. We know enough how to that it doesn't make a lot of sense to make chemicals that are carcinogenic and add them to our bodies and then argue about how much we're adding. It just isn't a good idea, particularly when there are perfectly acceptable alternatives, and if the industry chose, it could change our exposures dramatically by its own actions.

MOYERS: In one sense, we are at day one of the chemical revolution. It's only about 50 years old in terms of the whole human trajectory. We're in day one of the chemical revolution. It started in my lifetime, and I guess that's why I have these 84 chemicals.

Have these chemicals been tested in terms of what happens when they are combined, when you have the combination of these 84 or any combination of two or four or six in my body, do we know the effects of that combination?

McCALLY: No. No. That is a complexity that we haven't even looked at.

MOYERS: Have they been tested on vulnerable populations like children?

McCALLY: No. We are just beginning to do that science. It is difficult to do testing on children. We don't like to do that. Children are vulnerable populations, and so we don't like to actually do tests on children.

But we will be doing long-term studies of children from their residence in utero until they're 20 years old, looking at the relationships between their environmental exposures and their health and development.

There's a major initiative underway sponsored by universities and industry, a longitudinal study of children's health and development. So that will happen.

But back to your question about the combinations. Combinations are -- I mean, if you have 84 and then if you start to look at the combinations, you know, you're quickly at 1500 and you're at 30,000, and we haven't begun to do that.

And there are scientists thinking about that, because you can use advanced science techniques to guess what the interactions might be because of the similarities of structure of the particular chemicals and whether they would be additive and be twice as strong or be neutralizing and half as strong. But we haven't done that kind of science. Just haven't done it.

MOYERS: What about the people who say that these chemicals in these low doses are really not as dangerous as coffee or cigarettes?

McCALLY: I'll offer a couple of thoughts.

One is that we're just now understanding that dose isn't always as important as timing, and that the real damage done by a lot of these chemicals is to the developing individual, people at the most vulnerable time in their lives when they are in utero busily making their bodies and their brains and their minds; and that very small doses, we know from animal studies and we talked about in relation to your own blood levels, are very effective in producing developmentally, reproductively abnormal animals.

So it isn't just the dose, it isn't just that, you know, a lot of chemical is bad and a little trace is not bad. It's a different story.

Secondly, many of these chemicals are, you know, carcinogens, and that we should --

MOYERS: And cause cancer.

McCALLY: Cause cancer. And that clearly we should not put into our environments and expose ourselves to carcinogens needlessly.

Many of these are easily replaced. You know, we've banned a number of the worst pesticides. So that clearly makes sense. And to say that they are, you know, not as bad as smoking, well, smoking is not a good standard for any sort of public health intervention. Of course that's a horrible outcome.

MOYERS: You said to me when we first met that you were sure you would find chemicals in my body, and you did. And you also said that none of them would have been found in my grandfather's body. What does that say?

McCALLY: That says to me that this is a phenomenon of the industrial and chemical revolutions, and that we didn't know this until we looked, but suddenly we find out that the industry has put a bunch of chemicals in our body that are not good for us, and we didn't have any say in that. That just happened. And just to say that we've had a lot of better living through chemistry and that we can live with this because just tiny doses is not an adequate explanation, is not adequately protective of public health.

MOYERS: I have already lived longer than my two grandfathers who didn't have these chemicals in their bodies.

McCALLY: If longevity is your only measure, then you could argue that, well, okay, we've lived a little longer. But we've done a lot of other things as well.

But what we don't know is how intact are the infants that we are now developing. We know that infants of persons who have occupationally or geographically higher exposures are not well. People who are subsistence fish eaters, have offspring. You wouldn't want our grandchildren exposed to those risks. So those are real, and we don't want those.

MOYERS: So what is the fundamental question we should be asking?

McCALLY: I think the fundamental question is, who do I have a chance to ask it of? The fundamental question is, who's responsibility is the nature of our chemical environment? And I think the chemical industry has a role that it has not stepped up to assume, and that it can do that voluntarily or it can do it in response to regulation.

The present scene is regulatory pressure, resistant chemical industry. The desired outcome is a chemical industry that is public health oriented, prevention oriented in how it approaches its role in society rather than one that wants to cover up, slow down, and denies responsibilities in assuring the safety of the products that it makes, in monitoring effects as they might occur, and in being responsible, even liable for what it puts out there.

MOYERS: Here's the 64-dollar question to me as a journalist. Why are we continuing to release these chemicals into the environment when we don't have much testing, we haven't answered all the questions? Why are they still being released into our environment?

McCALLY: That's the way we have set up the regulations. That's easier to do than to insist on our spending the money and knowing the answers before we do it. You can call it public health apathy. We haven't had a lot of attention to environmental health until the last five years. You can call it regulatory indifference. It has taken a long time to get regulations that really worked in the chemical exposure area. And you can certainly talk about industry resistance. The industry has just not come at this pro-actively.

MOYERS: They've come grudgingly.

McCALLY: They have come grudgingly, and still, to this day.

And as I look at other parts of the environmental problems of the world and other spheres where industry has a major role -- energy production being one of them -- there are sectors now where industry is really realigning itself and saying, look, global warming, even if it's less than the models say and even if man's contribution is not the full story, petroleum-based energy economy is going to be gone in a little while, we need to get out in front. They're really saying and doing different things.

MOYERS: At 66, should I have any undue concern over the 84 chemicals you found in my body, including the 31 kinds of PCBs?

McCALLY: As an individual, no. I have the same, I'm sure -- although I've not been tested -- that my pattern is probably the same as yours, and I'm not going to take on things that are going to try to change exactly what's in me or get rid of them.

But I have a granddaughter, and I think that the implications for children going forward, both from cancer, because childhood cancer is an issue we haven't talked about. Childhood cancers are going up, and these agents are known carcinogens that produce those kinds of cancers in animals.

So I think that I want very much to change the environment for children in particular.

MOYERS: My second question was going to be, if I'm okay, what about Henry, Thomas and Nancy, my three grandchildren in St. Paul.

McCALLY: They've got longer to live in a chemical environment and they grew up in it and we ought to do everything that we can to change this chemical environment for them and for their children as soon as we can get it done. Because it can be done.