Twenty years ago, when Michael Wilson worked as a firefighter—paramedic in the strawberry—and vegetable—growing region around Salinas, he responded to countless 911 emergency calls from workers caught in machinery or struggling to breathe. A malfunctioning conveyor belt would grab a worker’s arm. A chlorine cloud loosed during the vegetable cleaning process, or a leak in the line that ran ammonia to storage freezers, would take down a group of workers. Wilson and his team would stabilize the accident victims and then rush them to the emergency room.

“Our role was done,” he says. “But there was often this totally disabled person, wrecked really, with lifelong costs and complications.” Most of these incidents, Wilson recalls, were completely preventable, and “a direct result of the 24-hour production focus of the plant.” Frustrated by his inability to stanch the flow of injuries and shocked by widespread indifference to the problem, he entered Berkeley’s School of Public Health, where he is now a research scientist.

When we met in his office on the seventh floor, with its sweeping view of the Bay Bridge under construction, of Oakland’s vast dock works and ships headed to port, Wilson, MPH ’98, Ph.D. ’03, was at an elevated computer station that allowed him to stand while typing. He retains some traits of a first responder. During our conversation he sat on the edge of his chair with a furrowed brow and focused gaze. He’s not fidgety, just squared up to react.

Wilson’s research at Berkeley initially took him to greasy auto repair shops around the state, where hexane, another debilitating chemical, was in wide use—the result of good intentions gone disastrously bad. In an effort to protect public health, California had been phasing out chlorinated solvents. The market responded by introducing hexane, a brake—cleaning solvent sprayed from an aerosol can—a known neurotoxin, but a chemical not on California’s hit list. Wilson met a 24-year-old auto mechanic who had completely lost his sensory and motor functions. “He was in a wheelchair and had the symptoms of multiple sclerosis,” remembers Wilson. “He had no control of his limbs. He had no grip strength. He’d been seen by three different neurologists but no one could figure out what it was.” A colleague of Wilson’s at UCSF discovered the hexane link.

Manufacturers tried to reduce the hexane content in individual spray cans by cutting it with acetone. But that combination of chemicals was more dangerous, since acetone amplifies both the severity and duration of hexane’s neurotoxic effects. And it wasn’t just Californians who suffered. The state is such a massive market that manufacturers shifted away from chlorine-based to hexane-based products and ended up creating an occupational health disaster across the country. Through this research, says Wilson, he realized that it wasn’t enough to focus on one chemical at a time. “We had to look at the entire chemical production system.”

Wilson began to see toxics control as an intricate puzzle. If he had concentrated solely on hexane, for instance, he would have seen an interesting and isolated case while completely missing the big picture. The challenge became not just the toxicity and health hazards of individual compounds but also the political decision-making that created the problem in the first place; the economic policies that justified the status quo in development, manufacturing, and marketing by prioritizing profit alone; and, finally, the potential for profit and for public and environmental health through an entirely new and sustainable way of doing business. These ideas became the building blocks for a powerful new initiative in California called “green chemistry.”

By taking such a wide swing at the problem of toxics, Wilson had whacked a multibillion-dollar hornet’s nest. Most Americans assume that if a product is on the shelf it’s been tested and government approved. In fact, industrial chemicals are largely unregulated, and there are no incentives to create benign alternatives. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA), all chemicals on the market before 1979—that’s 92 percent of those used today—are exempt from scrutiny. As a result, we do not know the health and environmental effects of most of the 80,000 and more chemicals currently in wide commercial use.

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