A biologist and author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, Sandra Steingraber knows more scary things about environmental toxins than anyone since Rachel Carson, and she was looking for a safe haven in which to write her next book. She found a nurturing milieu -- and lots of help from faculty members and students -- in the Cornell Center for the Environment (CfE).
More specifically, Steingraber's Cornell home since 1999 has been the Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors (BCERF) program within one of CfE's affiliated units, the Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology. There the scientist, who first experienced environment-related cancer at age 20, found colleagues to share her concern and curiosity about pollutants that could affect a pregnant woman and the infant she would nurse.
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| A portion of the cover of Sandra Steingraber's book Having Faith, showing her and daughter in a photo by Frank DiMeo of University Photography. |
"BCERF is where I wanted to be, with one foot in scientific research and one foot in activism," said the author, most recently, of Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood (Perseus Publishing, September 2001), mother of Faith (who is now 3) and lately of Elijah (born with the help of local midwives on Aug. 10 and named for the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy). "This is truly science in the public interest," she said of BCERF, which specializes in translating current research into understandable terms for policy-makers, breast cancer advocates and the general public.
Steingraber and her sculptor-husband, Jeff de Castro, had felt an urgent need to get 9-month-old Faith out of their lead-polluted Boston suburb, Somerville, and the invitation from the then-director of BCERF, June Fessenden-MacDonald, came just in time. A biochemist whose acquired chemical sensitivity forced her to abandon laboratory research for teaching and administration, Fessenden-MacDonald secured a courtesy appointment of visiting assistant professor for Steingraber, who supported her Cornell work with foundation grants and publisher's advances.
The visiting professor didn't know it at the time, but the Cornell scientist who would become the next director of BCERF, Rodney Dietert, professor of immunotoxicology, studies the impact of lead exposure on pregnant women and the immune systems of their children. Dietert is one of the faculty members thanked for their assistance with Having Faith. Others include Peter Nathanielsz, director of the Laboratory for Pregnancy and Newborn Research in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and Fred Quimby, the veterinary toxicologist who studied PCBs' effects on the immune function of Indian reservation women and their pets, until his recent retirement from Cornell.
But Steingraber bestows her most lavish praise on two undergraduate students, Fan Lau and Tamar Yael Melen, who spent "countless hours ferreting out books and journal articles ... and generally cheering me up. Two brighter students I have never had occasion to work with," wrote the author who earned a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Michigan, taught at Chicago's Columbia College and conducted fieldwork in East Africa, Costa Rica and northern Minnesota.
Without copious current research, Having Faith wouldn't be what it is: a molecule-by-molecule, membrane-by-membrane account of Steingraber's pregnancy with Faith and the pollutants that would imperil them, followed by months-long ambivalence over "the most contaminated of all human foods," as Steingraber terms breast milk, ultimately leading to her conviction that chemical-free nursing is a human right that should be codified in the Constitution.
Softening the book's clinical detail is considerable wild-bird lore and natural history from a biologist who admits she was a "mediocre fieldworker" and also is a published poet, with Post-Diagnosis (Firebrand Books, 1995).
There's also plenty of self-deprecating humor. Steingraber's telling of her public coming-out as a breast-feeding mother (at a formal dinner hosted by the president of her alma mater) is as hilarious as her description of amniotic fluid is piquant: "It's like liquid amber," said Steingraber, who had been trying to think about hummingbirds when the amniocentesis needle pierced her uterus. "Like an amber jewel." It occurred to her, she said, "that amniotic fluid might be the loveliest substance I have ever seen." "That's baby pee," the obstetrician said. "We like it yellow. It's a sign of good kidney functioning."
Later, Steingraber found a memorable way to share with 122 United Nations delegates her fascination with another precious -- but toxin-laced -- body fluid. Before delivering an invited address to the September 1999 treaty-negotiating session in Geneva, Switzerland, on POPs (persistent organic pollutants), she slipped into a bathroom and expressed a half cup of breast milk into a glass jar. Then she passed the jar around the room while discussing babies' place atop the food chain. Some of the dark-suited men averted their eyes, she reports, but others smiled in recognition.
A newspaper writer at one point in her career, Steingraber now faces other journalists while criss-crossing the country on the latest book tour. Surprisingly, the most-frequently-asked question is not: How can a woman scientist who knows the risks of environmental pollutants continue to produce children? That's often the second question, but more people who read her books and hear Steingraber lecture ask: What can I do about this toxic mess?
The answer on a global scale, Steingraber says, is to recognize that some pollutants -- such as DDT and PCBs -- finally are decreasing in the environment, thanks to "plain ordinary folks who cared enough." Repay the debt, Steingraber urges, and continue the process of detoxification. "It's not going to help our breast milk, but do it for our daughters."
On an individual scale, she adds, pregnant and nursing women should reduce their exposure to household and agricultural chemicals, and everyone should watch out for flame-retardant chemicals, such as those found in computers.
Then Steingraber answers the question about why more children, while a contented Elijah nurses. "My biological past was closed to me" said the adoptee who never had the chance to reunite with her biological parents. "These children are my chance to create a biological history.
"If I were still 32 instead of 42," she said, "I'd have a houseful of them."
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