Amy Lindberg settled quickly into life at Lejeune. She played tennis and ran on her lunch breaks, flitting through sprinklers in the turgid Carolina summers. But something dark was lurking beneath her feet.<\/p>\n
Sometime before 1953, a massive plume of trichlorethylene, or TCE, had entered the groundwater beneath Camp Lejeune. TCE is a highly effective solvent\u2014one of those midcentury wonder chemicals\u2014that vaporizes quickly and dissolves whatever grease it touches. The spill\u2019s source is debated, but grunts on base used TCE to maintain machinery, and the dry cleaner sprayed it on dress blues. It was ubiquitous at Lejeune and all over America.<\/p>\n
And TCE appeared benign, too\u2014you could rub it on your hands or huff its fumes and feel no immediate effects. It plays a longer game. For approximately 35 years, Marines and sailors who lived at Lejeune unknowingly breathed in vaporized TCE whenever they turned on their tap. The Navy, which oversees the Marine Corps, first denied the toxic plume\u2019s existence, then refused to admit it could affect Marines\u2019 health. But as Lejeune\u2019s vets aged, cancers and unexplained illness began stalking them at staggering rates. Marines stationed on base had a 35 percent higher risk of developing kidney cancer, a 47 percent higher risk of Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma, a 68 percent higher risk of multiple myeloma. At the local cemetery, the section reserved for infants had to be expanded.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Langston had spent the remainder of the 1980s setting up the California Parkinson\u2019s Foundation (later renamed the Parkinson\u2019s Institute), a lab and treatment facility equipped with everything needed to finally reveal the cause of the disease. \u201cWe thought we were going to solve it,\u201d Langston told me. Researchers affiliated with the institute created the first animal model for Parkinson\u2019s, identified a pesticide called Paraquat as a near chemical match to MPTP, and proved that farm workers who sprayed Paraquat developed Parkinson\u2019s at exceedingly high rates. Then they showed that identical twins developed Parkinson\u2019s at the same rate as fraternal twins\u2014something that wouldn\u2019t make sense if the disease were purely genetic, since identical twins share DNA and fraternal twins do not. They even noted TCE as a potential cause of the disease, Langston says. Each revelation, the team thought, represented another nail in the coffin of the genetic theory of Parkinson\u2019s.<\/p>\n
When Goldman compared both populations, the results were shocking: Marines exposed to TCE at Lejeune were 70 percent more likely to have Parkinson\u2019s than those stationed at Pendleton.<\/p>\n
But there was a problem. The Human Genome Project had launched in 1990, promising to usher in a new era of personalized medicine. The project\u2019s goal, to identify all of the genes in man, was radical, and by the time it was completed in 2000, frothy comparisons to the moon landing were frequent. Unraveling our genome would \u201crevolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases,\u201d then president Bill Clinton said.<\/p>\n
But for Langston and his colleagues, the Human Genome Project sucked the air out of the environmental health space. Genetics became the \u201c800-pound gorilla,\u201d as one scientist put it. \u201cAll the research dollars went toward genetics,\u201d says Sam Goldman, who worked with Langston on the twin study. \u201cIt\u2019s just a lot sexier than epidemiology. It\u2019s the latest gadget, the bigger rocket.\u201d A generation of young scientists were being trained to think of genetics and genomics as the default place to look for answers. \u201cI characterize science as a bunch of 5-year-olds playing soccer,\u201d says another researcher. \u201cThey all go where the ball is, running around the field in a herd.\u201d And the ball was decidedly not environmental health. \u201cDonors want a cure,\u201d Langston says. \u201cAnd they want it now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amy Lindberg settled quickly into life at Lejeune. She played tennis and ran on her lunch breaks, flitting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,26948,316,84,9251,1058,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-336866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-diseases","11":"tag-genetics","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-longreads","14":"tag-medicine","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}