How To Grow an Environmental Health Center

December 09, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

The past and present directors of the Kresge Center for Environmental Health met last month at the annual meeting of the National Institutes of Health's environmental health centers -- this year hosted at the School of Public Health. They are (left to right) James Whittenberger (founder), John B. Little, and Joseph Brain (current director).

For four days beginning Halloween night 1948, a temperature inversion trapped an industrial fog over the town of Donora, Pa., in the Monongahela Valley. Air pollution was linked to 20 deaths, and hundreds of injuries and illness in half of the population.

In the second week of December 1952, as Londoners burned soft coal in their homes to keep warm, a sulfurous fog laced with particles enveloped that city, killing more than 4,000 people over the next three weeks. Prize animals at an agricultural fair also fell ill and died.

These two large, unnatural disasters helped to create the impetus for the field of environmental health to grow in scope.

But before there was a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and before the National Institutes of Health (NIH) included environmental health, there was the Kresge Center for Environmental Health at Harvard’s School of Public Health. Beginning in 1958, the Center brought together medical and physical scientists and engineers to investigate these manmade health problems of the 20^th century.

The Kresge Center recently celebrated the renewal of its grant from the NIH for another five years. Assigned the number ES00002, it is the longest continuous grant – 40 years – awarded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), an agency within the NIH, and marks the federal government’s long-established use of Harvard’s environmental research. The five-year grant will total $6.9 million.

From a classic focus on industrial workplaces, the Kresge Center has seen environmental health grow to incorporate every part of our natural and constructed habitats. And over the years the Center has added the expertises of epidemiology, biostatistics, and molecular biology to its scientific arsenal, allowing the assessment of environmental damage at the cellular level as well as the susceptibility of individuals to certain environmental hazards. An undisputed leader in the study of air pollution, the Center has provided the scientific evidence upon which the EPA has set its current controversial standards for particles in the air.

At the Kresge Center’s annual lecture in November honoring founder James Whittenberger, the topic was typically interdisciplinary and of immediate concern: "The Asthma Epidemic: Is It Due To Genes, The Environment, Or Both?" The lecture came at the annual meeting of NIEHS centers, this year hosted by Harvard and M.I.T.

NIEHS Director Kenneth Olden honored Harvard as a "distinguished" center holding his agency's longest grant.

SPH’s Department of Environmental Health had its origins with Whittenberger, a postdoctoral physiologist who came to the campus after World War II and within a month was handed the tiny Department of Physiology on the unexpected retirement of the department head. Taking a public health rather than a medical school approach, Whittenberger began to study physiology in polluted workplaces and communities and collaborated with the Bureau of State Services, the federal agency to which environmental matters then fell.

After the Donora and London episodes, said Whittenberger, "the federal government decided we ought to have people expert in what air pollution is and how to control it and how to determine what health effects there are." A federal Division of Air Pollution Health Effects was created and Whittenberger served on its advisory committee, eventually writing what is regarded as the seminal guidebook for research on the environment.

In Whittenberger’s new interdisciplinary center, supported by the Kresge Foundation, were John B. Little, a postdoctoral fellow in radiobiology who would succeed his boss in two decades, and Joseph Brain, a graduate student, who is the center’s current director and the Cecil K. and Philip Drinker Professor of Environmental Physiology. Whittenberger encouraged a broad, public health view of environmental effects.

"Up until then it had been a case at a time, or a cluster," Brain explained. "Jim [Whittenberger] said chronic disease methodology should be applied to the environment. In addition to rat experiments, you need to take advantage of ‘experiments’ in the workplace and the community."

At the time there were plenty of pollution episodes to study and a growing environmental movement demanding remedies. "Pittsburgh was filthy; the Monongahela River caught fire," recalled Brain. "It was obvious that air and water needed to be cleaner. But if you’re going to regulate, you need numbers to set standards." As the EPA moved to regulate environmental quality, it turned to SPH’s researchers to monitor the health effects of increased pollution. The historic Six Cities Study was the result. This effort was a dramatic use of epidemiology to understand a complicated and widespread health hazard. Eventually air quality and the health of 8,000 adults and 14,000 children would be monitored for more than two decades. The most frequently cited paper from the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993, found that air pollution was cutting short people’s lives – by up to two years in the most heavily polluted regions.

The Kresge Center continues to zero in ever more closely on air pollution – discovering in the 1990s that fine particles are a more damaging constituent of air pollution than gases like SO2. Research at the SPH formed the basis for the EPA’s 1987 particle standards – focusing on particles smaller than 10 microns in diameter, those that can deposit deep themselves in the lungs. Further Harvard research also led to the EPA’s 1997 revised and tightened standard, which targets particles smaller than 2.5 microns because of their association with hospitalizations and asthma attacks.

"These small particles are mostly the product of smokestacks and tailpipes," said Joel Schwartz, associate professor of environmental epidemiology, "in contrast to particles between 2.5 and 10 microns, which are mostly dust and clay and not as toxic." The new standard has been energetically attacked by industry groups that question a policy decision based solely on an epidemiologic indictment, not on lab experiments. To address this data deficiency, the Kresge Center has begun animal experiments involving the smaller particles.

Though the new particle standard is on the books, President Clinton has withheld its enforcement until the next round of review, which will conclude in 2002.

In the 40 years since Whittenberger founded the Kresge Center, said Brain, "the U.S. has made progress in solving its environmental problems. Air and water and the work environment are cleaner and safer. At the same time, there’s a rising incidence of asthma; lead continues to damage children; air pollution kills susceptible individuals. In many foreign countries environmental conditions have deteriorated."

"The Kresge Center is responding to these new challenges," he said, "and is using our understanding of gene/environment interactions and new technologies to analyze and solve environmental problems. The human habitat continues to evolve, and we continue to try to make it safer."