Ex-EPA Official Heads New Institute On Health Risks

PASADENA, CALIF.—An industry-funded research institute that pledges to be independent of the companies that are funding it is the latest player in the debate on, the environmental and public health risk of toxic chemicals. The Institute for Evaluating Health Risks (IEHR) says it is the nation’s first independent institute formed to specifically address environment-related health risks. It was put together by ethicist Charles Powers, a former philosophy professor at Yale University, who has started two other organizations for evaluating environmental problems. IEHR’s origins lie in a 1986 California law known as Proposition 65, which bars industry from releasing toxic substances into waterways and requires industry to warn consumers of the levels of toxic chemicals contained in products. Exempt from the law are substances that have been shown to pose no significant risk, a formidable challenge for any manufacturing company. This fall the institute moved into an office at the National Academy of Sciences’ Beckman Center in Irvine, Calif. Its president and chief executive officer is John A. Moore, a toxicologist who headed the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide program for five years during the Reagan administration. By year’s end Moore expects to have hired staff scientists and devised a course of action for the institute. The institute’s biggest challenge, says Gilbert Omenn, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle, will be to select “two or three initial activities that are judged to be important and useful.” Moore says one project is likely to address a dietary. health risk, such as a pesticide or group of pesticides. The institute’s scientific staff will work with consulting scientists drawn heavily from academia. The institute will not conduct its own research, Moore says, but rather will evaluate existing research. The staff will also suggest the issues that need further study when there is insufficient data to make an evaluation regarding a particular health risk. “Because there is uncertainty in [risk assessment], differing points of view might be held on the risk,” says Moore. “And everybody—scientists in particular—loves then to holler at each other about who’s right and who’s wrong. I’m enough of a realist to know I’m not going to change scientists from doing those things that they love. But maybe we can also agree while we’re [arguing] that we canget more information on the table that might narrow our differences.” Asked why government can’t carry out the work that IEHR wants to do, Moore says that agencies such as EPA already evaluate the health risks of substances “with great frequency." But he adds that federal budgets are in general too small to do all the work that needs to be done. Moreover, he says, “EPA’s primary job is not to be an innovator.” IEHR’s task is so large, says Powers, that “government will never be able to do all the risk assessment that’s going to be required under the new law.” That’s why an independent organization such as IEHR is needed, he says. But the institute doesn’t plan to limit itself to the California law. The institute “will be an extraordinary national resource,” predicts Powers. “The country’s moving toward risk assessment as its way of trying to make sense of health data in relation to environmental regulation.” Fight For Independence Environmentalists have greeted the institute’s formation with caution. David Roe, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based activist organization, and one of the authors of Proposition 65, says that while he applauds its goals, he is “skeptical” that it can remain independent of its sponsors. “Industry groups have tried to co-opt scientific bodies before,” he says, “and they will certainly try to co-opt this one.” At the same time, Roe says that Moore earned a reputation for fairness and good judgment while at EPA, and that he is hopeful the new institute will make a positive contribution to the field. “We’ve got very high respect for him, his abilities, and his approach to the issues,” says Roe. Startup funding of more than $600,000 for IEHR has come from a dozen oil companies, banks, and supermarket chains. Arnong the contributors are ARCO, Shell, Chevron, Bank of America, WellsFargo, Lucky Stores, and J.G. Bos- well, one of California’s largest agribusinesses. But Moore says the institute hopes to add enough government and foundation funding to achieve a balance that protects IEHR from being beholden to any individual sector. Such a balance was not possible from the start, Moore adds, because industry is capable of moving more quickly than either the public or the nonprofit sector. Powers says he hopes that the institute’s board of directors will ensure the institute’s independence. It includes Richard K. Atkinson, chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University and a former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; William F. Ballhaus, past president of Beckman Instruments; Theodore L. Hullar, chancellor of the University of California, Davis; Rosemary Schraer, chancellor of the University of California, Riverside; David Packard, chairman of Hewlett-Packard Co.; and Melvin Lane, chairman -and publisher of Sunset Publications, which puts out home improvement books and a popular magazine. Moore says that they are the sort of people “who are likely to be excited about solving important public problems.” Kathryn Phillips is a freelance writer based in Pasadena, Calif.

Ex-EPA Official Heads New Institute On Health Risks

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