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ABSTRACT:  Theo Colborn, Endocrine Disruption, and the Dilemma of Consumer Culture

Theo Colborn (1927-2014) was a remarkable woman who had three lives. Trained as a pharmacist during World War II, she married a fellow student, had four children, and worked as a pharmacist in New Jersey from 1947 to 1964. Then she and her husband left East-coast urban life behind—and the increasingly corporatized pharmaceutical industry—for the rural lifestyle of a western Colorado ranch. There she reared her children, bred fancy sheep, and pursued her love of birding. Bird-watching excursions into the habitat of the mesa country of Delta County alerted her to environmental degradation associated with the recent introduction of coal, natural gas, and oil extraction on the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains. In 1979, once her youngest child finished school, she abandoned her marriage to follow her passion: discovering whether health problems she saw as a pharmacist might be linked to environmental toxicants. To do so, however, would mean acquiring the academic credentials to become a professional scientist. So she returned to school, receiving a MS in biology in 1981 and PhD in 1985 (at the age of 58), specializing in water toxicology and epidemiology. As a water quality expert, she could now focus on how water-borne toxicants might impact human health.

According to science writer Kathryn Schulz, “the fundamental task of biography: to show us why that life mattered.” This biography, exploring Colborn’s quest to alert scientists, policy-makers, and the public to the existential perils posed by chemicals that undergird modern consumer culture, profiles a woman whose life—all three of them—did indeed matter.

Thus began Colborn’s third life: working as a “public scientist” and consultant for environmental nonprofit organizations, first at the Conservation Foundation and then the Wildlife and Contaminants Program of the World Wildlife Fund. Neither a laboratory nor a field scientist but a researcher, like Rachel Carson, Theo had an amazing ability to synthesize others’ data. She could see patterns others couldn’t. Thus, in 1988, when working as a consultant on an American/Canadian collaboration of biologists and policy analysts, she identified reproductive and developmental maladies, not cancer, as prevalent in top predators in the Great Lakes Basin who had been exposed to toxicants in the water, soil, and air of their ecosystems contaminated by decades of industrial, agricultural, and urban effluent. Knowing the effects of PCBs and dioxin on humans as well as wildlife, Colborn hypothesized that industrial chemicals were largely to blame, a view endorsed by participants who reviewed the data at the 1991 Wingspread conference she convened. Thus was born the new science of endocrine disruption.

For the next two-and-a half decades, Colborn promoted the science of endocrine disruption, encouraged policies to reduce the production of or alternatives to chemicals associated with endocrine disruption, and championed public understanding of the issue. By mimicking the body’s natural hormones, these “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” can derail normal development and functioning of the body’s organs and organ systems, including the brain. Moreover, the ubiquitous presence of “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs) in virtually all individuals on Earth imperils human survival. Interfering with the ability of humans to reproduce and individuals to develop according the plan laid out in their DNA, Colborn’s 1996 book, Our Stolen Future, coauthored with Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson (Pete) Myers, explained the existential crisis endocrine disruptors pose for humans, as important as climate change is for Earth. The NGO she founded, The Endocrine Disruptor Exchange (TEDX) carried on this work after she retired from the World Wildlife Fund and after her death in 2014.