As the world woke up in synthetic

During the first crucial weeks of pregnancy, when fetal cells turned in a brain, organs and fingers and lips, a constant flow of chemicals created by man pulsate by the umbilical cord. Scientists believed that the placenta filtered most of these pollutants, but now they know this is not the case. Together with nutrients and oxygen, numerous synthetic substances travel to the uterus, penetrating the blood and tissues of the fetus. That is why, from their early moments in life, each north -American newborn has a large number of synthetic chemicals in their body.

Many of these chemicals have never been proven to be crucially. Of those who have it, some are known to cause cancer or prevent fetal development. Others alter hormone levels in the uterus, causing subtle changes to the brain and organs of a baby who may not be evident at birth, but can lead to a wide variety of ailments, such as cancer, heart disease, infertility, early puberty, reduced intellectual coefficient and neurological disorders such as ADHD. How did we end in this situation, where does each pre-contaminated child born? The response lies in the Fervent of the United States by synthetic materials, which, from the mid -twentieth century, remodeled our entire society and in the Astuts methods that chemical manufacturers used to ensure their unrelated dissemination.

It began in 1934, when the Dupont ammunition company struggled to rescue its reputation. A new Blockbuster book, Merchants of DeathHe argued that the company had improperly influenced America’s decision to enter World War In the meantime, a probe of the congress had discovered a strange plot – Almesed by Dupont and other companies that opposed the new agreement – to demolish the United States government and install a Mussolini -style dictatorship. Almost during the night, Dupont became a National Paria.

In response, the company hired a legendary public relations consultant that concluded that there was only one way that Dupont could escape the controversy: transforming in the mind of the public from a manufacturer of fatal ammunition in a wonderful source of inventions that benefited the general public. In 1938, the company debuted the first of these revolutionary materials: Nylon, which could be converted into “as strong as steel, as well as the spider web,” said a Dupont executive at the presentation. The company’s popular exhibition at the New York World Fair in 1939 had a chemical form of Miss that rose from an essay tube in a nylon dress and stockings. When Nylon stockings went on sale in 1940, they were almost immediately exhausted.

But it was not until World War II that the synthetic ones really took off. Faced with a shortage of natural materials such as steel and rubber, the United States government spent great sums by developing synthetic materials and expanding the mounting lines of chemical companies so that they could produce the quantities needed for the global war. After the conflict, the industry transformed these substances into a cornucopy of domestic goods. Plastic polyethylene, used to cover the radar cable during the war, became Tupperware, Hula-hoops and grocery bags. A new exotic family of chemicals developed through the first secret Manhattan project was shown in products such as the Scotchgard fabric protector. These substances, known by scientists as a perfluoroalchyl and polyphluoroalchylquil substances, or Pfas, gave ordinary goods a strange resistance to fat, spots, water and heat. They soon found their way in thousands of household items.

With the world suddenly in synthetic, people had access to a wide variety of low cost products, and this brought thousands of new chemicals to American houses. Most people did not think much about implications. But manufacturers sponsored research on the health effects of the new substances they used, much of Robert Kehoe’s laboratory, a toxicologist with almost religious faith in the power of technological progress to solve the problems of society.

When I visited the Kehoe archives at Cincinnati University, they encountered unpublished reports that united synthetic chemicals with a wide variety of health problems. Kehoe believed that the secret was justified. These chemicals, argued in a 1963 essay that I found among his roles, would be desperately needed to “feed, dress and house those who will populate this abundant land in successive generations”. Given that science continued to develop, he wrote, focusing on the public’s attention on the toxicity of chemicals would be “neither wise nor kind.”

But in the 1950’s, emerging scientific consensus was that many chemicals created by man could alter key body functions, making them harmful to lower doses than ordinary poisons. A small but vowel group of activists began to think about the lack of chemical evidence in food supply. They found a defender in James Delaney, a New York Democratic Congressman, who formed a committee to investigate the subject. One of his main testimonies was Wilhelm Hueper, a former Dupont pathologist, who, according to his unpublished autobiography, had warned his businessman on the bond between synthetic chemicals and cancer until the 1930’s. During his testimony, Hueper argued that since synthetic compounds could damage in the tiny doses and effects were not a level of exposure, they could not be accumulated, they could not be a level of exposure, they could not be accumulative. They. He advised legislators to demand that food chemicals be “tested for toxic properties and possibly carcinogenic” and prohibit cancer.

The Titans of the North -American Industry had other ideas. Help for the public relations firm, which would later be the Big Tobacco campaign to discredit science over the damage of smoking, chemical companies pressure legislators, gave conferences on all expenses for journalists and placed science materials in the pro-Industry industry in the classrooms of public school, according to meetings in the main commercial association in the chemical industry. These efforts paid off. In 1958, when Congress issued a law that required security evidence for chemicals that ended with food, it was assumed that the thousands of substances already used were secure and good.

One of these substances was Teflon, which is made with PFA, or forever chemicals, as they are known. According to Kehoe files, Dupont had previously avoided marketing it to use it in most consumer goods due to toxicity problems. Workers who inhaled Teflon’s smokes developed flu symptoms. When Kehoe’s laboratory scientists exposed dogs, cobai, rabbits and mice to the gases that Teflon issued when heated, many died in a few minutes, according to an unpublished report of 1954. But since Teflon’s ingredients had been warned, the company no longer needed to show its security in the government, only its benefits for customers. In 1959, he invited a reporter of Popular science At its Wilmington headquarters, Delaware, for a pancake demonstration using a Teflon Pan prototype. According to the magazine, the cakes came out brown and left no crunchy waste, “because the paella was lined with Tefló, a remarkable fluorocarbon plastic” which was “as slippery as ice on the ice”. By 1962, the happy paellas of the Dupont brand flown from the shop shelves.

That same year, he published the naturalist Rachel Carson Silent springIntroducing the audience to the disturbing idea that the chemicals created by man flooded the bodies of people. Most of the research that Carson had drawn was not new. They were the same data as scientists like Hueper, which Carson cited in the long run, had developed decades earlier, but Carson was the first to gather -everything for a wide audience. The base environmental movement is lit by Silent spring He led to the creation of the EPA in 1970 and, six years later, the passage of the toxic substance control law, which gave the agency the power to regulate chemicals. Thanks to the aggressive industry lobby, the law was terrible. Manufacturers were not forced to proactive new security chemicals, except in rare cases, and once again, existing chemicals were warned.

At the time of the passage of the bill, Dupont and another manufacturer, the 3m of Minnesota, had discovered that the PFA accumulated in the blood of the people throughout the country. Studies in the internal industry of this period showed that chemicals refused to break in the environment, which means that each molecule that companies produced would remain on the planet for millennia. It was also found that chemicals rapidly accumulated in the food chain and had devastating health effects on laboratory animals. A 1978 study of monkeys on PFAS had to be aborted two months earlier because all monkeys died.

When Dupont and 3m began to investigate the effect of chemicals on workers, the results were even more worrying. A 1981 study of the “pregnancy results” between the women of the Teflon factory in Dupont, which was later revealed by litigation, found that two of the seven pregnant workers gave birth to babies with severe facial deformities, a “statistically significant excess” with respect to the rate of birth defects of the general population. But instead of alerting the employees or the public, the company simply left the investigation.

A spokesman for Dupont, who in 2015 diverted the division of Pfas as part of a major restructuring, told me that “I was not in a position to talk to products or that they were part of the companies owned by other independent and publicly contributed companies.” A 3M spokesman said: “During the decades, 3m has shared significant information on PFA, including publishing many of its findings on PFA in available public journals that date back to the 1970’s,” adding that 3M aims to eliminate PFA from their manufacture in late 2025.

Limiting the use of PFAS now, however, does not change to what extent the chemicals and their damage have already spread. A large research body of independent scientists has linked chemicals forever to severe health problems, such as obesity, infertility, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, neurological problems, immune suppression and complications of pregnancy that endanger life. Researchers who follow PFA’s propagation found that they suffer from the blood of polar bears in the Arctic, eagles in the North (American and Fish in the Ocean depths. They allow Everest and breast milk to Rural Ghana. A 2022 study of rainwater around the world found that the levels of the best known two PFAs were only high enough to jeopardize the health of people and ecosystems everywhere. Less than a century after these chemicals entered the world, nowhere is it not pristine.

This article has been adapted from the next book by Mariah Blake, They poisoned the world: life and death in the time of chemicals forever.