Arlene Blum

Transcription

[MUSIC] ALAN EUSTACE: So hello everyone, I'm Alan Eustace, and I have the great pleasure of introducing Arlene Blum, who will talk about her new book "Breaking Trail." You know, it's a big pleasure for me. I was telling her the highest peak I've ever climbed is 14,500 feet or something like that, but I read her book very early on, and it was very inspirational on Annapurna, and I like several things about it. Later, I found out that Annapurna is the hardest and most difficult of all the 8,000 meter peaks, but the other thing was inspirational was the fact that it was an all women's expedition. And I felt like it really showed both the planning ability, the creative genius, the athletic ability, the sense of adventure that I thought was kind of-- there weren't married many role models in mountaineering for women, so I was really, really happy to see it. And also, I thought the book gave a prospective. Women writing books, I think, bring a different passion. It's less conquering, and it's more communing with nature in ways that I think are really good, and it showed both the tragedy and the triumph that's involved in mountaineering. Later, when we talked earlier, I found out that she obviously likes challenges that are practically impossible, because she also spends time, as you'll hear today, working on legislation to protect people from the environment, and you'll hear a lot about that today. And I think I her definition was, in many ways it's even more challenging, because it's a fight against the chemical industry, and billions of dollars, and trying to find ways to actually protect people, costs them less money, and make them more safe overall. So with that, I'd like to introduce Arlene. Thank you very much for coming. Oh, let me say one other thing on this book. I looked on Amazon. This book has 41 reviews. Of those 41 reviews, 37 are five stars, the maximum, and three are four stars. It is probably the highest rated book I have ever seen, and the reviews are amazing. And I already bought mine, I just want to let you know. This is the first author that I've ever paid money for their book, so I want you to know that. ARLENE BLUM: And if you ever need a job as my marketing manager. And actually, the mountain that he talked about, even though it's 14,000 feet, North Palisade is one of the more challenging and beautiful mountains I've ever climbed, so being 14,000 feet can still be quite an accomplishment, so I recommend North Palisade right, good mountain. So as we said today, I'm going to talk about mountains and molecules, and you might end up-- we'll see at the end. How many people here came to learn about mountains? How many came to learn about molecules? Oh, OK, a lot of molecules people here, that's good. So my career of both mountains and molecules began in my freshman chemistry lab at Reed College, and this is in the '60s. My professor was a 23 year old woman with a PhD In chemistry from MIT, and you can imagine that was pretty unusual in the '60s. She thought chemistry was the coolest subject on the planet, and there were four girls in my freshman chemistry class, and we all got PhD's in chemistry, which says something about the importance of role models. My lab partner was a very handsome young man from Portland, Oregon, and we studied chemistry till late one starry night, and he said, do you want to climb Mount Hood. Well, I was from Chicago. I'd never done anything physical in my life, had been raised by an overprotective family where I wasn't even allowed to ride horses, but he was very handsome, so I said sure. And so we drove up to Timberline Lodge, he put a big pack on my back, and we started up, and I started gasping. He said he didn't think I was going to make it out of the parking lot, because I was gasping so loudly, but he was very handsome, so I persevered. And when the sun rose, I was in the most beautiful place I had ever been, high above the clouds, and I fell in love with him, and with mountain climbing, and with chemistry, and kept doing mountain climbing and chemistry until I was a grad student at UC Berkeley. And I just passed my qualifying exams, and wanted to go on an adventure, and one of my lab partners said, there's an expedition to Denali and I'm going to go. Do you want to go? And I said, great, when I pass my qualifying exams I'll go to Denali. And I wrote for the information and it said women can go on a Denali trip at a reduced price, as far as base camp, to help with the cooking. So I called the guy who is leading the trip and I said, I want to go to Deanli, but I want to climb it. And he said, women aren't physically strong enough or emotionally stable enough to climb mountains like Denali. And I said, I was climbing with my friends from Reed in Peru, and we climbed higher than Denali in the Andes. And he said, were you the only woman. And I said, yeah. And he said, did you really do your share of the leading. And I said, no, I probably didn't, but I thought I participated. And he said, you are probably just carried up the mountain. So I realized as long as I climbed with all guys, and in those days most of the climbers were guys, people, and maybe even me, would question had I done my share. So I thought, I wonder if we can organize an all women's team to Deanli, and that was a very revolutionary idea back in 1970. So we organized the Denali Damsels, and here we are on the mountain. And nowadays, people carry their loads on the low slopes on sleds where they pull them, but we hadn't thought of that back then, and to climb Denali you need about 200 pounds of food and gear, 30 days of food. And so the reason people thought women couldn't do it is because they thought women couldn't carry-- you saw that big pack we're carrying-- but we could, and we headed up the mountain. It was a beautiful place. We got up to our high camp. I was the deputy leader. I'd organize the trip. I was 25 at the time, but the leader was a 50 year old woman who was one of Alaska's leading climbers. But most of the peaks in Alaska aren't very high, and it turned out she had an altitude problem, so she was really strong up to about 14,000 feet, but she didn't do very well above 14, and Denali is 20,000. So we're at the high camp here at 17,000 feet. It's summit morning, she has a headache, she hadn't actually been carrying her load. She'd been feeling really badly, and I said, Grace, maybe you shouldn't try for the summit when you have a migraine and you feel terrible. But she was really determined, and so we headed up. She was going slowly, but it was a gorgeous day. We reached the summit-- she's the person slumped down to the right of the flag. She wasn't eating, drinking. We weren't so happy. We were very happy, because we hadn't even know if women could climb Denali. Every step of the way it was like, can we actually do this, and we did it. We were on the top, but we saw thick clouds coming. We heard a big Arctic storm was forecast, and she was really ill, and so we sort of supported her down a little way below the summit, she collapsed unconscious. And I was now the expedition leader at age 25, with six people, an Arctic storm coming in, and a unconscious person near the summit of Denali. So we put her in a sleeping bag with a pack frame as a structure. We wrapped a climbing rope around. We kind of made a stretcher, and we hauled and lowered her down the mountain. And I think you can see the place where the summit is, the place where grace collapsed, and then we hauled and lowered her down that slope to where it says bivvy site. I can't quite see in the back. And then another woman and I stayed up with her on the bivvy site watching the clouds massing, this big storm coming in. It was getting dark, and I'll always remember that moment, thinking if the storm comes, what do we do. Do we stay here? Do we leave her? It was a horrible moment, and then fortunately she got a little bit better, and we were able to get her down the mountain before the storm really hit, and we're down now at 14,000 feet. You can see the amount of snow on our snow shoes, and we were going out every three hours to shovel the snow off the tent, but I was a different person. That happening gave me so much more self esteem. If you read "Breaking Trail" you'll see I had a really tough childhood where I was always said pretty negative messages, and really never felt very good about myself, and I do remember a long time ago though, sitting in that tent thinking, I'm not such a bad person. I got Grace down alive. We climbed Denali. I'm actually OK. And it really gave me a lot of confidence to have had such a challenge, and to be able to have gotten her down the mountain. So by the time we flew out, I felt like I'd gone from being a 25 year old girl from Chicago who climbed some mountains, to a woman who could lead expeditions, and dream up impossible things. So my next big adventure happened when I was back at grad school, hard at work not writing my thesis. Has anybody engaged in such an activity? So I went to the movies, North Side Theater if any of you know it, Berkeley, and "The Endless Summer" was playing. It was the Beach Boys going around the world with big surf boards looking for the perfect wave, and I watched them and I thought, when I got my PhD I want to go around the world and find the perfect mountain. So I told my adviser, who thought this would not be good for my career as a chemist, and I said, don't worry. I was studying a molecule called Transfer RNA. I said, I'll make a flag that says tRNA, and I'll fly it on all the summits. I'll think about my research. So we planed to climb in Europe for a summer, in Africa. By going up and down across the equator, we could have five climbing seasons in 15 months, so it was Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, back to being a chemist for the rest of my life, one adventure. So I'll go quickly. We missed Europe, because my thesis was late, but we started in Ethiopia where we climbed, in the background, the highest peak Ras Dashen, which is 15,000 feet. And then we went to these mountains, the Rwenzori. Would you believe you're looking at Uganda and the Congo? They're on the equator on the Congo-Uganda border, and they're the source of the Nile. Ptolemy said a long time ago, the Nile came from snowy mountains on the equator. And the weather is so bad there that nobody hardly knew they existed, and we actually climbed about all the peaks in the Rwenzori. Here I am on the summit at 17,000 feet on the equator, and you see my flag says tRNA. I was thinking about my research. This is Mount Kenya, which is about a five eight rock climb, about 18,000 feet. Kilimanjaro-- I have now a unique slide that I've only shown a few audiences, but I actually a couple months ago gave the big lecture for the American Alpine Club dinner in New York, and at the lecture was a guy I had met on Kilimanjaro that I hadn't seen since Kilimanjaro. This was 1972, and at that time we said no money. We were poor students doing this on no money, carrying our own packs up Kilimanjaro. He was part of a guided party, and the day we climbed Kilimanjaro it was snowing, and the guided parties went to the crater rim and turned back, but we didn't have a guide so we walked around the crater rim to the real summit. Anybody climbed Kilimanjaro here? Yeah, so right there's a couple miles, I think, you walk up high where you hit the crater to the high point. But anyway, when we were going by, I don't know how this happened, but I said something like, I think I'm going to sun bathe in my bikini on this summit. And he said, I'll give you $10 for a picture. Well that was a lot of money for us in those days, so I hadn't seen this guy since 1972, but there he was at the Alpine Club dinner, and I was able to squirrel through all my slides quickly and add my summit picture from Kilimanjaro. It was fast. It was cold. It was a very fast picture. So he gave me the $10. It's not it's worth as much as it was 1972. So we carried on to Mount Damavand, which is the highest peak in Iran, and then we went to Kashmir, so we were so lucky. We went to all these places you can't go to now, and we joined up with the local Kashmiri Mountaineering and Hiking Club, who knew about all these mountains that they'd tried to climb but never could, because they didn't have the techniques and the gear. And mostly the idea of getting up at 3:00 in the morning when the-- they would get up at 8:00 and make chapatis, and not get up the mountain. And we would get up at 3:00 and cook over our little primus, and be up at the summit when the sun rose. Anyway, so they told us about all these mountains that had never been climbed, and then we climbed them all. So here I was at age 26 doing first ascents in the Himalayas. It was a long way from Chicago, and I wasn't that good a technical climber, but I was really determined. So when there was really deep snow and everybody said, the snow is too deep, let's just not bother, I would sort of break trail through the deep snow to the face of the ice cliff where the guys who were the good ice climbers would take over. So my specialty was indeed breaking trail, plodding through snow, and as you'll hear, doing science policy is just like breaking trail. Does anyone do anything in your work where you feel like you're plodding through deep snow? These were some peaks in Kashmir we did not climb that were really hard, but we were so lucky to be at all these places that we were practically the first Westerners. Then we went to Afghanistan and did an expedition, and again, I felt so privileged to have this wonderful time in Afghanistan at a very happy time for that country. There was a king, it was modernizing, and in fact, after September 11, I showed this slide show about Afghanistan, which led to founding the Society for Preservation of Afghan Archaeology. From having climbed there, have been involved with things around Afghanistan. So here I am at 20,000 feet in Afghanistan, thinking about my tRNA research, right. But this was a very memorable day. At this point it was 1973. All the world's highest mountains of 8,000 meters or higher had been climbed by men, but no woman had ever climbed to 8,000 meters, and we were climbing a mountain that was 7,500, and there was a Polish expedition there. We're heading up to the summit, and we met coming down Wanda Rutkiewicz, who went on to become the world's leading moment mountaineer. She was the first woman to climb K2, the third woman to climb Everest. But meanwhile, we were on Noshaq and she had just come down from climbing, it's like 24, five, 7,500 meters, and I was heading up, and she gave me a big hug, and said, we will climb Annapurna together, all women. And so that moment in Afghanistan was where the idea came to climb Annapurna. Meanwhile, I did lots of other expeditions, I got my PhD, I post doc'ed at Stanford in bio-chem, and alternated climbing expeditions, research. I was studying intermediate in protein folding, and I went on an expedition in India that changed my life. And it was an easy mountain called Trisul, but it was, again, high, over 7,000 meters. It had been climbed back in 1890, very easy, and on it was Bruce Carson, who was at that time America's leading young rock climber. He had pioneered climbing the hardest faces in Yosemite without pitons. People used to drive pitons into the rock, now Bruce pioneered putting chalk stones in that don't scar the rock, and he had led people like Yvon Chouinard and Royal Robbins, if you know those names, up the first grade sixes ever done in the valley without pitons. And so we were on this easy mountain. I'm a slow walker. He was ahead with some of his friends. I got to the summit and his friend said, we think Bruce is lost. I don't think I have a pointer. I don't have a pointer do i? We're going to imagine. So you see those footprints on the left? Do you know what a cornice is? A cornice is where the wind blows, like you have a rocky place, and the wind blows, so you can have snow over air. It's like a big wave of snow, and so Bruce got to the top with his friends. He was very careful climber, always roped, but he unroped. He thought that point that you see there was a higher summit, and where his footprints are on the left, he went out on the point, but he was on a cornice and fell to his death. And you can see, this is from the other side, that big cornice on the top, and we had no idea that there was a-- India was very secretive in those days about maps. We had no real map. We didn't know there was a face, and so Bruce was 23 having done all this, and fell to his death. And I was really depressed, and I came back to Stanford, and I didn't really want to study protein folding. I wanted to do something for the world, for the environment, because Bruce had been an early environmentalists, like he did the first big cleanups in Yosemite Valley, getting rid of all the trash. He was very much, and so a guy who had been on my PhD orals committee called Bruce Ames-- anybody here ever heard of Bruce Ames? If you're in biology, but he had something called the Ames test, where you could take a chemical, put it on a bacterial plate, if it changed the bacteria it was likely to cause cancer. It was a cancer screening tool that was kind of revolutionary, and so I went to see him and I said, I don't want to do protein folding anymore. It's not important. It turns out protein folding is really important, how proteins fold, for lots of things. But I want to do something environmental, and he said, you know, I'm kind of worry about this flame retardant in kid's pajamas. It looks like it's a carcinogen to me, and it's actually 10% of the weight of all the kid's pajamas in the country, and I think it gets inside the kids. Do want to study that? He said it's so practical, even the undergraduates won't-- you know scientists like to do theoretical things, nothing too practical. He said, nobody will look at it. Would you look at it? I was sufficiently depressed. I said sure. So I found a child who-- and the chemical is called brominated tris. All the pajamas pretty much kids in America were wearing were 10%. I found a mom who'd bought her children's pajamas in England, so they'd never worn the tris pajamas. So we put a child in the tris pajamas, collected their urine. The next morning there were tris breakdown products in the child's urine, which meant the tris was going from the pajamas into the child. And then we ran a screen to see if it was a mutagen, did it change DNA, and it was one of the strongest mutagens we'd ever seen. And I thought, oh my goodness, we have to write a paper. We have to alert the parents of America. This is a disaster. And then I got invited to this mountain. Do you know what mountain this is? Anybody know? Big mountain. Everest, Mount Everest, and at that point, Everest had been climbed once by Americans. 1963, and this is the 50th anniversary of the first American ascent of Everest. And if anyone's interested, I'm on the honorary committee for the 50th anniversary party, which is in Richmond, California in the end of February. If anybody wants to go, see me afterwards. I'll give you an invitation. So there's a 50th anniversary party for Everest. So Everest was climbed by Americans in '63. This was '76, the bicentennial year, and no American woman had ever eve tried Everest, and so I had this terrible choice. Did I write the paper about the cancer causing pajamas, or did I climb Mount Everest. So how many of you would climb Mount Everest? How many of you would write the paper about the cancer causing pajamas? So I did both. So here is our team, and we climbed in beautiful places like the Khumbu Icefall, rigged ladders, but every night I would get to camp and I would write more of my paper. And here we are in the great Khum, and when I reached my high point, now my flag says the mutants. That petri dish has no tris, the one with only two colonies, and you can't see blowing in the wind the one with lots of tris where there are lots of mutations. But I'd finished my paper. I sent it by mail runner back to Berkeley, and we did reach the summit of Everest on October 15, 1976 for the bicentennial, and then the next January our paper was published in "Science." And I always include the title of this paper in my talks, because it really says what our Institute is now doing. So the subtitle, which I can't read back there, "The main flame retardant in children's pajamas is a mutagen and should not be used." For those of you read scientific papers, is that an unusual title? What do all scientific papers recommend as the next steps at the end? More research, and that's pretty much all they recommend, and we went, oh my god, every kid in the country is wearing toxic pajamas, and so we really recommended that. We did media, and three months after the paper came out, tris was banned from kid's pajamas. So some of you might have been those kids. It was only used for a couple years, '74 and '75, or maybe those were your parents who didn't wear the tris pajamas for that long. And it made me realize that it's really important for scientists to, at some point, go from saying more research is needed, to taking a stand and saying there is a problem here, and something needs to be done about it, and so we now have the Green Science Policy Institute. Our mission is to bring the best science to change policy in the public interest. So brominated tris was banned, and when something is banned, industry likes to keep things as similar as possible. So what do you think the replacement for brominated tris was? Chlorinated tris, and so we ran mutagenicity tests. It also changed DNA. It was also banned from kid's pajamas, but chlorinated tris turns out to be the number one chemical in furniture, and other baby products today. So anyone here have a couch from Ikea? What year did you buy it? AUDIENCE: Just this year. ARLENE BLUM: Oh, this year. Well, it's maybe not too bad. What about yours? AUDIENCE: Who knows. ARLENE BLUM: OK, so if you bought your couch between 2005 and 2011, it contains chlorinated tris, all the Ikea couches, and pretty much all the couches. But basically anyone in California who has a couch has tris or a related chemical in it, so it was banned from baby pajamas, but not from furniture. But we didn't know that back then. We though, yay, we've solved the problem. And I thought, it's time to give women a chance to climb an 8,000 meter peak. I'd met Wanda in Afghanistan. She said, let's climb Annapurna. It seemed like a good mountain. It was the first 8,000 meter peak ever climbed. On my way back from Everest I got a permit for it. We put together a team who ranged in age from 20 to 50. Actually, there is Dan. Irene is not here, is she? Dan's wife Irene was the first woman to climb Annapurna. Sorry if I'm embarrassing you, Dan. Anyway, so there's Irene and the rest of our team. Thank you for coming again. I'm sure Dan has seen-- the later part's different, you'll see. So we're all still friends. We have reunions. We had to raise $80,000 to fund our expedition, and We raised it selling these t-shirts, and if anyone wants it, you just Google Annapurna t-shirts, and you can get them from our website. So I'll quickly go through-- see how we're doing on time-- some of the beautiful pictures on Annapurna. It was one of the most gorgeous places I've ever been, but one of the most dangerous. We didn't know it then, but Annapurna has the highest fatality rate of any of the 8,000 meter peaks. It's really high precipitation, so there are these huge avalanches, really amazing steep slopes. It's considered the most difficult and the most dangerous of the 8,000 meter peaks. Not the best choice, but we persevered, broke trail, and reached the summit. There's Irene in the center, and two Sherpa teammates. Two of the women on our team, two Sherpas reached the summit. We unfurled a Nepali flag, American flag, women's place is on top flag, all held together by a save the whales pin. Headed down there was a second summit attempt, and the two women on that fell to their deaths, so climbing mountains like this can be very, very dangerous. So after Annapurna-- there's Irene in front of Annapurna-- I wanted to do an expedition to a safe, quote, "easier" mountain, and we did a hard first ascent in India with an Indian American women's team. We're congratulated by Indira Gandhi. I said I'd always dreamed of walking the whole length of the Himalayan Mountain range. It's a thing, once you get a dream or a vision in your mind, you kind of have to make it happen. So I thought, walk across the Himalayas, but the borders were closed to Westerners, but Mrs. Gandhi said she thought she could help, and we got permission, and we started in Bhutan and walked all the way across Bhutan, India, Nepal. I turn out to not have a very good sense of direction, but Hugh Swift, who I was walking with, had just finished writing a guidebook, so he knew how to find the way, and I was pretty good at the politics. And so we crossed 19,000 foot passes, and drop down, down, down terraced valleys. Everywhere we came it seemed like a very auspicious day. This was the annual archery festival in Bhutan. Most places, almost the whole time we were in places, there had never been a Westerner before, so we were greeted like visitors from the gods by the local people. The one day we were in [INAUDIBLE], the Dalai Lama was there giving a talk in English. Yeah, it was like auspicious day all the way. Every day was an auspicious day. We entered Nepal on the Day of the Dog when dogs were given little marigold wreaths, and little tikas and special treats. We funded out trip by having trekking groups that met us, and brought us supplies, and walked with us for a few days. And I still lead treks, one or two a year, and indeed we have sign up sheets. This is a cue to pass out sign up sheets. If anybody wants to be on our mailing list, we'll pass out sign up sheets, and basically you'll hear for me if we have trips. I think I'm doing a trip-- now there's a scientific meeting in Switzerland, so then I'm going to do a trip from Charmonix to near the Matterhorn, along the Haute Route in August. So I do one or two trips a year. We're really lucky last year. We did a great trek in Burma right when it opened, so starting from this-- and then you actually get to hear a lot about flame retardants if you sign the list, so if you don't want to hear about flame retardants, write adventures only. So we send out flame retardant messages once a month, and adventure messages about four times a year. So we took pictures of the beautiful women who lived in the Himalayas as we walked across, who did a lot of work. And namaste, the greeting, I respect the spirit in you. From that trip, I came back and wanted to share all these auspicious days in the Himalayas with my friends back in Berkeley. We started to Berkeley Himalayan Fair. Has anybody here been to the Himalayan Fair? Sorry, I can't read the dates. I'll turn around. Yeah, so next May 18th and 19th, if you want to come to Berkeley Live Oak Park, we'll have a big Himalayan party, food, dancing, and all the Himalayan people from the West coast come. It's a great match-making thing. Nepali people in different cities, they all come and they meet their husbands and wives and things at the Himalayan Fair. And I have the best booth since I founded it. Come say hi. I'm under the big tree right across from the stage. Everyone's invited to hang out at my booth. So my most recent adventures were with my daughter Annalise, and I rightfully figured she might not like walking, so when she was a baby, her dad and I decided we'd have a last big adventure, and we carried her across the Alps from Yugoslavia to France in her cute, Gor-Tex baby suit. Anyway, and then here's Annalist on her gap year teaching English in Guatemala. Annalise, she's an environmental engineer. She doesn't like hiking and camping. She complains bitterly about sleeping on the ground, but she's an environmental engineer who studies water and sanitation in developing countries, so I'm proud of her. She cares about the world. And meanwhile, I wrote two books. "Annapurna," which took about a year to write. Anybody here read "Annapurna?" Some of you. A few people, yeah. And then after that I thought, well I'll spend another year and write a book about how I came to Annapurna, and wrote "Breaking Trail," which tells a lot of stories, and it ended right before my daughter started college. It took me 20 years to write "Breaking Trail"-- not an easy book-- about my childhood, and it was a tough book. But I wrote it, and then I actually hadn't done science for 26 years. I'd been a mom. I'd done leadership training here in Silicon Valley, and I thought, I want to go back to science, but I really don't know anything. And that was six years ago, and this six years have been the biggest adventure of my life, much harder than climbing Annapurna, and way more important. And the problem-- before I do that, maybe just ask. How many people here think if a product is in your shampoo or your toothpaste, someone's making sure it's safe for your health? OK, and how many people think there can be cancer-causing, harmful chemicals in an everyday product, and the EPA knows about it and are powerless to do anything? And unfortunately, the second is true, and the reason is we only have one law-- so in America, foods, drugs, and pesticides are regulated. All other chemicals are regulated by something called the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, and when that passed, it wasn't a very good law, and it has no authority. So asbestos, which kills thousands of people every year, the EPA tried and tried and cannot regulate. So chemicals can be really harmful, the EPA can know, and they can be in your toothpaste. And indeed, if anyone uses Colgate Total. Anybody use Colgate Total toothpaste here? My daughter did. It has triclosan in it, which is a potentially harmful chemical. It's banned at Kaiser. There are really only a handful of these real horror stories, and we can learn these horror stories and protect ourselves, so don't get too depressed. There really aren't tens of thousands of evil chemicals out there. There's a small number, and we can say what they are, and we can be healthier. But the EPA has no authority basically to regulate. When they passed the Toxic Substances Control Act, all the chemicals then were grandfathered as being OK, and with new chemicals they have no authority to require information, so there's no information on most of the new chemicals. So the thing that I have been working on, and I've come to realize-- maybe you've heard that I work on flame retardants-- but I've come to realize the problem really isn't flame retardants. And flame retardants are chemicals that are used at really high levels, like 5% of the foam in your couch is a flame retardant. But the problem is flammability standards, and back in the '70s, several flammability standards were passed where no on really thought about do they provide a fire safety benefit, and is there a harm from the chemicals that are used to meet them. And the chemicals are very profitable. The companies that make them do a lot of lobbying to make new laws that require more of the use of their chemicals. And this is a very major health problem, but a solvable health problem, and we're going to talk about in the '70s, there was a furniture flammability standard passed called Technical Bulletin 117. There was a code for foam plastic insulations in buildings passed with something called the Steiner Tunnel Test, and their flammability standards for electronics, and we're going to say the most about Technical Bulletin 117. If you go home and look at your couch, they're all going to have a sign saying it meets TB117. That means the foam inside won't burn for 12 seconds with a small flame, but the reality is if you drop a candle on your couch, the fabric burns first. You have a large flame, the foam burns, and there's really not much benefit. The chemical used to protect all the furniture uses a flame retardant until it was banned globally in 2005. In that picture of chemicals, the top one is PCBs, which are carcinogens and harmful. The center one is that flame retardant, and then the bottom ones are dioxins and furans, which are really harmful, so it's a chemical that's halfway in structure between a PCB and a dioxin. When I asked a chemist what do you think about students at Berkeley being exposed to this chemical? He said, only in a fume hood with full protective gear. But that's what's in your furniture if you have furniture from before 2005. So why is this important? We're exposed to these flame retardants in our homes, in our office place, in cars, and they're slowly making their way into the food chain. Right now, about 90% of the exposure is in our homes. If you look at levels in dust, on the left you have outside the US very low levels, other states in the middle. California has the highest levels, because we, uniquely, have a furniture flammability standard. No other state has a standard. Sadly enough, toddlers have three times the level in their bodies compared to adults, because they get their mothers level through the placenta. The chemicals are lipophilic, fat loving, so they go into breast milk, and then toddlers crawl in the dust and put their hands in their mouths. So a woman who has a higher level of this flame retardant-- this is the one that was banned, but is in older furniture-- it takes longer for her to get pregnant, and then there are a number of neurological impairments. And these are actually epidemiology studies in people. There's maybe 20 or 30 studies showing harm in people, and then this is the number of studies in animals. This is well studied. There's an industry of scientists around the world studying these flame retardants, but yet this information never reaches decision makers. So there's this many peer reviewed papers, and if you go to a typical hearing in Sacramento, you will hear from the chemical industry there is no valid science showing any harm for many flame retardant. So this is a huge disconnect that we're trying to bridge and can bridge, bringing good science to decision makers. So to give you an example of what happens, remember back with the children's sleepwear, we had brominated tris, it got banned. We got chlorinated tris, it got banned. In our furniture, we had [? penta ?], it got banned. Then we got chlorinated tris, and it is on the way out. Chlorinated tris been listed as cancer causing, and we stopped making it in the US. Most of the furniture from 2005 till now has chlorinated tris, and the replacement is something called Firemaster. The manufacturers will not give out samples to study, but colleagues of mine got one sample, and it looks like it causes obesity and anxiety, so it's an obesogen, so this is the newest flame retardant. So I got my dust tested. I had some of the highest levels in the world, very high levels of this toxic flame retardant, 97 parts per million in my dust. So I got rid of my couch. That's my couch going into the dumpster, and then three years later my level was down to three parts per million. So getting rid of toxic furniture works, but where does the couch go. Into a landfill where it can leech out into wildlife, and all these top of the food chain carnivores have high levels. So is there a fire safety benefit, and the answer is not much. If you compare the blue, the furniture without flame retardants, to the red, with, you can see there's a few seconds delay in ignition, three seconds longer, but twice as much smoke, five times as much carbon monoxide, and 80 times as much soot. So that means you delay your fire three seconds, but you get lots more of the smoke and toxic gases. Let's just skip to the next one. So what about legislation? we have tried in California for six years. There's been four bills to change our furniture standard to have increased fire safety without toxic chemicals. Doesn't that's sound like a good idea? Who do you think might not like that idea? Right, this is part of a $6 million campaign from Citizens for Fire Safety, and who are they. Albemarle, Chemtura, Israel Chemicals Limited, the manufacturers of the chemicals, and why do they spend $6 million, because the chemicals are so profitable. I don't think they do press releases like this anymore now that I've put them on my slides, but I found in chemical and engineering news Albemarle proudly announcing a 377% increase in their profits from their sale of brominated flame retardants. And then Chemtura announcing they're raising their prices 25%, in part to pay for global advocacy. 25%, that's pretty good. So these three companies have a global monopoly. They can charge anything they want, and people have to get their products to abide with laws, so then they have huge money to make laws, which used to pass. But if someone happens to bring a little bit of good science into decision making they don't pass, and that's what we've been doing, and we've had some recent help. The Chicago Tribune, if anybody wants to know all the dirt, this is one of about 20 front page stories in the Chicago Tribune. And again, I can't quite remember it, but the subtitle, "A deceptive campaign by industry brought toxic flame retardants into our homes and our bodies, and the chemicals don't even work as promised." And this is a total front page, four more pages, issue after issue of the Tribune exposing the duplicity of this industry, and that's been a huge help to our science to inform policy, which led to, after six years of failed legislation, last May the governor directed the state agencies to change our flammability standard to increase or maintain fire safety without toxic flame retardants. And that process is moving forward. It's a yearlong process. February 1st there'll be a public comment period. If any of you signed my mailing list-- has it made it all the way around? Anyway, if anyone hasn't gotten the mailing list, if you raise your hand it might come your way. If you sign it, you will get a chance to comment in the public comment period that you might like a couch without flame retardants. And if the process moves, and it's moving well, the foam industry, everybody's in favor of the change except the three chemical companies. So by next June you should all be able to buy safer furniture without flame retardants thanks to the governor. This is a paper where we looked at what was in 100 baby products, and 80% of them had toxic flame retardants at levels up to-- there was a changing pad that was 12% tris by weight. And it was funny when we submit the paper, it was first turned down for not being novel enough, and then it was the top paper of the year in this journal, had the most readers. Right, anybody with a child read the paper. And indeed, based on that, three baby products have been exempt from requiring the flame retardants, and when the standard passes all the rest will be, so the chemicals will not be in our furniture or our baby products. Just to say something about building insulation, all these plastic foam insulations that make buildings energy efficient are treated with some of the worst flame retardants. There have only been 21 chemicals globally banned, which include several flame retardants, and the HBCD, which is a-- polystyrene is going to be the 22nd globally banned chemical. This is a form of tris that's used in blow in and spray insulation. But again, you don't really need it. The insulation materials are behind fire block wall, so before you hit the insulation you have to burn through the wall, and then at that point the insulation doesn't make much of a difference. So we wrote a paper, "Flame retardants in building installation: a case for reevaluating building codes," which is free online until January 26th if you want to copy. We got them to make it free for two months. But based on this paper there's a code change proposal for the 2015 residential code, that plastic foam insulations behind fire block walls or below grade will not be required to have flame retardants. Oh yeah, and this was supported-- these are the proponents, which is the US Green Building Council, the Cancer Firefighters Organization. You can see these are all the sponsoring organizations who are sponsoring the code change, so we have a lot of great organizations. And Nancy Skinner, our local assembly woman, to my great surprise on Monday released AB127 to change California law so that we are not required in our codes to have flame retardants in building insulation, so this is great news, and her staffers that they plagiarized from our paper for their whole legislation. So this is a case directly, you write a good scientific paper, it can be used for legislation. And to have green buildings, having good water and all that is important, but if you're going to have flame retardants in the insulation it's never going to be totally green. So I'm going to put in a word for our newest thing I'm planning, is the Blue Mountain Toxics Reduction Retreat. We'd like to get leaders in government industry, business, nonprofits all together to talk about the big picture. What are the biggest toxic threats that we can solve, because I think there are a handful of things like flame retardants, stain repellents, triclosan in toothpaste, that are known to be harmful, but things we just don't need. So it's not how do we replace it, it's like let's just not use it, and so I'm hoping someone from Google might attend our retreat. So when I spoke here last year, [INAUDIBLE] said make a slide on how Google can help solve the flame retardant problem, and so these are some suggestions. Support California code changes and legislation for fire safety without toxicity, and so we have the governor's initiative, which the chemical industry maybe $100 million to spend to try to defeat it, so we're all waiting to see what they're going to do. I've heard that people are getting phone calls sort of saying, do you know the governor is going to get rid of this good standard that saves lives. Are we going to go back to the bad old days where we all burn. So if you get any of those phone calls, take notes, let us know, but support the governor Nancy Skinner's legislation. Specify no flame retardants if you can in purchasing. There are products that use flame retardants where it's not required. Hopefully you don't use flame retardants in Google products if you can. We don't have much time, but there are a couple minutes. Are there other things? OK, I'm almost done, and let's come back to what other things Google might be able to do. So if you want more information, you already got a chance to sign our list, or leave a card at the basket outside. If you want to know more about us, Google green science policy, and there's lots and lots of information about how to have less flame retardants, safer and healthier products, and I am optimistic. I think the toxic chemical problem is solvable. We can reduce toxics and have a healthier world, and it's just like mountain climbing. You just have to put one step ahead of the other, and we can reach the summit of a world with less toxics. Thank you. Do you have a question? AUDIENCE: Hi, I was wondering if you can talk about how you went about organizing the expeditions, at the same time having, I assume, a lot of work to do at school and everything to follow up on that. As well as, how did you go about writing the paper without having all the materials and everything there. How did all of that work out about being at Everest? ARLENE BLUM: By multitasking big time. I am a hard worker, and it was hard. In graduate school I probably slowed my progress a bit, because I get pretty focused on these different climbing expeditions. But it's a good question. Somehow when you're young you have a lot of energy, and I think on Everest it was pretty much written. I was in the editing. I had the figures an the data. I just had to do a bit more and do some editing, so I didn't really write it from scratch. AUDIENCE: But in terms of planning the expeditions, was it just you didn't sleep, and you just did the planning, and then going to school in the day time, or were there some days that you would just plan the expedition, not care about school, and then go back. How did you juggle that? ARLENE BLUM: The whole time I was in grad school, I would climb a lot, every weekend, so I think it really cut into my climbing when I was planning an expedition. I probably did less climbing, but I kept doing my school work, kind of. AUDIENCE: So when you had the slide up about the TSCA Act, one of the bullet point said that there's 20,000 chemicals roughly, and 85% we have no health data about. But you also said that of all these chemical, there's really only a few that are really bad. ARLENE BLUM: Really bad and at high levels in our homes. A lot of them are industrial chemicals. They're used in processes. We have a lot of chemicals in our home, but flame retardants are 5% of the weight of the foam, maybe even 10%, so you have pounds of flame retardants in your home. AUDIENCE: I guess my question is, we don't even have data about 85% of that chemical inventory, so how do we know that there's not a lot more chemical stock out there and in our products that does provide, or put us close to harm? ARLENE BLUM: One of the interesting things that we're talking about now is looking at classes of chemicals, so similar chemicals have similar properties so you can sort of generalize, so the class I work on, organohalogens where you have carbon bonded to bromine, chlorine, and fluorine are super persistent, and they stay around a really long time. So anything that stays around a really long time and is at high levels in your home is going to be a big problem. So if you're a chemist, you can kind of look at a chemical-- not always-- but you can kind of guess. And there's a lot of-- certain metals are problems. We sort of know what the things are in our homes that are the biggest problems. There could be others, but I'm saying is that there are these obvious-- like your red list. There's kind of low hanging fruit, toxic things that you know are bad, and in many cases you don't need them, so why don't we just get rid of the really bad things we don't need. Flame retardants, because there's an industry, they're profitable. Most of them, the reason we're using them is because they're profitable, but I think that that can be solved. AUDIENCE: I have a tiny question. I think I saw one of these notices on a backpacking tent. Are they also treated with flame retardants? ARLENE BLUM: They are, unfortunately. And again, that might be a time you might want flame retardants, and there are ones that are safer, and there are ones that are less safe, and it's a problem that because the EPA can't regulate. One of the projects we haven't done is to just give the outdoor industry a list of what they really harmful flame retardants are, and maybe they could move from the harmful ones to the less harmful ones. And maybe they're already doing that, I haven't looked into it, but lots of industries are trying to move from more harmful to less harmful flame retardants and other chemicals. And I'm sure at Google when you're doing your products, you're trying to move-- there's something called the green screen, where you can compare chemicals. So for backpacking tents you might want flame retardants, maybe your stove's going to explode, but you want to try to have the safest possible flame retardants, or use materials that are inherently fire resistant. So there are lots of ways you can solve the flammability problem without putting lots of toxic chemicals into things. AUDIENCE: In terms of affecting policy decisions, what's the step between publishing the paper and actually talking to the people that are making the decisions? ARLENE BLUM: That's a great question, because in this field of flame retardants, I go to meetings with hundreds of scientists who do paper after paper about the harm and how their accumulating in everything in the environment, and I'm like, write a "Scientific American" article, do something. And they're like, well it's on our website, or they can read it in the journals. But scientists have to realize people aren't going to read it in the journals, and they're not going to go to your website, and scientists have to take the trouble to put their science in a form that's accessible. I've been working with epidemiologists who do studies showing harm in humans, which is big news, and if they can effectively tell the press, at least people can find out. So I think not all scientists, but a small number of scientist, if they could make that part of their mission, and that's what we're trying to do. There are some scientists who care about this, and we're helping do some communications courses, facilitating scientist talking to decision makers, because scientists have a lot of credibility. In other words, in addition to writing the peer reviewed paper, write the white paper, write the public article. And the problem is, at least academic scientists are not rewarded for this. It's almost looked down on. But what I think, in the old days in academia it was considered bad form to make money, and bad from to do policy. Nowadays, making money is great, and I think we have to make it so the doing policy is great too, that there's a reward system for taking your science and using it in the public interest. Because scientists are paid by the public, and I think they have a responsibility to take their information and bring it to the decision makers, and it is a huge vacuum, and very effective when people do. So, other questions. Yes. AUDIENCE: As a former grad student, how were you able to fund your expeditions? ARLENE BLUM: We funded our Annapurna expedition selling those t-shirts, the woman's place is on top Annapurna. The title got a lot of attention, and when we walked across the Himalayas, we funded it by having people come trekking with us and supporting it. So I think nowadays people get sponsorships from companies a lot, like the North Face and stuff have sponsored athletes, and in those days we really didn't, so we kind of, as I said, sold t-shirts or treks. We had support treks. It was not easy. Before Annapurna, I thought that the mountain of t-shirts-- the t-shirt business, remember we sold 80,000 t-shirts, the business was in my house, and I thought that was even harder than climbing the mountain, but I was wrong. The mountain was harder. AUDIENCE: About a month ago, I read a few places, including your newsletter, about brominated vegetable oil showing up in Gatorade and a few other sodas, and I was wondering what should we be avoiding, and also what's being done since then to try and get those removed? ARLENE BLUM: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. That is one of the dumbest ideas around. Back in the '70s, Europe and Japan all banned brominated-- we're like the Wild West in terms of regulation of chemicals, sadly enough. Anyway, so brominated vegetable oils are used-- but it's very specific-- in certain orange sodas, like orange Fanta, Mountain Dew, certain kinds of Gatorade. Just look on the label. It'll say brominated vegetable oils, and they are metabolized, stored in our fat, and I actually was like a referee for a paper from Germany on how bad they are, calculating that if a kid lived on orange Fanta they'd get a pretty high dose, and we can't seem to regulate it. We do not have a will to regulate chemicals, and it's really sad, because prevention is the old thing, but prevention is so much cheaper. There's a limited number of really bad chemicals in our homes that end up in our bodies, and they are causing a lot of our cancer, infertility, neurological problems, and I feel like we know what they are, and they could be regulated. And I think that's an example of a thing that we don't need. It makes it look like the orange Fanta has fruit floating in it. It's kind of a density thing they put in brominated vegetable oils. So I actually sent out a press release about that about a year ago, and it got some media attention, but it's nobody's business to regulate it, I guess. So you read my newsletter, but I think if people knew that, orange Fanta would find something. In Germany, they have orange Fanta without brominated vegetable oil, so that's the kind of perfect example of something that if we have information we can solve, and where scientists can share that information. I have to say, I reviewed the paper, gave it high scores, and it was not published because it was not novel enough, so how science measures things is not-- the people measuring it aren't measuring it in terms of public health. The analytic techniques probably weren't novel enough, so somehow there's got to be some points in paper review and in funding for things that impact public health, and I'm afraid there isn't yet. I guess last question. AUDIENCE: I was wondering, is there an easy, cheap tool that anybody can put-- I understand for different class of chemicals it's a different things-- but that anybody can put some kind of a chemical, or the dust in their homes, and easily measure levels of certain toxins? ARLENE BLUM: That would be great. Maybe someone could develop that. But when we did our studies of-- we just did a study of what's in America's couches-- we were using GC Mass Spec, which is very expensive and difficult. No, there aren't, and people want to know what's in their couch, and I say, if you live in California, you don't need to bother measuring it. But it's expensive, so there's no easy way, and the other part is we don't really have labeling. There's no requirement, and that's a very simple thing, and I don't know if you guys know that Google has made a huge contribution to transparency in what's in buildings, so the US Green Building Council has had a big effort just to say what's in a building. Shouldn't we know, and the American Chemical Council completely squashed it in an ugly way, and Google gave $3 million to the US Green Building Council to increase transparency. Am I saying that right? OK, and I guess some of the people in this room-- Thank you-- were, in part, responsible for this, so you guys are really contributing, and it's really important. When someone builds a building to be able to know what's in it, and say-- and I think the example I always give is, one of the most persistent chemicals around are stain repellents, like they put on carpets. And I always think, if you say to a mom, so you can have a stain repellent carpet, but when your baby crawls on it, chemicals are going to go into their body that they're going to be there for the rest of their life, and they're harmful, or you can not have such a good stain repellent. What would a mom pick, but we're not given that information, so transparency information, those are things we really, really should demand. And maybe they're things Google can help with. You're so into free information, so maybe that's the connection of why you gave $3 million. Really great, I hadn't thought about that before, but I think with information-- that's really smooth-- information, we can all be healthier. So anyway, the world thanks you for that $3 million, the USGBC. Well I think we're out of time, but does anyone else have any ideas of how Google can help? That was my question in my slide, just since you're all here with information. Well send me an email if you have one, [email protected], and I hope some of you will be on our list, and come to the Himalayan fair, come on a trek, or write in the comment period that you want furniture without flame retardants. So thank you.