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CHE Partner Dr. Theo Colborn
Mapping Critical Windows of Development

When CHE Partner Dr. Theo Colborn, President of The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX), first went to Washington, DC, she started collecting citations relating to the health impacts of low-dose chemical exposures during prenatal development – a time when humans are particularly vulnerable.

Over the years, she amassed thousands of citations.

“It bothered me,” Dr. Colborn recalled in a recent phone interview. “There is so much information out there about [the health effects of] chemicals that should have been regulated years ago. I kept thinking, ‘There's got to be a way to squeeze all this data into a computer and turn it into a simple picture.’”

Colborn's first inspiration for the Critical Windows of Development tool came from a paper by Dr. Susan Porterfield published in Environmental Health Perspectives. "She showed a very elegant and simple picture of how the human brain and thyroid system develop together. You didn't have to be a scientist to understand it."

In 2001, Dr. Kembra Howdeshell spent a year's internship with Dr. Colborn in Washington, DC while working on her PhD. She wrote a paper, later published in Environmental Health Perspectives, in which she embellished on how the human brain develops and created a complementary picture of how the mouse brain develops. It was those two seminal papers that led to the Critical Windows of Development tool.

The logistics of organizing the mountain of references Dr. Colborn had amassed over the years were daunting, to say the least. At the beginning, the TEDX team had no funding dedicated to the project, so it was mostly a nights-and-weekends endeavor. It was far from certain whether they would be able to pull it off.

To guide their efforts, they posted a huge piece of butcher paper on a long wall in TEDX’s Paonia, CO office to serve as a crude mock-up of the tool they hoped to create.
“It began to get very sloppy and change color as it aged,” Dr. Colborm remembered. “At one point I said, ‘We're never taking that down.’ That thing on the wall kept us going.”

Then, in 2007, Dr. Carol Kwiatkowski (now the Executive Director of TEDX) came to work for Dr. Colborn. As Dr. Colborn recalled, “Carol walked into the office, took one look at the wall, and said, ‘I think I can do it.’”

***

With Dr. Kwiatkowski’s computer know-how and support from the Winslow Foundation and the New York Community Trust, Dr. Colborn and TEDX created an interactive web-based tool called “Critical Windows of Development”. Critical Windows of Development uses a visual format backed by a massive Excel database to give users a Google Maps sort of view of chemical exposure and prenatal development: you can look at the big picture and also zoom in to the level of individual data points.

Adding the data for a single chemical takes one person two months of meticulous full-time work. So, for the public debut of Critical Windows of Development on Feb 10, 2009, three chemicals were selected – bisphenol-A, dioxin, and phthalates – along with a cutoff dose for each one. (They wanted the tool to focus on the effects of low-dose exposures.)

They cut off bisphenol-A at 1 part per million, dioxin at five parts per billion, and phthalates at two parts per million. Over fifty prominent scientists reviewed the tool before its release. The team will continue to add new studies about the three chemicals as they are published, and hopes to add several more chemicals in the coming year.

“Hopefully,” Dr. Colborn said, “this is a very simple picture of thousands of points of technical concern that point out the need for entirely new legislation about public health and how chemicals are determined to be safe.” 

She feels a great sense of urgency about her work, pointing to evidence of widespread harm to human health from chemical contamination, like the California study showing what she described as “frightening” increases in autism frequency. The time for “Band-Aid legislation”, she said, is long past. “How many studies do we have to do?”

Fortunately, she sees brighter days ahead.

“The public is coming around. The press is coming around. We have the opportunity now, especially with President Obama in the White House, to go back and use good, conflict-of-interest-free science to make legislative, regulatory, and research decisions."

By Shelby Gonzalez, CHE Administrative Coordinator