Interview with CHE Partner, Terrence (Terry) J. Collins, PhD

Thomas Lord Professor of Chemistry and Director, Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University

Steve Heilig: What first brought you into the environmental health movement?  

As an undergraduate at the University of Auckland in New Zealand in the early 1970s, I learned that benzene was especially toxic. One undergraduate summer, I worked for a refrigerator manufacturer. I found the entire production process fascinating and got to know fellow workers in many areas of the plant. One day at lunch, I learned that some workers were experiencing habitual headaches and nosebleeds. They worked in a part of the factory where the exterior of the inner metal refrigerator lining was dipped in hot tar to seal it. Some of the tar would inevitably splash on the white enamel interior and they had to clean it off with a solvent-soaked rag giving a heavy hydrocarbon smell to their part of the factory.

I wondered if benzene was involved because the symptoms were familiar from my reading about acute benzene exposure. I called the manufacturer and learned that the solvent was about 5% aromatics, mostly benzene, toluene, and xylenes.

The next day I calculated the volume of the huge room where the tarring was carried out, determined the average daily solvent use, estimated the benzene concentration in the air, and realized that the workers were being exposed to totally unacceptable benzene concentrations. I took my analysis to the company’s chief chemist who told me not to worry—they would very soon shift to an emulsified cleaning agent. I remember being disappointed by his unflattering characterization of the workers.  
  
Nine months later I returned to check as I felt a responsibility to the workers. Nothing had changed.  I approached an official of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry for advice and was told that little could be done. I collected all the information on benzene toxicity I could find and took the pile of papers back to the chief chemist –– I still remember his astonished look when I gave him the papers and urged him to act. I was frustrated that I could do so little when the case seemed clear that people were being senselessly harmed.
   
As a graduate student at Auckland, I attended a debate between a young environmentalist and the mid-1970s medical and health establishment. Three babies had been born in a small New Zealand town around the same time with severe spina bifida. The environmentalist was attributing the birth defects to aerial topdressing of nearby farms with dioxin-contaminated 2,4,5-T in the early part of their gestations. The environmentalist, in animated style, explained why he believed the herbicide was responsible. A medical professor, in calm and deliberate style, explained how it was all just a terrible stroke of misfortune for which no convincing evidence could mark the 2,4,5-T as the culprit.
   
I have followed the dioxin issue in New Zealand ever since. Time has only added depth to my initial conviction that the environmentalist was correct, even if scientific evidence was never sought for the unfortunate babies. Historically, New Zealand’s handling of its extensive dioxin problems has not distinguished its health department, although things seem to be improving.
   
I went on with my goal of becoming an academic chemist. Understanding how to avoid toxicity and ecotoxicity in the design of chemical products and processes has evolved into an underlying passion.

 
What is the primary goal/mission of your organization/project?

I direct the Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, a research, education and development center in which we are endeavoring to build a holistic approach to advancing sustainability science.
 

What have been the most significant obstacles and successes you have encountered and achieved in this work to date?

On the success side, we have developed TAML activators, which are small, highly effective mimics of peroxidase enzymes (nature’s huge catalysts for activating hydrogen peroxide). They represent a clean platform technology for the large historically dirty field of oxidation chemistry. For example, TAML activator technologies decompose a wide range of pollutants easily in water and are highly effective at killing spores, the most difficult of microbes to kill. Carnegie Mellon University now has over 100 TAML patents with more in the pipeline and several licenses. A TAML company is being launched. For me, TAML activators represent a scientific dream come true.
   
Paul Anastas, the father of green chemistry, formulated the widely accepted definition of the field as “the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.” A considerable obstacle to building the field is that green chemists need a sound understanding of what substances are hazardous and why as a basis for design. Yet historically, chemists have not been educated in toxicity and ecotoxcity, my benzene story notwithstanding. So the first generation of green chemists must embrace the task of converting tox/ecotox knowledge to useful design understanding for green chemistry (Collins, Green Chemistry, 2003, G51-G52).  

This is challenging territory in both its intellectual and political dimensions. It requires, for example, that one be prepared to stare into the deep dark pools of knowledge of the impairment of living things by anthropogenic chemicals and then to honestly talk about this unnerving understanding inside the chemistry community in ways that are optimistically directed toward achieving positive change.
 

What is the number one change you would like to see for the future of environmental health?

In my lifetime, I would like to see green chemistry lead to new products and processes that at least begin to eradicate the scourge of anthropogenic endocrine disruptors on living things.
 
 
What or who continues to inspire you in your work?

I am privileged to know many great people who have dedicated their lives to advancing human health and the environment and who are also searching in their own unique ways for pathways to a sustainable high technology civilization. Their creativity and tenacity is the indomitable force that will bring a good future to humanity.
 
 
Do you have any comments/suggestions regarding CHE itself?

With its growing stellar community and body of activities and resources, CHE has become a luminous symbol of hope in the firmament of inspiration lighting the pathway toward sustainability. 

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Posted: 12 June 2006