The EPA lab in Duluth is one of many targets of the Trump and Musk budget-cutting juggernaut. Most people living in Duluth today don’t remember a time when the lab did not exist, and many don’t have much of an idea of what the lab does. But anyone who lived here in the early 1970s remembers the trauma of being told their water contained “asbestos-like particles” that might cause cancer.
The particles were discovered and studied by chemists at the lab, which had been built on the east end of Duluth, just across the road from Lake Superior, in 1967. Ironically, the lab’s location was chosen for its access to one of the cleanest freshwater sources in the world, and now a potentially dangerous pollutant was showing up in Duluth’s water supply.
Those asbestos-like particles became a key part of a precedent-setting legal case that established the principle that the government could close a business if it was egregiously endangering the environment. The scientific results and the legal decision led to protection measures that continue to make Duluth’s Lake Superior drinking water safe and clean.
According to current news reports the Trump administration plans to eliminate the EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), which includes the Great Lakes Toxicology and Ecology Division laboratory, one of 11 labs around the country and the only one devoted to freshwater research. The administration expects 50-75 percent of R&D positions will be eliminated. Some employees have reportedly been told to download and save personnel files, writing samples and anything else they might want from their work computers.
The news has prompted anxiety among current workers and action among former workers, along with national political leaders. In an opinion piece published in the Duluth News Tribune, former lab director Carl Richards pointed out that the work at the lab produced “research that didn’t just sit on shelves but actively shaped a healthier environment.”
Sixty U.S. House Democrats signed a letter to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin warning the action would “decimate the scientific backbone of EPA which provides independent, objective, and unparallelled research that informs Agency assessments and decision-making.”
A little history
Those asbestos-like particles dominated the life work of one lab chemist, Phil Cook. He devoted years to trying to determine if they were toxic, and if so, how dangerous they were. Cook invented new methods of isolating and counting the microscopic fragments, and created faster ways of testing such materials. He supervised animal studies that showed some of the particles were splitting in the lungs of test animals, thereby increasing the dose. He tested more than 200 models, and finally concluded that the standard approach, on which exposure standards were based, likely excluded the vast majority of disease-causing fragments in a given air sample.
It was not the first or last time lab workers advanced scientific knowledge for the benefit of nature and people.
In the early years, researchers concentrated on identifying what we needed to learn about the natural world and how to learn it. They developed research protocols and test methods; they discovered which aquatic animals provided the best testing subjects and how to include real-world environments in research. They developed methods to understand how chemicals affect water organisms and pioneered the now widely used mass balance approach to measuring pollution.
In the 1980s, Gary Glass and his team tested lakes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan to study how various characteristics such as pH, conductivity, transparency, and water color affected their reaction to acidic rain and mercury deposition. Acid rain research included an experiment in which researchers divided a Wisconsin lake and treated one part with acid to compare various parameters with the non-acidified part. Scientists investigated productivity, nutrient cycling, hydrology, and benthic communities in the acidified lake and the control.
These studies helped predict how acid rain would affect various types of ecosystems. Acid rain is widely regarded as an environmental protection success story after Congress passed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Glass and colleagues also pinpointed sources of mercury contamination; today, the power sector and most other industries have dramatically reduced their mercury air releases.
Some lab researchers described the effects of agricultural chemicals’ impacts on lakes and rivers in the Midwestern corn belt. Others studied the concentration of the contaminants dieldrin and PCBs in Green Bay, and—in the 1990s—the impacts of introduced species such as zebra mussels and ruffe.
They came up with ways to predict the toxicity of mixtures of persistent organic chemicals, which can be quite different from the manufactured products themselves. They figured out how to assess the ecological risk of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. They studied the chronic effects of dioxin on fish, which opened the door to understanding other chemicals with a similar mode of action. And they developed bioaccumulation models for organic chemicals in Great Lakes food webs.
Frank Whiteman was a research biologist at the lab from 1995 to 2019. He jokingly describes early work as the “kill ‘em and count ‘em approach.” They used fathead minnows and certain other water creatures, much as other investigators use white rats. In acute toxicity tests, a given number were placed in tanks and treated with chemicals for four days. The survivors were counted, and the data were used to set permit levels for industry. This research was widely accepted by others in the field, and twenty-five years later, the national water permitting system continues to rely on that research.
In the mid-1990s, this “rather crude way of getting a database together,” as Whiteman describes it, was superseded by computer modeling, and again the Duluth lab was in the forefront. Duluth researchers developed tools and models that can be used to mine existing data in predicting toxic effects on organisms. Colleague Gary Ankley is a world-recognized expert on endocrine disruption. Whiteman says Congress was highly motivated to fund that kind of research after intersex bass were discovered in the Potomac River near Washington, D.C.
All this research is used by state agencies and businesses to set limits and design projects to avoid environmental damage.
Carl Richards directed the lab from 2005 to 2015. He was excited to come to Duluth because the work combined basic and applied research. “These internationally known toxicologists were doing work that EPA’s other programs were begging for,” he says. “That encouraged high-level, productive scientists to come and stay for a long time.”
The Duluth lab led the field in developing statistical and testing protocols to determine the health of large aquatic systems, Richards says. “Using the older ways would take several busloads of scientists,” he says. “Working with researchers from other states and agencies, from Canada and other countries, we developed more sophisticated ways of describing the health of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River system, and other large aquatic systems.” Then the lab focused on developing ways to restore ecosystems and value that restoration. “What does it buy you to restore an ecosystem,” Richards asks rhetorically. “Aquatic life, habitat, even the dollar value. These scientists wanted good answers.”
In fact, lab researchers and their work played a key role in the years-long clean-up of the St. Louis River estuary. To address the legacy of decades of pollution, they collaborated with state and other federal agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, both of which are facing federal funding cuts themselves.
In mid-April, the Trump administration cancelled the first meeting since last year of the Board of Scientific Counselors, or BOSC, an independent federal advisory committee established in 1996 to provide guidance on “all aspects” of the ORD’s research programs. No reason was given for the cancellation; no information was provided about possible rescheduling.
Carl Richards is retired now, but he’s watching the results of federal cutbacks. “The new leadership of EPA clearly has a different vision for how the agency should function, and I have great concern about what’s going on now,” he says.
