The Accidental Discovery That Gave Us ‘Forever Chemicals’ | A Pregnancy Play Inspired By Mushroom Research

The host of the “Hazard NJ” podcast talks about the origins of PFAS “forever chemicals” and their impact on New Jersey residents. Plus, playwrights and scientists teamed up to create plays based on scientific research. One of them explores pregnancy through fungal computing.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O O dot com. That's O D O O dot com. WNYC is supported by Bear. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 0:45Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  You've heard about PFAS chemicals, the so-called forever chemicals. But just how did they come to be, well, everywhere?

• 1:11Speaker 03

  We're finding PFAS in every blood sample in every blood bank. In fact, you have to go back to the Korean War to find blood that didn't have it.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  It's Tuesday, December 17th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Sci-Fry producer Charles Burquist. A bit later this episode, we'll hear about connections between computers, pregnancy, and mushrooms. But first, a dive into the history of PFAS chemicals in New Jersey. It all starts with Teflon, the stuff on the original non-stick pan. Here's Sci-Fry's Kathleen Davis.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  And now it's time to check in on the state of science.

• 1:50Speaker 05

  This is KER. For WWNO. St. Louis Public Radio. Iowa Public Radio.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. We've talked a lot on this program about the problem of PFAS chemicals, the so-called forever chemicals that are just about in everything in our environment. And we often say something like used in nonstick coatings, flame retardants, and stain repellents. But all that traces its history back to the accidental invention of one substance, Teflon. Joining me now is Jordan Gosparay, creator and host of the Hazard NJ Podcast. The new season looks at the history of PFAS and their role in New Jersey. Jordan, welcome back to Science Friday.

• 2:35Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me, Kathleen. I appreciate it.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  So remind us again of what PFAS chemicals actually are.

• 2:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it's interesting that you say PFAS because I usually pronounce it PFAS. But then when I was recording episode one, I said PFAS. So I've had to keep it that way throughout the entire season. They're a class of thousands of chemicals. So it's not just one, two, three, four, five. There are thousands. And the big kicker about these chemicals, though, is that they, the ones that we at least know about and the ones that we have researched and that we've studied have been linked to numerous health risks. Again, PFAS, there's thousands of these chemicals. It's not just one.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  So this traces back to Teflon, which was not an intentional invention. Tell me about that.

• 3:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think this story was the most fascinating to me because I saw this season as the beginning of PFAS and the end, hopefully, of PFAS in New Jersey. It started in New Jersey. And our last episode really gets into what's being done to get rid of PFAS once and for all in New Jersey. And so I actually had no idea that Teflon was discovered in New Jersey until working on this project. 1938, you know, setting the stage here that, you know, in a lab in deep South Jersey. It was Roy Plunkett. He was 27. He was a, you know, pretty low-income kid, grew up in Ohio, and he started working for DuPont. It was a really good-paying job, moved to South Jersey.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  And what he was supposed to be doing at the time of this accidental discovery of Teflon was trying to figure out a DuPont version of Freon. So it was him and his assistant, Jack Rebick. So they're trying to work on finding a DuPont version of Freon, and they're experimenting with this new gas, and they think, you know, maybe we'll figure something out here, things aren't going according to plan. And then, one day, they open up this canister, and they discover this white powder. And that was the beginning of Teflon. They started testing this powder, and they realized that it wouldn't break down. Didn't, well, you know, it didn't break down when it was exposed to heat, electricity, most solvents.

• 4:44Speaker 06

  And yeah, that would turn out to be PTFE, which DuPont later dubbed Teflon.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Okay, so let's hear this clip from Roy Plunkett.

• 4:52Speaker 05

  I'm proud of my part in this development. I'm proud of the company with whom I worked. I'm proud of what has happened, and most of all, I'm proud of all the benefit to mankind from this original invention. The discovery of PTFE has been variously described as an example of serendipity, a lucky accident, a flash of genius. Perhaps all three were involved.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  So, it turns out, though, that this didn't really catch on at first in the industry, until the Manhattan Project, is that right?

• 5:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's right. So, the interesting thing about this was, DuPont is also connected to nylon. So, you know, nylon, we most often think of it as a nylon hosiery, so your pantyhose made out of nylon. And this was, you know, right around the kickoff of World War II, when nylon was invented. And that, unlike PFOS, was a very purposeful discovery. They were looking for stronger fibers. And so, they were all concerned about that. And, you know, then comes World War II, and you have this general, General Groves, he was the director of the Manhattan Project, and he had heard through Grapevine about Teflon and how great this this new chemical was. And like I had mentioned before,

• 6:09Speaker 06

  how, you know, it's really difficult to break down. And so General Groves goes to DuPont and says, you're going to have to ramp up development. And pretty much from what I've read in a nice way of threatening DuPont, saying, if you're not going to ramp up development, the military is going to take this chemical away from you. So DuPont said, okay, great. Well, we'll be able to supply you with enough of this product for all the things that you're doing, the secret things you're doing with the Manhattan Project.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  Wow. Okay, so after the war, this material found its way into consumer products. And I think the one that most people are going to be familiar with is the Teflon pan, right?

• 6:50Speaker 06

  Yes. So DuPont released the first Teflon coated pots and pans in 1960. They released it at Macy's in New York City, and they were correct. They kept thinking this was going to be a hit. Sure enough, it was a hit. And I found the price of the that original Teflon pan that you were wanting to buy at Macy's in 1960. And it was $6.94, in case anybody was curious about that.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  That's fascinating. Okay, so let's fast forward a little bit. It turns out that related materials weren't just useful in your frying pan. They found other uses, right? Like in firefighting foam?

• 7:26Speaker 06

  They did. Yeah. So, you know, that first PFOS chemical for Teflon was really resistant to heat and was really hard to break down. And also with the Manhattan Project and the already the US military getting interested in this and using it. We talked about a little bit, the forestall disaster. It was a big fire on a Navy ship. And this really hit the US Navy very hard. And they kept thinking like, what could actually have been done to have prevented this disaster? And that's what was really leading people into the research of, we need a better firefighting foam. And the PFOS chemicals fit the bill. That was one product. But I mean, PFOS has become so highly ubiquitous that, I mean, even today, when I put on my

• 8:09Speaker 06

  waterproof jacket to go outside, I was thinking, There's probably PFOS in that. My mom, when I was a kid, I remember Scotchgarding my shoes, spraying that stuff in the house in front of me. Scotchgard has PFOS in it. They're in all sorts of everyday products, like they're in fast food wrappers, they're in face masks, they're in toilet paper. It's everywhere.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  So, I mean, with things like firefighting foam where you are spraying them everywhere, and you know, when you're washing your Teflon pans, I mean, is that stuff just all getting into the environment?

• 8:39Speaker 06

  It is. And I think one of the interesting things about this is that, you know, even thinking about, well, I have these products already, like a Teflon pan, I don't want to use them anymore. I'm gonna throw them in the trash and I'm gonna buy pans that don't have any PFOS or products that don't have any PFOS in it, because I did my research. Okay, you're throwing it in the trash. Where do those products end up in the trash? They're gonna go to a landfill. They can't be recycled. And in that landfill, PFOS will leach out of those products and be able to then go into drinking water systems, go into rivers and aquifers that supply our drinking water. And you have what some of the scientists I've spoke with call this PFOS cycle, which is terrifying.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Jordan, I have done that exact thing with my nonstick pan that I got a little too scared of.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Okay, so you have it in the water and in all these products. Is it in us?

• 9:33Speaker 06

  It is in nearly all of us. And I say nearly all of us instead of completely all of us, because I imagine that most of us have not had our blood tested for PFOS. I remember one scientist saying too, and this really terrified me, is that PFOS has been found in polar bears. It's everywhere. You can't escape it.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  And we have a clip here from Graham Peaslee, who's professor emeritus at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Gee, we're finding PFOS in every blood sample in every blood bank. In fact, you have to go back to the Korean War to find blood that didn't have it. There's no blood left in North America that doesn't have PFOS in it, from cord blood to adult blood, anywhere.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  So I mean, you looked specifically at the town of Paulsboro, where researchers from Rutgers have been studying blood samples from residents. What have these researchers found?

• 10:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the tests that we were following or the study that we were following recently wrapped up, and so the results of that test have not been released yet. But they were trying to sample as many people as possible in Paulsboro that had lived in the town during a very specific period of time that the researchers knew the drinking water was contaminated with PFOS. So like I said, those studies have not been released yet. But the whole purpose of the study, too, is to try to see, is there a link between PFOS and different health conditions? So whenever that research does come out, I'd be, I'm very curious to see what they find. They picked Paulsboro, too, because they had already kind of assumed

• 11:05Speaker 06

  that people there were going to have high levels of PFOS in their blood. And they had done a previous study, something similar on a smaller scale in 2017, that had shown some of the residents had extremely high levels of PFOS in their blood. So but right, but right now, yeah, that the study has not, has not officially concluded. Rutgers was part of a whole CDC effort. Paulsboro was part of this whole CDC effort. There were other towns across the nation that were doing something similar. So it'd be interesting, yeah, when that the results come out, what it, what it's going to say.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  So we'll wait to see the result of that blood study from Rutgers. But I mean, this is such an overwhelming issue, it feels like. Is there any hope or signs of progress towards cleaning up this problem?

• 11:49Speaker 06

  One hopeful thing is that earlier this year, for the first time ever, the EPA announced a new drinking water standards for five PFOS chemicals in drinking water, which was huge. What I've been told, because there is some hesitation, the fear that some of these things might be rolled back and it might be left up to the states to, to figure out the PFOS contamination sort of on their own. Hopefully, they won't be rolled back. New Jersey was sort of at the forefront in 2018 of setting their own standards. And that, you know, I don't think it would be a bad idea if other states also decided to, to set their own standards and follow suit, especially more stringent standards. I don't want to get doom and gloomy, but I think the EPA announcing that.

• 12:34Speaker 06

  Those drinking water standards for the five chemicals is a good step in the right direction. But it looks like it's going to be chemical by chemical. So again, PFOS, there's thousands of PFOS chemicals and the EPA is only regulating now five. Hopefully, maybe we might follow suit like in Europe where they're considering drinking water standards for the entire PFOS family and other like families of chemicals instead of doing it chemical by chemical.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Jordan Gosparay, creator and host of the Hazard NJ podcast. Thanks so much for being with us today.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  After the break, how mushroom science connects to computers, pregnancy and the theater. Stay with us.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  I'm Kevin Roos. And I'm Casey Newton. And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your

• 13:28Speaker 04

  life, and all of our futures. Twice a week, we'll be exploring the biggest moves in tech and give you unmatched access to the real titans of industry. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  People are finding all sorts of uses for mushrooms these days. And for the rest of the hour, we're going to focus on two of them. How scientists are using them in robots and how playwrights are using them in theater. A few weeks ago, Sci-Fry producer and host of our podcast Universe of Art, Dee Peterschmidt, checked out the Science in Theater Festival in Brooklyn, New York. It's put on by a company called Transform a Theater, who staged science-inspired plays. And one of those playwrights was inspired by mushroom research that seems stranger than fiction. Here's Dee.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  When director and playwright Hannah Sims was commissioned to write a play for the Science in Theater Festival earlier this year, she didn't have to look too far for inspiration.

• 14:32Speaker 06

  Well, I had just had a baby.

• 14:36Speaker 07

  And that was the most profoundly science fiction experience of my life. And pregnancy was my experience of having this really intimate connection with a being growing inside my body, so closer than I've ever been to anyone, but we had no form of communication beyond this sort of woo woo cellular feeling about our connection. Hannah was directed to a growing field of research called unconventional computing, where scientists are trying to figure out how to connect various parts of nature, like mushrooms, to computers. Mushrooms have these root-like threads called mycelium, which turns out generate electrical signals. It's a small amount, but it's enough to send through wires to control a basic computer interface.

• 15:21Speaker 07

  Different species of mycelium produce different types of electrical signals, depending on what they're exposed to, like a chemical or light. But some scientists suggest that this signaling could be a form of communication for these fungi, and maybe even a sign of consciousness. Hannah's play, Fruiting Body, takes those ideas a few steps forward. One of the sort of foundational concepts of my piece is that the character creates a fetal monitor that runs on mycelium. That character, Yara, who studies fungal computing, is in the final months of her pregnancy and creates a mushroom-powered fetal heart monitor almost as a side project. But then, with some artistic license from Hannah, she discovers she can talk with the mycelium powering the heart monitor, who has a different kind of connection with her unborn child than she does.

• 16:05Speaker 07

  And both their worlds open up in surprising and complicated ways. Endogeny, the name of the mycelium colony, is played by a human actor. Here's a snippet from the play between Yara and Endogeny, played by Chloe Mutabe and Eureka Nikano Grimes. Endogeny speaks first.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  You want me to learn me your yes/no language? Yeah, but code is not a language. Like, no one is born speaking it. Not your machines? Machines, they're built to speak it. Hmm, built and born are different. Yeah, humans build things with our hands and born things, birth people from our abdomens. Um, can I, can I show you?

• 16:44Speaker 07

  Yara puts Endogeny's hand on her belly.

• 16:46Speaker 04

  And there, there's a new one. Ah, yes. A part of you that will reach farther out? A foraging front? Yeah, kind of, exactly, actually.

• 16:59Speaker 06

  I guess it makes sense you know about that. Do you feel the-

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Sondik pulses? Yes!

• 17:04Speaker 06

  His heartbeat. We gotta go to the lab tomorrow.

• 17:06Speaker 07

  A fetal heart monitor powered by mycelium that can talk to you and sense your unborn child? That's not something you can pick up at CVS yet.

• 17:14Speaker 06

  It's not a thing you would do, but I needed it.

• 17:18Speaker 07

  But this idea of translating mycelium's electrical signals to a device or a machine, it's catching on with other scientists like Anand Mishra. He's a research associate at Cornell University in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and he specializes in what's called soft robotics. He's made robots that grow like plants, robots that have skin, and even robots that sweat to cool themselves down.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  If you wanted to imagine what the future robotics should look like, you need to have some integration of biology.

• 17:46Speaker 07

  And earlier this year, Anand published research about a new kind of robot he helped make, and it's entirely powered by mycelium. One of them looks like a starfish with five robotic legs. A petri dish filled with king oyster mycelium sits on top, connected to the robot by wires.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  We grew mycelium in a petri dish. We put a electrodes on that and we designed a new kind of real-time control system, which is like reading the mycelium signal in real time and then sending it to a robot.

• 18:14Speaker 07

  Mycelium produced these rhythmic electrical spikes that sent through electrodes to a control interface, which interprets those spikes and sends signals to the pneumatic motors and the legs of the robot, which kind of scrunches them up and then releases them. And that scoots the robot across a flat surface. King oyster mycelium are also sensitive to ultraviolet light, and when the team flashed that light onto the mycelium petri dish, it changed the gait of the robot.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Imagine like hidden signal has now a mechanical visualization. So I feel like that's why it's so exciting to use this living system as a living material and develop such a system that can do more job.

• 18:49Speaker 07

  Because mycelium acts as a natural sensor, researchers are thinking that they could use fungal robots to monitor the health of ecosystems like soil health or air quality. And since fungi are a renewable and biodegradable resource, it offers a more sustainable way to build and power robots.

• 19:05Speaker 06

  I think one of the other reasons that fungi have really captured consciousness right now is that they are so adaptable and can grow in the harshest of conditions. And considering what we have been doing to our planet, that's something that humans are really interested in is how do we adapt? How do we continue to thrive in harsh environments? So I think what Ananda is talking about is really exciting from that perspective.

• 19:34Speaker 07

  Mycelium are also known for their ability to form complex networks underground that transport nutrients and send signals to nearby plant life, which was a pretty irresistible concept for Hannah.

• 19:44Speaker 06

  I think that's why I was so drawn to it. Fungi as a metaphor for connection in a time that feels so disconnected. And fungi as a metaphor for listening. I think a lot of people right now go around knee jerk reacting to things and as a result, dehumanizing and murdering each other. As we go around doing that, fungi seem like a really appealing symbol of what real connection and real synthesis could look like.

• 20:20Speaker 07

  If you're in the New York area and want to catch more science inspired plays like this in the future, check out Transforma Theater, who put on the Science and Theater Festival. I'm Dee Peterschmidt.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  That's it for today. Next time, you've probably heard that you should move around more during the day and sit at a desk for less time. But just how much sitting is too much? We'll find out. Lots of folks helped make the show happen this week, including

• 20:45Speaker 04

  Emma Gomez. Annie Nero.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  George Harper. Melissa Mears. And many more. I'm Sci-Fr producer Charles Burquist. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you soon.