Newark Star-Ledger, Alex Lane
Published March 7, 2004
Dennis Paustenbach has rarely met a toxin he didn't like.
The 50-year-old toxicologist, principal of the California firm ChemRisk, once soaked in a Jacuzzi laced with chromium to try to prove it did not seep into the skin.
His résumé runs 92 pages, boasting such clients as ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemical and some 60 other corporate giants. He has worked on infamous environmental hot spots from Times Beach, Mo., to Love Canal, N.Y., studying dioxins, benzene, PCBs, MTBE, asbestos and many other toxins. Almost without exception, both his admirers and critics said, he has asserted these contaminants are not as dangerous as regulators believed. "He's a respected guy, but he sees things from industry's perspective," said Ed Calabrese, a University of Massachusetts toxicologist friendly to Paustenbach.
Others were less charitable.
At the mention of Paustenbach's name, David Michaels, an environmental research professor at George Washington University who served as former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy, said: "Ah, Dr. Evil." "These guys have the same relationship to science as Arthur Andersen does to accounting," Michaels said, comparing Paustenbach and his colleagues to the disgraced accounting firm.
Paustenbach resigned last year from an expert chromium panel in California amid criticism that he had hidden his industry connections. The panel had relied on a study that bore the name of a respected Chinese scientist - though Pacific Gas & Electric, a chromium polluter, had paid Paustenbach to revise the study.
But Paustenbach has other prospects. He is editor in chief of a publication called the Journal of Children's Health. The Bush administration appointed him to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention committee that assesses the health effects of environmental chemicals.
As to whether he has a pro-industry bias, Paustenbach said: "I happen to think, if there is bias in the world, and I guess there is, it goes both ways. The agencies say they're protecting the public health and indeed they are. But they also need to make things exciting and look productive, otherwise they're not going to receive the funding they want to receive."
