by Dan Fagin
Finally, in early December, Sam Reich awoke to the magnitude of what was happening on the rear two acres of his property. He got into an argument with Fernicola about the dumping, which by now was generating a powerful odor. A few minutes later, summoned by Reich, the town police showed up and arrested Fernicola, charging him with dumping without a permit and violating zoning laws. Union Carbide officials, also summoned by Reich, paid their first visit to the farm on December 15. The following day, the company finally barred Fernicola from taking any more of its drums.
The question now was, what to do about the toxic waste? More than five thousand drums were strewn across the back of the old farm, and Fernicola was in no position to remove them. When Reich called the newly created state Department of Environmental Protection to ask for help, he was told that the state had no jurisdiction on private land and that his lawyers would have to take it up with Fernicola and Union Carbide. For their part, town officials were in no rush to see exactly what kind of a mess they had on their hands; they waited until the end of the following month—January 1972—to send a team over to Reich Farm for a detailed look. When the officials finally arrived, they found a foul-smelling, snow-covered wasteland, with thousands of drums lying in open, muddy trenches near some abandoned trucks. Jack Farrell, the town’s code enforcement officer, said in a legal filing that his clothes stank for days after his brief inspection and that his rubber galoshes disintegrated after he walked in the muck. The inspectors found drums marked with labels like “Polymer Solution,” “Toluene,” and “Styrene” as well as large-print warnings stating the contents were flammable and explosive. Many carried this label: “Caution: Leaking Package Must Be Removed to a Safe Place. Do Not Drop. Chemical Waste.”
Don Bennett, the newspaper reporter, remembers getting a call from Jack Farrell, who said, “You’re not going to believe what I found on this old chicken farm.” Bennett hustled over and was shocked by the scene. “The drums were just all over the place, everywhere you looked,” he recalled. Farrell and the other town health officials knew so little about toxic waste that the only way they could think of to assess the hazard was to haul four of the Union Carbide drums to the town landfill and attempt an extremely primitive form of chemical analysis—using live ammunition. Under Farrell’s direction, a town police officer named Michael Carlino pulled an army rifle from the trunk of his Ford Thunderbird and took aim at the drums, which were set up on an earthen berm one hundred yards away. After emptying two clips from his M-14, Carlino finally scored a direct hit. Bennett, who witnessed the spectacle, said that Farrell turned to him and said, “Well, I guess the stuff can’t be that bad. It didn’t explode.”
While Carlino was target shooting at the landfill, Nick Fernicola was busy haggling with the town and with Union Carbide over what to do with the drums he had dumped at the farm. The company at first claimed that it bore no responsibility for removing them, citing Fernicola’s promise a year earlier to assume all liability for disposal. Fernicola, for his part, was engaged in some fancy footwork, telling the town and Union Carbide that he was deep into final negotiations for yet another dumpsite, this one in Berkeley Township, on the appropriately named Double Trouble Road. By February, however, Fernicola’s shenanigans were public knowledge in Toms River. The local papers were carrying stories about the illegal dump at the back of a Pleasant Plains egg farm. Meanwhile, Fernicola’s “negotiations” with Berkeley were going nowhere. The Reichs had filed a lawsuit against Union Carbide and Fernicola and so had the town, which argued that the site was a public nuisance and a health threat. The state Department of Environmental Protection was preparing to bring charges, too.
It was obvious that Fernicola and Union Carbide were out of options and ready to cut deals. They found willing partners in government officials who were just as eager to close out an embarrassing incident in which they appeared to be either negligent or corrupt, or both. Union Carbide switched tactics and agreed to take back the drums, pay the Reichs $10,000 in damages, and reimburse them for the cost of digging a new water well for the property, since the old well had been poisoned. Crews from Union Carbide and a new waste contractor hauled the leaky drums back up Route 9 to their starting point in Bound Brook and eventually to landfills and incinerators around the region. At first, the company took just thirty-five hundred drums off the property. Only after the Reichs threatened to reinstate their lawsuit did Union Carbide return to haul away another fifteen hundred drums. State and town officials, meanwhile, were similarly focused on making the problem go away as quickly and quietly as possible. No one was prosecuted for corruption at the landfill, which would close nine years later, but Sharkey, Columbo, and the landfill manager were transferred to jobs elsewhere in town government.
By July 1972, just seven months after Fernicola ended his dumping spree, the whole incident had been buried—literally. Having removed all of the drums that were in plain sight, Union Carbide bulldozed Fernicola’s trenches, covering up the solvent-soaked soil and some stray drums too. The thousands of gallons of hazardous chemicals that had spilled, or had been poured, into the unlined trenches and onto the sandy soil of Reich Farm were now out of sight and out of mind, and so was all the Union Carbide waste that earlier had been dumped and buried in the town landfill. No one seemed the least bit worried about where all that buried toxic waste might go—in particular, whether it would trickle down through the sand and reach the water-saturated layer of soil, the aquifer, that the entire town depended upon for its drinking water. No one tested the backyard wells of the Reichs’ neighbors to see if they were tainted, even though officials already knew that the Reichs’ own well had been poisoned. Could the plume of contaminated groundwater spread even farther? By the summer of 1972, the Toms River Water Company was using six newly drilled wells at the Parkway well field, about a mile south of Reich Farm. Might those wells be affected by Fernicola’s folly? No one tried to find out, even though the water company was pumping more groundwater every year to try to keep up with ever-increasing demand and even though the natural direction of groundwater flow—southward—ensured that the chemical plume from Reich Farm would head toward the six new wells.
The Reichs stuck it out for another four years before moving away, but their efforts to sell the old farm were hopeless. No one wanted to own a leaking toxic dump. Instead, the Reichs watched in frustration as their neighbors made big profits selling to developers. Forty years after Nick Fernicola’s 1971 misadventure, their property was still in limbo and Bertha and Sam Reich—at ages eighty-four and ninety, respectively—were still bitter. They blamed Union Carbide, government regulators, and especially Fernicola, and they defended their original decision to rent out the back two acres for $40 a month—money Fernicola never bothered to pay them—in exchange for four calamitous months of dumping. “All we did was rent out to a guy who was supposedly gathering the empty drums and selling them,” said Bertha Reich. “We didn’t know he was a crook.”
As for Fernicola, he exited the waste hauling business; he had little choice, since the town had seized his trucks. (Four years later, his permanent departure from hauling would be formalized in an agreement with the state in which Fernicola was also required to pay a $100 “settlement.”) He moved on to a new venture that fit his talent for prevarication: fixing and selling used cars. Fernicola stayed in Ocean County until his death in 2006 but rarely spoke about his year as a waste-hauling entrepreneur, doing so only when compelled by legal subpoena. When he did talk about it, he did so with rueful self-pity instead of remorse and with characteristic dissembling. It was unfair to single him out, he would complain, because other haulers paid similar bribes to dump drums at the town landfill for much longer time periods, while he did it for less than a year.27 “My whole thing in the drum business lasted about five months,” he told lawyers in a 1993 deposition. “From what I heard, everybody made money but me. I am the only one that lost money and I started it. I lost the trucks. I lost everything.”28
O
thers would lose more.
CHAPTER SIX
Cells
The labor was painful, and he took a few frightening extra seconds to draw his first breath, but nothing else about the birth of Michael Thomas Gillick at Point Pleasant Hospital on February 1, 1979, suggested that anything was amiss. A few days later, his parents, Linda and Raymond “Rusty” Gillick, took Michael home to nearby Toms River, where his eight-year-old brother, Kevin, was waiting. Michael immediately became the center of adoration. He was an unusually attractive baby, with blue eyes, long lashes, and a sunny disposition to match his golden hair. He looked like a cherub in a Renaissance fresco, pink and lively. Linda Gillick, who had taught first-graders for years, considered herself a good judge of children. This child, she decided, was perfect. She never changed her mind about that, despite all the horrors that followed. In his mother’s eyes, Michael would always be beautiful.1
In May, shortly after he turned three months old, Michael vomited after his morning feeding, which was out of character for him. Later that same day, when his father went to Michael’s crib to pick him up after his afternoon nap, the infant’s eyes were darting back and forth, as if he was staring at a swinging pendulum. By the time his terrified parents got him to the pediatrician’s office, Michael’s eyes had stopped their bizarre movements, but the pediatrician recommended a visit to a neurologist, who gave Michael an electroencephalogram, a simple test of electrical activity in the brain. It came back normal, but Michael did not stop vomiting. The formerly placid infant also began to twist and turn in his sleep, as if he could not get comfortable. Five days after Michael’s symptoms started, his father was changing Michael’s diaper when he saw a lump beneath his son’s belly button. In a few more days, there were similar lumps on the small of his back and his right leg. Whatever they were, they were spreading with ferocious speed.
Mystery and dread have always been the close consorts of cancer. The disease’s causes and progression have never been well understood, and its prognosis (at least until recently) has typically been dire. Cancer is older than humanity: In a Kenyan lakebed in 1932, anthropologist Louis Leakey found a fossilized lower jaw of a hominid ancestor, possibly Homo erectus or Australopithecus, that included a malignant bone tumor. A tumor has even been discovered in a dinosaur bone at least a hundred and fifty million years old.2 The oldest surviving description of cancer is a papyrus from approximately 1700 B.C. but is probably a copy of a document at least a thousand years older. The fifteen-foot scroll, stolen from Thebes by tomb raiders in 1862 and sold to an American adventurer named Edwin Smith, includes a description of an attempt to treat tumors of the breast with a cauterizing “fire drill.” For “bulging tumors,” the scroll’s anonymous author notes, “there is no treatment.”3
The Greeks fared no better. While surgical removal of tumors was sometimes tried in ancient Egypt and India, Hippocrates preferred diets that were supposed to reduce “black bile” and restore the body’s “humoral balance.” But after watching his diets and more aggressive treatments fail, Hippocrates wrote in Aphorisms, “It is better to give no treatment to cases of hidden [internal] cancer; treatment causes speedy death, but to omit treatment is to prolong life.”4 Hippocrates did make one lasting contribution by observing that bulbous tumors, especially when encircled by veins, looked like crabs. He used the Greek words carcinos and carcinoma, derived from the word karkinos, or crab, to describe the condition. Celsus, the venerated Roman physician whom Paracelsus boasted of surpassing, translated that to cancer, the Latin word for crab.
The description fit, not only because of the shape of the solid tumors but also because of seemingly inexorable nature of cancer’s progression. “Cancer the Crab lies so still that you might think he was asleep if you did not see the ceaseless play and winnowing motion of the feathery branches round his mouth,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in an 1891 story, “The Children of the Zodiac.” “That movement never ceases. It is like the eating of a smothered fire into rotten timber in that it is noiseless and without haste.”
The ancient healers were flummoxed by cancer for the same reasons that stymie present-day researchers. Tumors are as diverse as the sixty bodily organs in which they can arise. Some grow slowly, while others spread with stunning rapidity, often by hitching a ride in the bloodstream to other parts of the body, the process known as metastasis. Some are hardened masses that distend the skin, while others are buried deep in the body cavity. A few types of cancer, including leukemias, rarely form tumors at all unless they have metastasized to other organs. Most frustrating of all, various cancers respond very differently to treatments. Despite Hippocrates’ attempt at a unifying taxonomy, it turns out that cancer is not one disease but many—more than 150, by most definitions. Their only common characteristic is supercharged cell division, growth run amok.
The first person to grasp the essential nature of cancer was another irascible, opinionated man of science: Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow. A diminutive, humorless, and hyperkinetic German born in 1821, Virchow was a physician who also made important contributions in an astonishing number of other fields, including anthropology, paleontology, and the biology of parasitic worms. In his spare time, he designed the Berlin sewer system and helped to excavate ancient Troy.5 His chief fault was Paracelsian self-confidence, which made him reluctant to accept ideas he did not originate, including the two most important of his lifetime: Louis Pasteur’s germ theory and Charles Darwin’s theory of universal common descent via natural selection. A fiery liberal who manned the Berlin barricades during the failed revolution of 1848 and was later a leading reformer in the German parliament, Virchow believed that social progress came through vigorous observation and testing, not abstract theory. “Medicine is a social science,” he declared in Die Medizinische Reform (The Medical Reformation), a radical newspaper he published during the tumult of 1848, “and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.”6
A prodigy who could read Latin and Greek by age twelve, Virchow became fascinated with microscopes soon after choosing medicine for a career. While still in medical school, he began conducting microscopic examinations of diseased tissue, something almost no one else was doing at the time. His medical approach was as radical as his politics because, even as late as the mid-nineteenth century, the humoral theories of Hippocrates still held sway and illnesses were regarded as mere indicators of the same underlying problem: a bodily imbalance of blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. That is not what Virchow saw in his microscope. He saw groupings of diseased cells in bodies that were otherwise healthy. Diseases, he reasoned, were not signs of an organism out of balance. Instead, they were distinct, specific processes that could be monitored through close observation of aberrant cells under the microscope. Thus was born the science of microscopic pathology, the essential discipline of modern medicine, which Virchow championed for the rest of his long and extraordinarily productive life.
Others had previously suggested that the cell was the basic unit of life, but Virchow was the first to propose that it was also the basic unit of disease.7 An epigram he popularized but did not originate, omnis cellula e cellula (all cells arise from cells), therefore meant that cell division must be the means by which illnesses spread inside the body. Pathological processes begin, he reasoned, when a healthy cell malfunctions under the influence of some outside force. Virchow erred in rejecting Pasteur’s idea that the outside disruptor could be a living microorganism, a germ. Actually, both men were partly correct: Some diseases were microbial in origin and others were not, but almost all involved the disruption of cells in specific parts of an otherwise healthy body. With their separate insights, Virchow and his rival Pasteur drove a stake through the heart of classical humorism, finishing what Paracelsus had started in Basel more than three hundred years earlier.
Cancer fit neatly into Virchow’s ideas about the cellular nature of disease, and his close observations of malignant cells helped him form his theories. In 1845, two years out of medical s
chool, he was the first to observe that some sick patients had far too many white cells in their blood and too few platelets and red blood cells. He coined the word leukemia to describe their condition because it meant “white blood” in Greek. Later, he noticed that a swollen lymph node above the left collarbone—now known as Virchow’s node—was often an early sign of cancer, an indicator still used by physicians today. Virchow poured all of his ideas and observations about cancer into an eighteen-hundred-page, three-volume work entitled Die Krankhaften Geschwülste (The Malignant Neoplasms), published in 1863. Many of his core beliefs have been vindicated, including the cellular nature of cancer, the central role of rapid cell division in its development, and the importance of an initiating event, an “irritation,” to begin the process by disrupting a previously healthy cell. As Virchow aged, his irritation theory fell out of favor and researchers drifted toward competing theories of carcinogenesis. He died in 1902, at age eighty—too soon to see his ideas return to vogue, and in variations that even someone with Virchow’s remarkable foresight could not have anticipated.
One of the many reasons the discovery of a malignant tumor in a child is so emotionally wrenching is that it is so surprising. Cancer is, in the main, an affliction of the elderly. In any given year, a person over age sixty-five in the United States is almost ten times more likely to be diagnosed with cancer than someone younger.8 In fact, between ages five and sixty-nine, the likelihood of getting cancer in any particular year rises with each year of life, and it does so in increasingly large intervals: from about one in nine thousand in the fifth year of life to about one in fifty-seven in the sixty-ninth year. There seem to be many reasons for this: complex molecular changes that occur in the cells of older organisms, immune deficiencies associated with aging, and the many years and intricate biochemical steps required before some types of tumors (prostate lesions, for example) can begin growing.9