Gender bender

“When it comes to sperm, you’re half the man your grandfather was”, the Esquire magazine headline proclaimed earlier this year. It’s the next Silent Spring, U.S. News and World Report declared, reflecting the views of U.S. Vice President Albert Gore. “Hormonal Sabotage” declared Natural History magazine, in a headline stretched across two pages. What’s behind all the fuss? Well, apparently humanity could be on the brink of extinction. Chemicals that mimic estrogen are ravaging wildlife and hitting mankind below the belt — lowering sperm counts and possibly contributing to testicular cancer. Endocrine disrupters are all the rage in the popular press these days. A serious matter, no doubt, but why do so many in the media let the rhetoric get so far ‘ahead’ of the facts? It’s not just to sell newspapers: journalists are storytellers by profession and we feel we serve our highest purpose when we’re raising an alarm. Although it has recently reared its head in the British and European press because such chemicals have been found in some brands of baby milk, this story actually starts back in the 1970s. Biologists discovered that the insecticide DDT, spilling from the drain of a manufacturing plant, was wreaking havoc on the wildlife off the coast of Southern California. One the effects was that about a third of male western gulls weren’t returning to their breeding islands, so the female gulls left behind paired up with other females. (In a 1994 story, the Los Angeles Times used this episode to proclaim that hormonedisrupting chemicals were turning seagulls into lesbians.) Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) caused similar disruptions, most notably in the Great Lakes region. DDT and PCBs are the two types of chemical most clearly linked to endocrine disruption in North America. Both have been banned for many years, and the affected gulls, pelicans, cormorants, eagles and other wildlife have bounced back dramatically. So why, one might ask, didn’t the headlines proclaim ‘Ecological Catastrophe Averted’? The answer comes down to how journalists, rather than scientists, deal with uncertainty. Although reporters are supposed to search out truth, we tend to err on the side of alarming, rather than reassuring the public. We are the watchdog barking in the night. It might not be a real intruder, but wouldn’t you rather be alerted to the possibility?