our next speaker is... Niladri Basu
who we recruited from Canada based on his cutting-edge work on mercury
exposure in wildlife
great so this
on the screen is actually the ancient alchemic symbol for mercury
and if you look really careful at the symbol I think you can see the devil
inside mercury
mercury really is a devilish substance I've been studying this chemical for about a
decade now
and in all of my readings and research it really has no biological role in our
body
all the research we've done in my laboratory and in laboratory of my
collaborators have shown quite clearly that mercury is toxic at very very low
concentrations
and mercury really is a devlish compound when it comes to public health
we find mercury in many products that we deem beneficial for public health
so for example dental amalgams those silver amalgams that some of you may have
in your mouth they may contain up to fifty percent mercury by weight
compact fluorescent light bulbs the swirly bulbs that we are told the purchase that
going to fix the energy crisis
they each contain about five milligrams of mercury inside them
uh... childhood vaccines I won't even go there given all the hubbub about the
presence of mercury
in childhood vaccines
and perhaps the most important
route by which you and i are exposed to mercury is fish
every single fish out their has mercury in it
some fish have little mercury in it some fish have a lot mercury in it
all fish have mercury in them
all fish also have beneficial nutrients in them
and that poses a major dilemma to public health do we eat the fish
or don't we eat the fish?
and it's with the presence of mercury in all of these
products
that we run a laboratory here at the University of Michigan.
So I run a laboratory every winter semester in which we lecture to our
students the risks and benefits of mercury
but also we teach them how to measure it in themselves.
So in this example data compiled from the last two years of doing the lab
uh... with the students esentially do is they work in teams
they snip each other's hair,
they process that hair they put it into machine that measures mercury in it.
But then they also work to design a survey
they ask each other how much fish they ate
and what types of fish they ate and what you see quite clearly here is that
individuals that eat more fish also have more levels of mercury in the body and
this has been so many many times again in research.
None of these levels are harmful at all these are
pretty low levels of mercury exposure but the point is here is that we have a
great
opportunity to our educational schemes to increase understanding of mercury through
uh... through laboratory exercises.
Now every year I try to join the students in this exercise
and last year when I did
this is my value
way up there.
It's perplexing is much higher it's clearly much higher
then those of the students.
It's about five to ten times higher than the mercury levels I usually find
in my own body
and this really perplexed me
when I tried to explain this result by looking at the survey
nothing on the survey could explain it
it wasn't tuna it wasn't shark it wasn't swordfish it was none of those.
It was something else.
and that was the moment when I had a moment of surprise
when I realized that a month before
I was not here I was up here
in the arctic
and we're up in the arctic doing research in Greenland studying
polar bears
and we actually had an opportunity to eat
polar bears.
We also ate a variety of country foods such as rings seals
pilot whale and a whole range of fish in addition to the polar bear.
And the truth is that these are foods that have been consumed for centuries up in the
artic they are culturally appropriate foods
highly highly nutritious
uh... spiritually... in a way that we can't comprehend down here
but the reality is is that these are some of the most polluted foods on the
planet
and it's an irony,
it's an irony because there is no mercury up there all the mercury that we release as I will show you
later comes from here.
It gets dumped in the arctic where it builds up in the food chains
and contaminates the food.
And this is the real basis for the research that we do up in the arctic.
So I am a firm believer that when you do biology and when you do science you need to get out
into the field you need to get dirty in your work and I've been doing work in the
arctic for about a decade in the last few years we've taken great strides in
establishing an international field station
in central east Greenland which I show you on the map here
that's a satellite image taken of our fuel station in the summertime
and here I encircle the field station which is called the Kap Tobin field station
those formerly an abandoned school house which we converted into a field station
here's a better view of the fuel station
taken last year during our trip
many nights were like this okay it was a spectacular place to work out of.
This is our team.
uh... a picture taken of the team during the day
it was comprised of preeminent scientists not only from the U.S. and Canada but
from Denmark and Norway
uh... and uh... again this is the team that was doing all the research
a lot of days looked like this thats the arctic
and if you look carefully in the background you can actually see the field
station just a couple meters away and in the foreground we have one of our intrepid
soldiers out running errands
and it really the visibility was just a few meters and you don't know what's
around the corner when the weather's looked like that. So it it was
a little hairy at times being up there.
This is yours truly actually engaged in some discussions.
I did want to point out that in the background that's sea you can actually
navigate through it and when the anecdotes we heard up there is that there is that
maybe five ten years ago
this was covered in ice.
In the month of February this should be covered in ice and it's only been in the last
few years where local knowledge has told us
that they're seeing something change in the environment
that all of a sudden all of this ice which has been here for centuries
is now breaking apart and you can actually navigate boats through this water.
I show this picture just to come back that indigenous perspective and i just want to
emphasize that this is really a community health project
uh... it's not a project where us as scientists just go up to the arctic because it's
a cool thing to do.
Rather
given what i told you earlier that we know that some of the most polluted
foodstuffs and polluted areas are up in the arctic
people up there have a great concern
and in this case Inuit populations across the polE
have expressed this concern scientists have been working with them over the last
decade or so trying to make sense of ... So here we have
the local elder in the community
engaged in discussion with one of our senior scientistS.
So again we work very closely with the local Inuit
and this is one of the hunters that we were working with
and if you look through the binoculars you'll see not one polar bear
but three polar bears.
And here they are up close.
They're cute and we did not kill them.
So one-mom and two cubs
and in Greenland
like many other parts of the north you cannot kill mom
and cubs.
But with that being said
again polar bears have been hunted for centuries they've been hunted because they afford
great food for people that live up there great shelter great apparel
and because of that there is a quota
uh... male polar bears can be hunted
in Greenland east Greenland
and that's what we're up there doing we weren't hunting ourselves we were
working with the local inuit hunters who are allowed to hunt.
We are not allowed to hunt
but what we can do is essentially serve as scanvengers at the
bequest of the inuit
meaning that when they hunt the bear
we go in and take a couple samples to assess issues such as what Dr Meeker
was talking about earlier - related exposure and some type of health outcome
in this case were taking a blood sample from a polar bear and we'll use this blood
sample to figure out how much mercury is in that bears body and also what type of
hormones are in that body, what other health impact that may be related to
that mercury or other chemicals for example
take a look at that blood sample.
It's probably got a hundred times more mercury in it than you or I do.
In fact if you
uh... survey Inuit - northern people, if you look at many
animals in the north
they likely have a hundred-
fold the amount of mercury in their bodies than we do it down here.
hundred years ago well a hundred years ago the artic was relatively clean.
We've been able to do some sophisticated studies looking at archiveD museum
specimens and sediment cores
and look back at the situation in the eighteen-hundreds and found it to be
relatively clean.
and it's really in the past one hundred years where we've seen this precipitous
increase in the amount of mercury
in the arctic
perhaps tenfold
than it was in the eighteen hundreds.
A hundred tons -
that's how much mercury we release as a society into the environment every one to two
weeks. About a hundred tons
of mercury
is going up into the air every one to two weeks
-
once that mercury gets inside your body it's probably going to stick around for a hundred
days if not much longer the half liFe of mercury is a hundred days
meaning that if you take in a little bit of mercury now a hundred days later there is
still going to be a substantial amount of mercury in your body
and then a hundred percent confidence
as scientists were told to be skeptical of our work but I think based on my own
experience in the arctic
and based on some of these facts and results that we've collected or our collaborators have
collected
I'm pretty much a hundred percent sure that the issue of mercury pollution
or just pollution at the poles
is really for real.
So what I want to do now is just to talk about some of the underlying
science and of course there many many questions and as a human society I think
the first question is well who's to blame?
It's you and I
and about the seven billion other people on this planet because many of us not
all of us the many of us live a very unsustainble lifestyle,
and to live this lifestyle we rely upon energy.
And most of the energy that we relay upon is nonrenewable. A lot of it in this
country especially comes from coal,
and if you think back to the fact that I told you earlier, a hundred tons of
mercury
coming at every one to two weeks, a lot of that comes from coal.
Every time you burn coal
you not only release ... greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide into the environment
but you also release a fair amount of mercury into the environment too.
So then the next question how is that that the coal that we burn here in the
midwest
make it's way up into the arctic?
Well, there's this really neat process called global distillation,
basically saying that chemicals like mercury that are volatile
at the lower latitudes, that are a little bit warmer, once they get into the
air
they're active... they can move around.
But the closer they get to the arctic or the closer they get to colder
environments, they tend to slow down, they tend to move less
and ultimately they get deposited in the arctic landscapes,
and they don't move again.
So that's why we often hear of the arctic as a sink for pollution once that
mercury gets there,
nce other pollutants get there they generally can't leave there.
It's a sink for pollution.
Once that chemical is there how is it that it makes its way up into the polar
bear?
It's a very simple process known as trophic transfer,
where we have small animals being predated upon larger animals ultimately
they get to the top of the food chain. So here is a very simple schematic from a report we
recently wrote
on the x axis going from left to right is increasing concentration of mercury, and
from the bottom of the top increasing trophic position,
and clearly you can see that at the top of this food chain are the polar bears.
And in fact the concentrations of mercury in the tissues of these bears
might be one million times greater
than the concentrations of mercury that we find in the air or the water in the
arctic,
so there's this phenomenal biomagnification that occurs
and then on top of this
when you throw humans into the mix
and we start consuming these upper level organisms
we're even exposed to that much more mercury.
So again this is what really drives our work in the arctic
that there is no source of mercury in the arctic uh... but unfortunately
because of some chemistry
and some bio magnification processes
some of the most contaminated organisms and people live up in the arctic,
and if you think about it just carefully it really represents an issue of environmental
justice of the global level.
So with that being said that this is going to be my final slide
and I want to end off for the quote which is "We are the land and the land is us.
When our land and animals are poisoned so are we."
Well realize that a year ago I just came back from Greenland where I kind of ate
off the land for a month.
I had a couple meals of country food, not that much,
and my mercury levels increased five to tenfold,
not to levels that are harmful but nonetheless they increased pretty substantially,
and you would think that me who's been studying mercury for a while
would know that if you're gonna go to a place like Greenland and eat country
food that your mercury levels are going to spike.
I've been studying mercury for a while, I sit on panels concerning mercury in the
arctic, I've authored reports on this issue, so you think that i'd know this going in.
But I was stunned.
And it really was that moment surprise that really made the science hit home,
where science and my personal life came together
and uh... I think it's really important as a scientist to tell this to people.
With that being said maybe I'll try to personalize this for you a little bit
more too. So here we are in Michigan
in the heart of the Great Lakes,
just realize that almost every single lake and river
in Michigan and in the Great Lakes has a fish consumption advisory
largely because of mercury
if we extend this to the country
the U.S.
about half the lakes and rivers have fish consumption advisories because of mercury
that's how ubiquitous of a problem this is
let's overlay this quote to this - we are the land
and when our land and animals are poisoned so are we - well if there's that much mercury out their
I'd bet that if you give me a blood sample I can measure mercury in it,
I can detect mercury in every single one of you got there.
And on then on top of that there's been some compelling studies to show that one out
of every six women of childbearing age
likely has levels of mercury in their body that might be damaging to their fetus.
That's one out of every six in this country,
And if you look around here and start doing the math
these are real lives being affected.
And then right now we hear a lot of it the economy in the economic downturn...
well, mercury also has an economic cost
and there's been a conservative estimate that mercury pollution every single year in
this country
costs us eight to forty billion dollars.
That's billion with a b.
So the last thing I want to say may be a little more lighthearted and on a positive
note [laughter].
sometimes I've thought that
I shouldn't really be doing the work that I'm doing,
that I shouldn't have a job
uh... everything we know that mercury says that mercury is not good
and in fact we have solutions.
We have a lot of solutions whether they're technological solutions or behavioral,
solutions do exist
to mitigate this mercury issue. Unfortunately we need a little bit of
money and a lot of political willpower to make this happen
and their's been a lot of talk about solving this issue right now
and hopefully in the next few years
I'd like to remain in my job maybe be studying something different. Thank you.