Research Earns Grasman Highest Honor

The Presidential Award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. Grasman and his fellow recipients from research institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Yale, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University received the award in a White House ceremony in mid-December.

Grasman said he's been studying the effects of pollution in the Great Lakes since 1991. "My interest goes back to the mid-1980s when I was in college," he said. A summer volunteer research position in North Dakota studying the effects of pesticides on waterfowl fired his interest.

"That was my first exposure to wildlife toxicology research," he said. "I'd always been interested in ecology in general. I just really enjoyed doing field work and also the lab work. It got me hooked on wildlife toxicology."

While doing research for his Ph.D. project and in subsequent research, Grasman discovered that pollutants seem to suppress the immune system in birds that live and breed at highly contaminated sites around the Great Lakes. "Essentially the T-cells in these birds are suppressed," he said. "This is the same type of white blood cell that is suppressed in an AIDS patient. In AIDS, a virus suppresses the immune system; in these birds, pollutants are suppressing the immune system. But the effect could be the same. These birds could be open to a lot of infections."

The EPA grant will help Grasman and his team explore what this immunosuppression actually means for the bird populations. Grasman will be working both in the field and in the laboratory to develop new techniques for studying immunosuppression in birds, surveying bird populations to determine what diseases affect the birds and exploring how birds with suppressed immune systems are affected by these diseases.

Grasman said there is already evidence that pollutants are taking their toll on Great Lakes birds. In his studies of Caspian terns, a long-lived bird that always returns to the same breeding site, he has found that birds that have fledged in highly contaminated sites don't return as adults to breed. "They never reach adulthood to reproduce," he said.

Although levels of pollutants have dropped dramatically since the 1960s as a result of stricter environmental laws, the levels have remained pretty much the same since the mid-1980s, according to Grasman. The pollutants he studies, mainly polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxin, have remained in the sediments along riverbeds, shorelines and bays. When storms, floods or dredging disturb these sediments, the pollutants are released.

Grasman's research can have implications for human health as well as for wildlife.

"So much of the testing of chemicals over the years has been targeted to detecting cancer," he said. Since animals rarely develop cancer, wildlife researchers have been looking at the other effects pollutants can have. "Human health researchers are just now expanding their interest in these non-cancer effects," he said.

Many of these chemicals can mimic hormones, which can affect animals and humans in very low concentrations. Grasman said several studies have shown that women who eat a couple of meals of Great Lakes fish each month are more likely to give birth to children with behavioral and learning problems. Another study showed that Inuits in northern Quebec, who are exposed to these chemicals when they eat seals and whales, exhibit lower T-cell activity. "We've had evidence of these kinds of effects in wildlife for many, many years," he said.

This past December was an exciting month for Grasman. In addition to receiving the Presidential Award and EPA grant, he and his wife brought home their newborn daughter. In the past, Grasman's research has been a family affair. "My wife worked with me in the field for three years when I was in graduate school," he said. "I keep asking her when our new daughter can come out with us, but we don't have any plans for a couple of years."