There is something in your blood. A man-made industrial chemical with an important function in the history of the world. It was developed during the Manhattan Project. It is not naturally occurring. Someone put it there. Without your consent. It's virtually indestructible, and it has the potential to alter your body chemistry, which could make you sick or kill you. But that is not a certainty. What is certain is this. Also, you are not alone. It's everywhere. Today the family of chemicals it belongs to is called PFOS. You may know them as forever chemicals. These chemicals were originally developed during the race to build the atomic bomb. This is the story of how they made their way into you.
SPEAKER_00This is Killer Chemistry, a true crime science podcast exploring how military science developed for the bomb ended up contaminating the entire world. With your host, Kelly Lyons, an author and investigative journalist who began covering this story more than 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_01An Appalachan landscape shaped by industry, carved by rivers, and shadowed by ancient ruins that refuse to disappear. It's a place where folklore isn't entertainment, it's inheritance, where stories of cryptids move through the hills as easily as fog. And the Mothman is spoken of less like a legend and more like a warning. People here don't argue over belief. They wait, watch. Because every so often something happens that makes those stories harder to dismiss. Something like this. Scientists were working with an enemy they could not see radiation. It had no smell, no color, no warning, and yet it moved through the body silently, permanently. They didn't fully understand it, not really. Which meant in some cases they were handling something they couldn't detect until it was already inside them. At Los Alamos, a town was built that officially did not exist. No real address, no public record, mail delivered to a single post office box. Thousands of people lived there, raising families, going to work, without ever being able to say where they were or what they were doing. And what they were doing could turn deadly in an instant. There was a plutonium core, small, dense, unremarkable. It would later be called the Demon Core. Physicists handled it by hand, literally, stacking bricks using tools, balancing on the edge of a reaction they did not fully control. At the center of it all was J. Robert Oppenheimer. When the first bomb was tested, the Trinity test, the light was described as brighter than the sun, colors no one had seen before. A silence, and then a shockwave that felt alive. Oppenheimer would later recall a line. Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. But some of the most disturbing parts didn't happen in the desert. They happened quietly behind the scenes. Radiation experiments, uniformed patience, long-term exposure studies that would not be fully revealed for decades. The kind of decisions that only make sense when something feels urgent enough to justify anything. And here's the part that never really gets said out loud. The Manhattan Project didn't just create a weapon, it created materials, new kinds of chemicals, engineered to be stable, resistant, nearly indestructible. Some of them didn't stay contained. They escaped into the environment, into the water, into blood. The project is often described as something that ended in 1945, but that's not entirely true, because parts of it didn't disappear, they persisted. And in some cases, they are still here. Scientists working on the project were trying to solve a series of complex engineering problems. Handling uranium required materials that could withstand extreme heat and highly corrosive chemical reactions. They needed substances that would not easily break down. Industry chemists discovered something remarkable. A bond between carbon and fluorine, one of the strongest bonds in chemistry. Once formed, that bond is incredibly difficult to break. The compounds created from it have unusual properties. They repel water and oil. They resist heat and chemical reactions. To scientists working during wartime, this discovery looked like a breakthrough in that moment and beyond. After the war, those same chemical properties found new uses. Manufacturers realized these compounds could be used to create products that were stain-resistant, waterproof, and nonstick. The chemicals helped produce materials like Teflon. Soon they were being used in treatments for cookware, carpeting, food packaging, clothing, firefighting foams, and thousands of other consumer applications. But there was one characteristic of these compounds that scientists did not fully understand at the time. The same chemical bond that made them useful also made them extremely persistent. By design, they do not easily break down in nature. Once introduced to the environment, these chemicals spread quickly. They became prolific in the atmosphere, crossing state lines and political borders until they were everywhere. Today scientists know these chemicals can be found in the blood of nearly every living thing. And research now suggests that forever chemicals don't simply accumulate in the body, they can also alter the body's chemistry in fundamental ways. When the story first crossed my desk, I was working for a newspaper in the Middoh Valley, where chemical plants have been part of the landscape along the Ohio River for generations. People tended to believe industrial facilities are carefully regulated or perhaps over-regulated. On the whole, Appalachians are often solidly against invasive regulatory authority of any kind. It's an understandable sentiment. There was also this prevailing sense that someone somewhere acting in an official capacity was protecting the water and keeping us safe from any kind of rogue toxic hazards. I often heard readers comment that if anything truly harmful was going on, the government would have intervened. But in time we would realize that is not how the system works. In the initial months of covering this case of contaminated water, many assumed to be a local crisis, it became apparent that the problem as we knew it, which originated in a neighboring town, was our problem too. Water sampling revealed that my two little girls, who were not yet in grade school, were also bathing in and drinking polluted water. Without knowing anything of risk, that thought alone is deeply troubling. Before we go any further, there's something I want you to understand. I am not a scientist. This case involves complexities I thought too difficult to comprehend. However, once I realized this potential danger had crossed the threshold and was in my home, potentially poisoning my loved ones, I became even more determined to understand the science well enough to explain it to my friends and neighbors, no matter how complicated the research. Fortunately, God blessed me with friends and mentors who provided me an informal environmental education, as together we confronted the strange and unknown. Because when an invisible silent threat hovers around your people, understanding what you are up against is essential. By now you may be realizing that the story raises more questions than it answers. And it would seem wrong to give you so much cause for concern without also showing you ways you can act powerfully in your own circumstances, whatever they may be. I call it practical magic. Steps you can take to better understand the risks around you and what you can do about them. Because when the world around you becomes a crime scene, you're likely going to want to investigate. Here's where you begin collecting evidence. It begins with one fundamental question. Where does your drinking water come from? Is it supplied by a municipal water system? A rural water district? Or a private well? Identifying your water source is the first step towards solving this mystery, understanding potential exposures and taking action to reduce the hazards. The bomb didn't just end a war, but introduced a new kind of power, one that didn't disappear when the fighting stopped. The chemicals developed during the race to build the atomic bomb didn't stay in the laboratory. They migrated into the environment and from there into nearly every living thing. We only know this because a farmer in West Virginia was relentless in his search for the cause of a mysterious wasting disease that killed an entire herd of cattle. His tenacity exposed a massive corporate cover-up and launched one of the largest environmental contamination investigations in history. That's next on Killer Chemistry.
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