Few academics have had the kind of chemical dependence on running that Marc Edwards did over the past six years, as he became locked in battle for his scholarly reputation, a contest that he ultimately won.
Mr. Edwards, a marathoner, is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. While studying pinhole leaks in the District of Columbia’s water system, in 2003, he found that the addition of chloramine disinfectant had exacerbated the leaching of lead from tap-water lines. Elevated lead levels can cause brain damage and developmental problems in children if they or their pregnant mothers ingest too much of it.
The Washington Post sounded an alarm about the lead threat to humans, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention minimized the danger in a 2004 report that left Mr. Edwards thunderstruck. The report asserted that, according to a study of 201 residents by the city’s Department of Health, “Residents with high levels of lead in their tap water did not have elevated blood lead levels.”
That conclusion was “a scientific impossibility” to Mr. Edwards: “I realized then that I had to take on the CDC.” He began spending tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to file Freedom of Information Act requests for health data. The chair of his department, while supportive, expressed concern about the ramifications for Mr. Edwards’s career, in which the ability to obtain grants depends heavily on one’s professional reputation. During that period, he says, he was also falsely accused of sexual harassment—an allegation that was eventually dropped—and received an anonymous telephone call threatening his young children.
“I lost 80 percent of the friends I thought I had in the water industry” and was essentially blacklisted, says Mr. Edwards, who lifted weights and ran every other day for his physical and mental health. “There were times when I couldn’t remember anything that had happened in that hour and 30 minutes.”
On other days, his battles with the CDC, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and other opponents were so all-consuming that he would strap on a hands-free phone and strategize with colleagues while he ran. On one particularly dispiriting day, he started a 13-mile run but ended up quitting halfway through and walking home.
Then something amazing happened: In 2007 he was notified that he had won a coveted $500,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for “playing a vital role in ensuring the safety of drinking water and in exposing deteriorating water-delivery infrastructure in America’s largest cities.”
The money was a life raft for a man who’d sunk his family’s finances into a cause that had at times seemed doomed.
Still, the fight continued, and so did Mr. Edwards’s long, restorative runs. A turning point came in 2008, when the Children’s National Medical Center, in Washington, agreed to give him blood data on local children so that he could do an independent study confirming his suspicion that they had been exposed to dangerously high levels of lead.
And this year, an investigative committee of the U.S. House of Representatives issued a report, on May 20, concluding that the CDC had knowingly used flawed data in its 2004 report. Mr. Edwards, fully vindicated, testified before the panel, and he was lionized three days later by a Washington Post columnist, who wrote, “Sometimes Don Quixote beats the windmill.”
It was Mr. Edwards’s running that helped him maintain his perspective and his sanity. “For every thousand people who do this sort of thing, only one of them comes out whole.”
After the Congressional hearing was over, he did what any runner would have done under the circumstances: He laced up his Nike Xccelerators and hit the trail. “Those are memorable runs,” he says. “With every stride, you’re covering 10 yards of distance. It’s like you’re floating.”
What worked for him could work for others, Mr. Edwards says. “I look at colleagues who are going through stressful times, who are quite depressed, and I wonder what it would do for them. Because I couldn’t live without it.”
