EPA Head Costle Urges Toxic Chemical Caution

Harvard and other medical schools should increase research on the prevention of disease from toxic substances, Douglas Costle '61, outgoing head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said yesterday in a speech at the School of Public Health.

Costle recommended that medical schools step up their training of students in the detection of the problems induced by such toxic substances as asbestos and pesticides.

Costle cited what he called a "chemical revolution" as the cause for current problems facing the EPA.

Noting the discovery of 800 new compounds in the United States every year, Costle said, "We are in the process of being tremendously productive, chemically." "We are creating a problem much more rapidly than we can realize it," he added.

Costle cited bureaucratic red tape as hindering regulation efforts for both beneficial and toxic chemicals.

Potentially beneficial chemicals may never be approved because of the "rigorous rules of administrative law designed to insure due process," Costle said.

Rushing chemical-related legislation through Congress is not the answer, he noted, voicing apprehension about the new, more conservative Congress. "My concern is that they won't stop long enough to be bothered by the facts," he said.

The ambiguity of scientific investigation has made decisions impossible in many cases, Costle said, explaining that experiments to determine the environmental danger of newly discovered compounds often yield conflicting evidence.

Costle, who will leave his office with the Carter Administration in January, doesn't see the Reagan administration as necessarily bad for the EPA. The extremism of rhetoric and ideas seen during the campaign will be quickly moderated, he said. "They'll have to face up to the everyday nitty-gritty that is public policy," Costle said.

"For three million years before World War II, humans learned for themselves what organic substances were edible and safe," he said, adding that now men are creating synthesized compounds, whose safety must be newly determined.

Since World War II more than 300 billion tons of synthetic substances have been produced, and there now exist five million kinds of man-made compounds, he said