Amy Lindberg made a deal Come to life in Lejune. He plays tennis and runs on his lunch breaks, running through the sprinklers of the turgid Carolina Summermers. But there was something dark under his feet.

Some time before 1953, a large plume of trichlorethelene, or TCE, entered the aquifer under Camp Leje. TCE is an effective solvent – one of those Midcentury thinking chemicals – that quickly dissolves and melts any grease it touches. The source of the spill was pinpointed, but roars at the base used TCE to maintain the machinery, and the dry cleaner spray it on the blues on the clothing. It was lost in Lejeune and across America.

And TCA shows up too – you can rub it in your hands or huff it and feel no immediate side effects. It plays a long game. For about 35 years, Marines and Sailors living in Lejune have been unknowingly exposed to TCE whenever they tap it. The Navy, which oversees the Marine Corps, first denied the existence of the toxic plume, then refused to admit that it would affect the health of Marines. But as Lejeune’s vets age, cancers and undiagnosed illnesses begin to set them back at alarming rates. Marines stationed on base have a 35 percent higher risk of developing kidney cancer, a 47 percent higher risk of Hodgin’s lymphoma, a 68 percent higher risk of multiple myeloma. In the local cemetery, the section reserved for infants should be expanded.

Meanwhile, Langston spent the rest of the 1980s setting up the California Parkinson’s Foundation (later named the Parkinson’s Institute), a Parkinson’s lab with everything needed to end the disease. “We thought we’d work it out,” Langston told me. Researchers associated with the Institute created the first animal model for Parkinson’s, called Pestinside called Pinsticide in MPTP, and confirmed that chemical workers increase Parkinson’s at a much higher rate. Then they showed that identical twins develop Parkinson’s at the same rate as fraternal twins – something that would be unimaginable if summer twins didn’t. They even noted TCE as a potential cause of the disease, Langston said. Each revelation, the team thought, represented one more nail in the coffin of the genetic theory of Parkinson’s.

But there is a problem. The human genome project launched in 1990, promising the arrival of a new era of personalized medicine. The goal of the project, to identify all human genes, was radical, and by the time it was completed in 2000, comparisons to the Moon landing were frequent. Sequencing our genome “will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases,” then President Bill Clinton said.

But for Langston and his colleagues, the human genome project is sucking the air out of the environmental health space. Genetics has become the “800-puzzling gorilla,” as one scientist put it. “All the research dollars are going into genetics,” said Sam Goldman, who worked with Langston on the twin study. “There’s more to sex than Epidemiology. It’s the latest gadget, the bigger rocket.” A generation of young scientists has been trained to think of genetics and genomics as the default place to look for answers. “I treat science like a bunch of 5-year-olds playing soccer,” said another researcher. “They all went where the ball was, running around the field in a herd.” And the ball was chosen not to be environmentally healthy. “Donors want a cure,” Langston said. “And they want it now.”