The pursuit

A lifetime of exposure

Chris Higgins and Craig Butt revisit the history and the surprising behavior of PFAS in the environment. They explore their own experiences with the challenges of measuring these compounds. 

11/14/2022 | Christopher Higgins and Craig Butt

Chris Higgins’s pursuit took him all the way across the US. Chris’s public health roots propelled him to work on a problem that would become surprisingly important to the world around him. He began a journey to understand problems caused by perfluorochemical environmental contaminants. Back then, the right tools to measure these chemicals didn’t exist—and nobody expected them to behave the way they did.

“Unless you're involved in some kind of industrial accident, you usually don't get a very high dose of chemicals. So it's really the long-term chronic exposure, lifetime exposure that we worry about.” 

Chris Higgins