Smog Detective Studies Effects on Humans : Environment: Researcher from UC Irvine uses a bag of tricks to track how air pollution harms the lungs.

As Bob Phalen’s minivan climbs a freeway ramp on his daily 10-mile commute to work, he scans the sky to the east, looking for mile-high Saddleback Mountain, barely visible through thick gray smog.

“This is where I judge the air each day. It’s pretty dirty today,” Phalen says. “Dirty air depresses me, but it reminds me I have a job to do. There are millions of Americans breathing this stuff. They deserve to know more about its effects.”

Phalen, 49, a biophysicist and inhalation toxicologist, directs the Air Pollution Health Effects Laboratory at UC Irvine. The sprawling campus is on the southern edge of America’s dirtiest smog zone: the Los Angeles Basin.

Armed with rats, ferrets, beagles, smog-exposure chambers, treadmills, fake noses and pollution-breathing mannequins, Phalen’s team of jeans-clad scientists has spent 15 years waging a war to save America’s lungs.

“Our air will be cleaner eventually as a result of what Bob Phalen and his colleagues have done, and the nation will benefit too,” said John R. Holmes, research director of California’s Air Resources Board. “He’s a real asset as far as helping us understand what we need to do in the air-pollution control business.”

Barely an hour past breakfast, Phalen plunges his gloved hands into a plastic tub of saline solution and pulls out a blackened human lung.

“This is the lung of a smoker,” he says. “This particular person died of a heart attack. The lungs weren’t suitable for transplantation. They were in bad shape.”

The lungs were donated for research. In Phalen’s laboratory, blue silicone rubber was injected into one lung, filling the airways and gradually congealing.

Phalen submerges the lung into a tray of lye. A few days later, the lung is dissolved. What remains is a lung cast: a blue rubber mold of the branching airways, even tiny ones.

Phalen studies casts of human, dog and ferret lungs to learn how age and bad air change the passageways that carry oxygen and pollutants into the body.

“Most environmental risks are through inhalation,” he said. “Each day, you drink two quarts of liquid, you eat two quarts of food, but you inhale 15,000 quarts of air.”

The air inhaled by residents of the Los Angeles Basin contains the most hazardous type of pollution: “secondary” pollutants created when sunlight triggers reactions among “primary” pollutants emitted by cars, factories and power plants.

“Secondary pollutants include (colorless) ozone, a very irritating gas capable of doing immense lung damage; nitrogen dioxide, which is known to intensify lung damage from ozone, and acid air pollutants,” Phalen said.

The basin’s air also is tainted with soot and other particles that make air hazy, and with cancer-causing chemicals.

“We breathe dozens of carcinogens in every breath,” and they build up in the body because ozone impairs the lungs’ self-cleansing abilities, Phalen said.

“In heavily populated areas, one in 10 or 20 people suffer because of air pollution--headaches, increased asthma attacks, worsening of bronchitis and more frequent respiratory tract infections,” he said.

“The most serious problems air pollution produce are not immediate symptoms, but the contribution to lung disease. The American Lung Assn. has estimated air pollution is a contributing factor in about 10% of human deaths in urban areas.”

But like millions of people, Phalen, his wife, Kathy, and sons Robert, 20, and Steven, 18, view smog mainly as a nuisance that sometimes causes burning eyes, headaches and chest tightness during exercise.

Phalen considers life a balance between risks and benefits. He enjoys smoking a pipe to relieve tension. And while he doesn’t know how chronic exposure to smog affects his family’s health, he won’t leave Southern California.

“We have excellent food, wonderful climate, a good educational system, a solid economy,” he said. “We have good medical services and a relatively relaxed lifestyle. All these things promote good health. It’s certainly not worth moving to get away from the smog.”

At home, Phalen and his family try to reduce air pollution.

“We purchase cars with smaller engines,” he said. “We limit barbecuing. We rarely use our fireplace. We cut way down on pleasure driving. We attempt to conserve electricity. We use spray products very conservatively.”

He believes the health risks of air pollution must be reduced by developing “more efficient transportation; better emission-control systems for cars, trucks, power plants and industry, and better ways of destroying our wastes.”

But Phalen opposes confrontation politics--”Hatred is the worst pollution,” he says--and doesn’t consider polluters bad guys.

“Air pollution is not created by malicious toxic polluters,” he says. “It’s created by our automobiles, our industry and our generation of electricity. It’s a consequence of our modern society, and that society appears to be responsible for adding approximately 40 years to our life span when we compare ourselves with completely undeveloped countries.”

So while smog could be eliminated by outlawing modern conveniences, “the resulting poverty would probably reduce our life spans,” Phalen says.

“Therefore, it’s necessary to identify particularly hazardous pollutants and combinations of pollutants and target them for control. That’s the role of our laboratory.”

Holmes said Phalen’s 15-member team is responsible for several “important breakthroughs,” including how human health is affected by complex mixtures of pollutants.

He also credited Phalen for finding that children absorb much higher doses of air pollution than adults, and showing how ozone hinders breathing.

That allowed California to justify the nation’s toughest ozone standard, which the federal government may adopt nationally, Holmes said.

These findings came from a lab that has a $1.5 million annual budget and that Phalen admits “looks like a dump from the outside.”

Yet the lab contains some of the most innovative tools in air pollution research. Phalen and his colleagues invented many of these tools, including fake noses, windpipes and voice boxes.

The fake noses are rubber cylinders with carved channels that mimic real nostrils. Polluted air is pumped through fake noses to simulate breathing, showing how much pollution reaches the lungs, and how much is deposited inside the nose where some contaminants can cause nasal cancer.

To study how much windblown dust is inhaled, Phalen drills holes in the noses of lifelike mannequins of men, women and children. The mannequins are placed in a dust-filled wind tunnel. A pump serves as a fake lung, drawing dusty air through the nostrils and into filters.

Phalen’s laboratory also contains elaborate smog exposure chambers.

“We have 40 techniques for making smog,” including tanks of pollutants, an ozone machine, a diesel engine and a soot-producing propane burner, he said.

Rats, ferrets and beagles breathe the noxious air, sometimes while walking on treadmills for studies on the effects of pollution and exercise.

Phalen’s use of animals made him a target of the Animal Liberation Front, which raided his lab in January, 1988, and stole 13 beagles.

The raid, which ended Phalen’s studies with dogs, was ironic. For years he advocated humane treatment of research animals and either adopted or found homes for 30 to 40 beagles whose research careers were over.

Growing up in a large family in Oklahoma helped inspire Phalen’s career.

His father was a Navy man and his mother an accountant. Phalen was close to an uncle who worshipped Albert Einstein, so he became a physicist, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1964 at San Diego State University.

After a 1961 explosion killed three people at a nuclear reactor in Idaho, Phalen wondered how silver from the reactor’s walls got into rescue workers’ lungs. That was the topic of his theses for a 1966 master’s degree at San Diego State and 1971 doctorate at the University of Rochester, N.Y.

Concern for human health pervades Phalen’s life because, as a child, he often faced sickness and death among his relatives.

“I loved every one of them so much it bothered me,” he recalled. “As a kid, I was always terrified of diseases.”

The uncle who admired Einstein was a pharmacist and inventor.

“He showed me that through knowledge you can do something about a problem. You don’t have to just be a victim, suffer and die.”