Arnold J. Schecter

Arnold Joel Schecter was born on December 1, 1934, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the first born and only son of Benjamin and Leonore Natalie (Lyon) Schechter. His parents were immigrants to this country who had fled persecution and sought a better life in America. His father was from a small town near the border between modern-day Poland and Ukraine. His mother emigrated from Lithuania. Originally given the Yiddish name Azriel Yoseph Schechter, his mother quickly changed his name to Arnold because she wanted to ensure that he would more easily assimilate into American society. To his friends, colleagues, and grandchildren, he was simply known as "Arnie." Along with his younger sister, Carol, Arnie grew up on the South Side of Chicago during the Great Depression and World War II. His father was a self-taught architect, builder and jack of all trades. His mother was an executive secretary.

As a youth, one day Arnie heard on the radio that America needed doctors. From that moment on, he decided that he wanted to be a physician. He talked about reading Microbe Hunters, a book that served to inspire not only him, but many other future biomedical researchers and doctors. At the age of 16, in 1951 Arnie enrolled in an early entrance program at Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois, where high school students could enter college before graduating. Shimer College had an academic affiliation with the University of Chicago. After two years at Shimer, Arnie would go on to obtain a Bachelor in Liberal Arts degree from the University of Chicago in 1954. He remained at the University of Chicago where, in 1957, he obtained a Bachelor of Science in Physiology-Neurophysiology.

After graduating from the University of Chicago, Arnie went on to receive his Doctor of Medicine from Howard University in 1962. Following his graduation from Howard, he went to Harvard Medical School as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anatomy conducting research in electron microscopy and served as an Instructor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA. It was at Harvard where he met Martha Jean Berenson, an eighteen year-old Classics major enrolled in Radcliffe College (Harvard's women's college at the time). Martha Jean was from nearby Marblehead, Massachusetts, and they quickly fell in love. The two decided to elope in New Hampshire and were married on February 14, 1964.

In 1967 Arnie was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. He was stationed in Ft. Knox, Kentucky and served in the US Army Medical Corps for two years, being honorably discharged at the rank of Major. While stationed at Ft. Knox he provided medical care to service members and their families. He practiced aviation medicine and also learned how to fly small airplanes while stationed on base, a passion that led him to purchase a small Cessna plane that he kept for several years (until one of his very young children tried to open the door mid-flight).



In 1970, after practicing medicine in West Point, Kentucky, for a year, Arnie and Martha Jean moved to Appalachia, where Arnie would begin a lifelong career in public health focused on individuals and communities whose voices were often silenced by those in power. Arnie was appointed as director of the Floyd County Kentucky Comprehensive Health Program (FCCHP), which at the time was funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (O.E.O.), the governmental entity charged with establishing the first community health centers in the United States as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. As director of the FCCHP, Arnie gained the support of welfare rights activists and attempted to bring innovative healthcare to a region that had been sorely neglected. Among other things, he used his expertise in flying to introduce the concept of helicopter ambulance service to transport patients from rural areas to urban medical centers in both West Point and Eastern Kentucky. At the time the idea was considered far-fetched, but a decade later the feasibility of helicopter air ambulance service was formally studied by the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, and today air ambulance service in these rural communities is a recognized standard.

Ultimately, the politics of Eastern Kentucky led to his dismissal from the program, an unpopular decision that immediately led to the mass resignation of the program's nurses. At the time Arnie called the program "hopelessly corrupt" and despaired of its future. "I don't think there'll ever be a viable health program in Floyd County," he said "because the politicians and the medical establishment would oppose a typical O.E.O. comprehensive health program where the poor would have a meaningful voice in policy decisions. Secondly, the O.E.O. is too weak to stand up to any political pressure." While the O.E.O. did pull funding from FCCHP, the Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization subsequently obtained funding for the Mud Creek Clinic, which became a national model for a comprehensive community health program controlled by the people it was designed to serve.

Arnie was a pioneer of many now established public health principles. He practiced at the intersection of public health and social justice. Because of this, he understood that public health is indeed political but must always be grounded in science. He would spend his entire career on that tightrope.

Arnie moved back to Louisville to become the Medical Director of the Kentucky Drug and Alcohol Abuse Program, where he began studying treatment options for drug and alcohol abuse. He understood that addiction is a disease that required medical treatment, as opposed to a crime in need of punishment. He pioneered early clinical research on the drug naltrexone and other narcotic antagonists. This work led him to New York City, where he first arrived as an Assistant Professor at the Downstate Medical Center, State University of New York Health Science Center, focusing on alcoholism and drug dependence. He received a Master's in Public Health from Columbia University in 1975 and then took his teaching and research talents to the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health, College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, NJ. During this time he authored and edited several books on the subject and published numerous peer reviewed articles related to narcotic antagonists.

In 1979 Arnie moved his family to Binghamton, New York, where he jointly served as both a professor of preventive medicine at the Clinical Campus in Binghamton, SUNY

Health Science Center/Syracuse, College of Medicine, and as the Broome County Health Commissioner. Seeking a quiet community to raise his family, little did he realize that within sixteen months of making this move, his professional life would be forever changed.

On February 5, 1981, at 5:30 am a surge of excess electricity led to an electrical panel malfunction in the Binghamton State Office Building. For 30 minutes, the resulting transformer fire was reported to have "filled the state office building in Binghamton, N.Y., with a thick cloud of toxic smoke, spreading PCBs and dioxins over everything, from the lottery tickets in the lobby to the law books on the 18th floor." Never before had a transformer accident resulted in the widespread contamination of PCBs and dioxins in an occupied office building. From a scientific perspective, this incident was the first outside a laboratory setting to demonstrate the conversion of PCBs, in the presence of oxygen and heat, to polychlorinated dibenzofurans, and of the chlorinated benzenes to polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins. In layman's terms, it was a wakeup call-demonstrating the unsuspected health hazards electrical transformers and capacitors posed to workers and the public when not properly separated from occupied areas of buildings.

The widespread contamination of PCBs and dioxins not only impacted first responders and those initially tasked with cleaning the 18-story building, but also the community and workers who waited to return to their offices. As public health commissioner, Arnie knew there was a major public health risk for anyone entering the building, and quickly realized that the PCBs and dioxins had infiltrated the building's HVAC system, spreading to every floor, every office, every nook and cranny of the building. He stood firm in restricting access to the building, choosing to treat it as a significant hazardous site; insisting that cleanup be deliberate and methodical before anyone entered the building unprotected. This frustrated some in New York politics, including Governor Carey who one month after the fire famously offered "to walk into Binghamton or any part of that building and swallow an entire glass of PCB's." Governor Carey would later apologize for making that statement.

Arnie knew the cleanup would be slow and expensive, a fact that did not sit well within state government. But he was steadfast in his insistence that the building remain closed until it was unequivocally safe for workers to return. That insistence would ultimately cost him his job as the County's Health Commissioner. Thirteen years later, after spending $53 Million to clean the Binghamton State Office Building (which only cost $17 Million to build), the building was finally declared safe from toxins, and workers were permitted to reenter. Arnie's original assessment had been correct.

Arnie's experience with the Binghamton State Office Building led him to realize that there was little research on the public health effects of dioxins in humans, and even less on the potential threats through exposure to dioxins in industrialized societies. He began to conduct research and collaborate with other researchers throughout the world, leading him to one of the largest human exposures to dioxins-Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. However, it was 1984 and the United States and Vietnam had not normalized relations. Arnie began groundbreaking collaborations with the Vietnamese government to conduct research on the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese population who were exposed to the toxic defoliant during the war. Over the years Arnie embarked on numerous trips to Vietnam where he collaborated with the Vietnamese Ministry of Health, veterans groups, and scientists from all over the world. For a scientist from the U.S., arranging visits, traveling throughout Vietnam, and collecting specimens for dioxin and furan analyses were at times daunting tasks. He was faced with having to overcome bureaucratic and diplomatic hurdles caused by the lack of formal diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. During his early visits, the only way he was able to communicate with his family in Binghamton was through telegraph messages from Canada. Arnie also began to assist Veterans in documenting their exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War and tracking the resulting health effects. He later met Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr., who served as the Commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam during the war. Admiral Zumwalt had ordered the use of Agent Orange during the war, an order which caused Admiral Zumwalt's son to be exposed to dioxins, an exposure that most likely led to his death from an associated cancer. Arnie and Admiral Zumwalt forged a partnership. Over the years they worked together to conduct more research and advocate for veterans exposed to Agent Orange, advocacy that ultimately resulted in the Veterans Administration providing benefits for illnesses resulting from this exposure.

It wasn't long before Arnie quickly became one of the preeminent experts on dioxins-not just in the U.S., but in the world. He edited one of the foremost texts on dioxins, Dioxins and Health (now in its 3rd edition), published over 200 peer reviewed articles and monographs on the topic, and presented his research findings at many national and international conferences. He would travel the world to industrial sites where dioxins had seeped into the community, speaking with local physicians, scientists, activists, and political leaders regarding the hazards they faced. He appeared on numerous national, regional, and local news programs to inform the public about the health effects of dioxins. In the U.S. and other industrialized countries, dioxins from certain industries and urban incinerators were appearing in the food chain, in milk, meat and fish. He understood that dioxins were ubiquitous and symbolic of industrialization, and that it was critical to determine the level at which they might become dangerous to humans. He sought to understand the potential links between dioxins and cancer, reproductive dysfunction, hormone problems, immune deficiencies, disorders of the central nervous system, liver damage, diabetes and altered lipid metabolism.

Arnie's career in public health and research on dioxins led him to become a

Special Expert with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and an adjunct professor at both Duke University and the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. He would then join the Environmental and Occupational Health Program at the University of Texas School of Public Health, Dallas Regional Campus at Southwestern Medical Center, where he not only continued his research into dioxins and PCBs, but also began to study the proliferation of flame retardants in our food supply and the presence of Bisphenol A (BPA) in food, canned goods, and plastics. Wanting to move closer to family, Arnie returned to Kentucky, coming full circle to the state where his remarkable career in public health first began. He continued collaborating with scientists and health care providers while an adjunct professor with the University of Louisville Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology.

For Arnie, public health was not only about research and science, it was also about informing the public on matters that impacted their health. It is no wonder that beginning in the 1970s there was media coverage about his work in both the mountains of Kentucky and with narcotic antagonists in America's largest city. Throughout the 1980s to the early 2000s, most of the major newspapers and news networks covered his dioxin and PCB research. Film crews from 60 Minutes, CNN, and C-Span all travelled with him to document his research in Vietnam and his work with veterans. Other news outlets covered his work, including within the last decade when he published research on BPAs and flame retardants found in America's food supply. Arnie's sister (Carol) is keen to note that he appeared in one of the last shows on ABC's Nightline with Ted Koppel.

Arnie was soft spoken with a dry sense of humor. He was dedicated to lifelong learning for himself and his family. He worked tirelessly to make sure all his children obtained higher education. He had an insatiable hunger for reading and sought out museums wherever he travelled. He had bookshelves double lined with books and underlined multiple daily papers and magazines with his multi-color pen. Knowing hunger and learning the virtue of frugality during the Great Depression, he enjoyed grocery shopping and always loved a good sale. He also had a fun and silly side he shared privately with his children and grandchildren, playing games like chess and checkers and building small collections of stuffed animals. He was not averse to risk. He was willing to fight for his ideals whenever he sensed a wrong. He was a patient, creative teacher and mentor to younger generations of students aspiring to have careers in public health, research and medicine. He was deeply committed to ensuring the wellbeing of his family and brought them countless moments of joy throughout their time together. He loved his wife, children, grandchildren, sister, daughter in law, brother-in-law, niece and other members of his family very much.

Arnie is survived by his wife of 61 years, Martha Jean Schecter, three children, Ben (Nicole), David, and Anna, four grandchildren, Zachary and Mia Schecter, and Seth and Adam Berkowitz, his sister Carol Abarbanell, niece Rachel Abarbanell (Michael Botti), and brother-in-law William Berenson (Lorena).

Donations in Arnie's memory may be made to Howard University Medical School or to a charity of one's choice. Arrangements were entrusted to Herman Meyer & Son, Inc., Louisville, Kentucky.