What prompted you to undertake this project? Did the idea arise from other reporting you had done on this subject?

Sheer response from readers. Every story I write about environmental contaminants -- in human breast milk or San Francisco Bay harbor seals -- invariably floods my inbox with response. When you get a dozen or more emotional emails from moms worried about the breast milk they're mainlining to their kids, you quickly realize there's a larger story here.

Was testing a family's "body burden" of chemical pollutants part of the project plan from the beginning?

Absolutely. To date scientific studies have concentrated on random individuals. No one is looking at families, or even the very young. Aside from curiosity -- how will mom differ from pop? Or mom from breastfed son? -- we knew the only way to tell this story would be to put a face on it.

What were the biggest challenges in carrying out this testing? Finding a family who would agree to take part? The ethical hurdles and complications for human testing? Persuading your editors to spend the money?

No one will believe this, but persuading my editors to spend the cash was easy. Same with finding the family. The hardest part, hands down, was the ethical issues. We were about to take a lot of blood from the family, hand them some potentially troubling results, then splash their names and photos all over the paper. Clearly, I was in over my head. So we took the whole project before a human subjects review board. They forced me to think hard about the protocol, establish protections for the family -- access to doctors and counselors, for instance -- and justify the kids' involvement. The whole process took three months. And I'll never forget the look from my editor when I said we needed another $1,300 for the review. But it was the best money we spent, no question.

The testing revealed some very high numbers, particularly for a class of flame retardants called polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs.

What kind of reaction did your findings elicit from regular readers or from others, such as scientists and policy-makers?

The general response from readers was not so much shock at the level of flame retardants, but surprise that we know so little about compounds that are everywhere. Scientists and doctors, on the other hand, expressed extreme skepticism at our initial results -- and with good reason: they really were off the charts. That's why we retested the family. You can still quibble with whether the initial numbers were real, but there's no question the kids are much higher than the adults.

Since the series appeared, you wrote an article about a state bill that proposes tough rules for certain chemicals in personal care products, which has been posted on the series web page. Do you plan a continuing follow-up to the issues raised in the series?

Definitely. One of the other reasons we undertook this project is that we sense a growing awareness in both politics and the public of our chemical "body burden." These bills banning chemicals and calling for greater disclosure and more biomonitoring are not new in California. They may not pass this year or next. But I do sense we are heading for a paradigm shift in what the public knows about chemicals in their bodies and how regulators control what manufacturers put in their products.

The series combines a central investigative element, the chemical tests, with characteristics of other journalistic genres -- an accessible, feature-story writing style and explanatory reporting's detailed attention to nuance and uncertainty. Was this hybrid approach something you set out to accomplish or did you decide this was the best way to proceed on the basis of what your reporting turned up?

We kind of fell into it. From the start we wanted to test a family and tell the story through them, and I feel slight regret that the Day One piece doesn't profile the family more. But we ended up with a tremendous amount of information that was extremely nuanced and quite technical. It was a relief to be able to jump back into the family's life to make a point or offer an illustration. Or just describe a quiet dinner scene.

How long have you been an environmental reporter for the Tribune? Are you the only person on the environment beat at the paper?

Five years in September. Sadly, I'm the only dedicated environmental reporter for not just the Tribune but a handful of affiliated dailies here in the Bay Area. Many of those papers, to be fair, do have reporters covering local environmental issues. But for region-wide stories, it's me.

What are the main issues, other than those addressed in the series, that you've been paying attention to? How would you describe the level of competition on the environment beat among Bay Area reporters?

The general assessment, if you ask any reporter on the environmental beat in the Bay Area, is that we're drinking from a fire hose. There are so many stories, so many unique angles, that it's easy to have entire chunks of the beat to yourself. But the main issues here are probably no different than what other environmental reporters encounter elsewhere: water quality and supply, land and resource use, forest plans, local wetlands restoration projects, air quality.

How long have you been involved in environmental reporting? Did you cover the environment in previous jobs? What got you interested in the field?

I've always loved reporting for the way it forces you to be curious about your world, but my arrival in the field is pure happenstance. I was working at Citibank's private bank in New York City, helping write investment proposals for folks with $20 million or more to invest, when I figured there were better ways to write for a living. About that same time a romance soured, and I needed a quick exit from the city. So I found myself in Alaska at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, where I talked myself into a job. I covered everything from City Hall to the North Slope oil fields and got the environmental beat at the Trib because that was the job they had open. But it's been a great ride.