Compromise Superfund bill up for House vote Backroom wrangling has pried loose long-deadlocked Superfund hazardous waste cleanup bills from two committees and sent a tough fiveyear, $10 billion compromise bill to the House floor. Chemical and oil industry trade groups immediately began a beefed-up lobbying effort for a broad-based corporate tax to finance the Superfund program. The House Ways & Means Committee already backs such a taxing scheme. But support is increasing in the House for bypassing this value-added tax and replacing it with increased taxes on chemical and oil products. Those so-called feedstock taxes, which supported cleanup under Superfund, expired Oct. 1. The compromise bill was negotiated by leaders of the Energy & Commerce and Public Works & Transportation committees. The bill that emerged was harder on industry than the one supported by Energy chairman John D. Dingell (D.Mich.). Yet even he agreed with the joint statement by both committees that the bill sets in place "a sound, workable Superfund program/' That bill would set schedules that the Environmental Protection Agency must meet in studying and cleaning up hazardous waste sites on the National Priorities List. The agency would have to study more than 1100 sites in a five-year period and begin cleanup on 125 sites by fiscal 1987. Cleanups would have to meet all relevant environmental standards. However, waivers would be allowed for air and toxic substances rules but not water quality criteria. In addition, the bill would allow citizens the right to sue in federal courts to force private parties to clean up hazardous waste sites that "may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment/' The bill also offers community right-to-know provisions. One would require chemical companies to report the location of facilities containing especially dangerous chemicals and the quantities of such chemicals. The provisions of the compromise
Dingell: a sound, workable program bill generally trouble chemical and oil companies but are applauded by environmental groups. The president of the American Petroleum Institute, Charles J. DiBona, says EPA would not be able to meet the bill's schedules, and citizens' suits would delay cleanups. Both he and Chemical Manufacturers Association president Robert A. Roland say that increases in taxes paid on the products or feedstocks of their industries would cost thousands of jobs and harm U.S. trade. The chemical and oil industries consider a broad-based tax on manufactured goods an equitable way of financing Superfund. However, opposition to such a tax is mounting among manufacturing and processing industries, with support from the White House. D
Artificial red blood cells developed Researchers in San Francisco have created artificial red blood cells that carry oxygen and have sustained laboratory rats whose natural blood was s i p h o n e d off. This success brings the prospect of a human blood substitute closer to reality. Such a substitute could save lives by temporarily replacing blood lost as a result of tissue injury. The artificial red cells consist of hemoglobin encapsulated in a lipid
membrane [Science, 230, 1165 (1985)]. They were prepared by emulsifying an aqueous solution of purified human hemoglobin with a nonaqueous solution of cholesterol and phospholipids. The lipids served as surfactants in the resulting emulsion. When the volatile organic solvents were removed under vacuum, lipid membranes began forming around the hemoglobin droplets. After several additional steps, the researchers isolated the artificial cells, which they dubbed neohemocytes. Suspensions of these bogus red cells were transfused into five lab rats to replace 95% of their red blood cells (erythrocytes). All the animals survived more than 18 hours, and two of them lived for months—long after their bodies had manufactured enough new erythrocytes to replace the artificial cells. Pharmaceutical chemist C. Anthony Hunt of the University of California, San Francisco, a n d his coworkers determined that the neohemocytes are cleared from circulation in rats with an apparent halflife of about six hours. In a medical emergency, that would allow enough time for an accident victim given a blood substitute to be whisked to a hospital for further care. But Hunt wants to extend the cells' half-life to at least 24 hours so that they are not removed from circulation before the body can replace them with its own red cells. The ersatz blood cells appear to be reasonably safe, although they are not ready to be tested in humans. The San Francisco researchers saw only minimal acute toxic effects in rats. "Although the rats look normal, they probably feel very tired," Hunt says. That's because the neohemocytes are less efficient than erythrocytes in conveying oxygen to the tissues and waste carbon dioxide to the lungs. The artificial cells carry less oxygen than normal blood because they contain only about half the hemoglobin of real red cells. And although the lab-made cells bind carbon dioxide, they don't process the gas as erythrocytes do because a key enzyme is missing. Hence, the artificial cells would have difficulty coping with respiratory demands caused by exercise. December 9, 1985 C&EN
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