Environ. Sci. Technol. 2008, 42, 6313–6317
NAOMI LUBICK
ALEX BUSCHOR
Walter Giger is an adventurous and ambitious analytical chemist who goes beyond what most people are willing to try, in the outdoors and in the laboratory. His skill and care yield excellent results in both arenas.
State University’s environmental and molecular toxicology department, Field was a postdoctoral researcher in Giger’s environmental analytical chemistry laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (known as Eawag) at the time. She and her husband had joined Giger and colleague Hans-Peter Kohler for the weekend outing. Field and her husband, Tom, had done some rock climbing but never any mountaineering. As the sun came up, Field recalls, Giger opened his backpack and threw down some crampons, with the admonition: just do not catch your other pant leg in your crampon. “I’ve never seen these before, let alone put them on,” Field recalls thinking at the time. “When we finally did need them, we were on exactly a two-person, foot-wide knife edge” near the top of the Mo¨nch. If something went awry, the only thing to do to save one’s partner and one’s self would have been to jump to the opposite side of the V-shaped ridge, so that the rope tying the climbers together would catch and hold the other person from slipping away down the other side. They summitted the Mo¨nch successfully. After a sleepless night at high altitude for everyone but Giger, the four attempted the Jungfrau the next morningsonly to turn back just shy of the top. Ahead of them, a group of climbers continually dislodged snow and ice that rained down on Giger and his troupe, and the conditions became too dangerous. “As Walter puts it, we ‘left a backpack.’ We had to end our hike before the summit,” Field says. Walter Giger rarely leaves a backpack. In his climbing and in his work, Giger is deliberate, careful, well prepared, and thoughtful. The risks he takes are inherent to the job at hand, whether to get to the top of a mountain or to forge into new scientific territory. “He doesn’t follow the crowd, and he’s always looking for what’s new and what’s relevant,” Field says. Giger has spent his career harnessingsor creating, if necessarysthe newest tools for detecting chemicals in the environment. In finding ways to measure these relative COURTESY OF WALTER GIGER
Scaling Peaks: The Life and Science of Walter Giger
On a clear day in the summer of 1994, Walter Giger led a small group of people up the steep slopes of the Mo¨nch. The mountain sits by its sister peaks, the Jungfrau and the Eiger, looming more than 4000 meters high (well above 13,000 feet). From these peaks, the Swiss Alps extend to fill the horizon. The party of four planned to climb to the Mo¨nch’s knifeedge ridge, spend the night high up on the mountain, and then attempt to summit the Jungfrau the next day. But before the tiny group could get a view of the peaks beyond, they had to prepare for the climb. “We took the train up, after getting up before the crack of dawn,” says Jennifer Field. Now a professor in Oregon
Field party: Tom Field, Hans-Peter Kohler, Walter Giger, and Jennifer Field summited the Mo¨nch in 1994.
2008 American Chemical Society
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JAMES GRAYDON
unknowns, Giger has been among the first to examine the environmental fate of high-production-volume materials, alkylphenol polyethoxylates, various anionic and cationic surfactants, laundry brighteners, corrosion inhibitors, pharmaceuticals, antimicrobials, and other chemicals.
Climbing comes first Giger has always been a climber and a chemist. He started climbing as a teenager and later helped to organize the Academic Alpine Club of Zurich in the 1960s (he stepped down as its president only a few years ago). As a teenager, he was also experimenting with a home chemistry set, “a lab in a box,” as he says. In college, under the tutelage of an excellent teacher, Kurt Grob, who developed capillary gas chromatography, Giger was off and running as a chemist. Born and raised in Zurich, he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. In 1971, Eawag’s new director, Werner Stumm, offered Giger a research position just as he was finishing his Ph.D. Legend has it that Giger acceptedsand then immediately set off for the Hindu Kush mountain range, where he and his climbing partners were the first to summit Afghanistan’s Lunkho-i-Kuchek (a 6451 meter peak). After 4 months of trekking, Giger returned to Eawagsonly to leave again almost immediately, at Stumm’s suggestion, to learn new techniques at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “In between, he hired me and I held down the lab,” jokes Martin Reinhard, now an environmental chemist at Stanford University. Reinhard joined Giger for climbs to the summit of Alaska’s Denali in 1979 (when Denali was still known as Mount McKinley and Giger was on sabbatical in Reinhard’s laboratory at Stanford) and later in the Swiss Alps. Giger has led trips to summit California’s Mount Whitney, Popocatepetl (in conjunction with an American Chemical Society meeting in Mexico City), and other peaks. “During all these visits, he just bagged one of these peaks. That was his style,” Reinhard says. The climb up McKinley took 3 weeks and was marked by the usual snowstorms and whiteouts, Reinhard recalls, but they summitted and descended without harm. Climbing shows Giger “at his best,” Reinhard says, highlighting his organizational skills and inclusivity. “That’s sort of his style on the trail as well as in the lab: well-organized, one thing built upon the next, nothing skipped, no cutting corners. That’s how I would characterize his research approach.”
Seaside stay Giger worked as a postdoc with Max Blumer at WHOI in 1973, several years after the West Falmouth, Mass., oil spill. That accident provided WHOI scientists with environmental samples for hydrocarbon analyses and biological assessments. Blumer and Giger focused their work on PAHs in near-shore marine sediments and bottom samples from salt marshes. They first noticed the complex composition of environmental PAHs by using combined chromatographic and mass spectrometric techniques. “I could combine both [methods] at a time when few people could do that,” Giger says. “For most environmental problems, the key issue is complexity of the mixtures.” Gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS) together gave better information at higher resolutions, allowing scientists to tease out the signals of individual compounds. In the early 1970s, at about the time the U.S. EPA was formed, “there was very little analytical methodology that could be applied to identifying let alone quantifying these Naomi Lubick is an associate editor of ES&T. 6314
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Climbing peaks: In 1982, Giger tackled Cathedral Peak in Yosemite National Park, joined by James Graydon (an environmental engineer and local guide who has worked with Giger) and Martin Reinhard. compounds in the environment,” says Ron Hites, an analytical chemist at Indiana University. Hites started his career at about the same time Giger did and became an associate editor of ES&T alongside Giger. Some analytical quantification was possible at the time for research on pesticides in food, Hites mentions, but environmental scientists relied on biological oxygen demand or chemical oxygen demand to figure out what was in water. “This is what the sewage-treatment guys used to see if their processes worked,” he says. GC and MS on their own, never mind directly coupled together, were intimidating tools, and they were not yet considered an everyday necessity. Hooking the instruments up to a computer and running the machinery were expensive and daunting. At the time, Hites says, “almost no one in the environmental community thought it would be practical to go out and take water samples, soil samples, and measure what was in there.” While learning the new techniques at WHOI, Giger recalls, he first read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. “I read it again 30 years later, on my sabbatical in Australia,” he says. “She was an excellent writer,” and she raised questions that he and his colleagues who studied natural sciences in the 1960s wanted to answer. Several of those like-minded researchers ended up at Eawag in the 1970s. In a short period of time, Stumm transformed a sleepy water-engineering center into a firstclass water-research institute. “He had an unconventional style for doing research, which fell on very fertile ground and created a lot of enthusiasm,” Reinhard says. And Stumm continued to influence the U.S. environmental scene by bringing students and researchers to Eawag, a tradition that Giger carried on later. In that atmosphere, Giger could apply new analytical science to environmental problems “at a time when it was not yet clear that the environmental movement would reach the dimensions that it is now,” says Reinhard. When he
JENNIFER FIELD
Giger resting with former ES&T managing editor Alan Newman after a grueling bike ride in the Lower Engadin of southeastern Switzerland’s Alps. followed Giger to Eawag, he says, “my colleagues at ETH were not impressedsthe idea was to go into industrial chemistry. Going out on a lake to measure water samples was not viewed as glamorous, to say the least. That was his influence on me: to point out that there really is a future in environmental chemistry.... That was not something an ambitious professor at ETH would have engaged in at the time.” The timing in the 1970s was just right: substantial Swiss federal funding started to shift to water research because many of the country’s lakes were eutrophic, including Zurich’s magnificent eponymous lake. “Something had to be done to protect the water resources of Switzerland,” Reinhard says.
To see nonylphenol Lake Zurich’s shores are lined with small communities, with the snow-white Alps looming to the south and southeast. By the 1970s, these townships had been dumping their wastewater directly into the lake for decades. Giger knew that much of this water, treated or not, probably contained household detergents and other pollutants that were contributing to the contamination of the lake. Those detergents included parent compounds that broke down into nonylphenol in relatively high amounts. But how could Giger see nonylphenol and other relevant chemicals when they were diluted in natural waters? By using GC/MS and, later, liquid chromatography (LC) techniques. Most researchers were focused on the nonpolar, hydrophobic compounds in the environment, in part because these compounds were easier to measure at the time. But Giger was eager to take on the challenge of measuring polar, hydrophilic compounds such as sulfonates and relatively polar nonylphenol, says Field. This work was done before the advent of “robust commercialized LC/MS/MS,” she says. “It was a helluva lot harder when all you had was GCs and LCs with detectors like fluorescence and ultraviolet [absorption].” By the mid-1980s, Giger and his co-workers had published their new techniques and data on nonylphenol and its parent compounds in Analytical Chemistry, in ES&T, and elsewhere. Their publications laid out the exact peaks for detecting the compounds. They then found evidence for these contaminants in treated sewage effluent and sludgesand finally in the environment in natural waters. At the same time, the researchers established in a crowning paper in Science (1984, 225, 623-625) that seemingly innocuous parent compounds were transformed biologically in wastewater-treatment plants to a compound of concern: nonylphenol.
Giger’s secret for success A burst of interest attended the Science paper shortly after it was published, says John Sumpter, an ecotoxicologist and head of the Institute of the Environment at Brunel University (U.K.). Then, he says, the paper faded from view, until the mid- to late 1990s, when “people like me got interested in nonylphenol because it had biological activity that mimicked a hormone and a 3D structure surprisingly like estradiol.” Nonylphenol’s weak estrogenicity grabbed the attention of biologists who noted that it was doing things it should not have done, such as feminizing fish. “Walter’s paper on nonylphenol started to get cited [again] effectively 15, 18 years after it was first published,” Sumpter says, and the number of citations per year was 3-4-fold higher than before. That citation rate continues today, which shows the lasting impact of quality research. It also shows Giger’s strength in discovering topics that are ripe for interdisciplinary research. “Walter kept picking out interesting new problems and compounds,” starting with nonylphenol, Hites comments. First, by proving that nonylphenols were in the environment and then by showing how they got there, Giger made these compoundssand the methods to detect themsrelevant, Field says. The key was to look in “the surface water and drinking water and [for] those compounds that are polar enough, soluble enough to make it through these systems,” she says. “He forged very much ahead in the polar side of things, before it was easy and before it was in vogue.” His scientific success can be broken down into three steps, Field says. “The first thing he does when he wants to get into a new area is he looks around for good quantitative analytical methods,” she says. If one does not exist, “then he’ll develop it and publish it.” In step two, Giger tries to understand the environmental occurrence and whether a compound is relevant, and in step three, he continues to explore its behavior, either in an engineered or in a natural system. “And each [step] is a meritorious, individual publishable unit. He’ll go through topics like that,” Field says. “He’s not subdividing his papers; each is stand-alone. And because of step onescreating those methodologies where they don’t existsone of his legacies is, I would say, legitimizing environmental analytical chemistry.” “His legacy is not just techniques,” Kohler adds, “but also the complete mass balances over entire environments.” Whether in sewage-treatment plants or in natural waters, he explains, Giger has developed the tools and the ways to apply them in order to figure out “how much goes in, what goes out, what processes and what metabolites are there, and how it all adds up.” Field also says that at the time she worked with Giger at Eawag in the 1990s, he was increasing the focus on quality control in his own academic laboratory. That extra vigilance allowed him to fight criticisms from industrial sources that his research or data were flawed.
From research to reality At times, Giger’s relationship with industry has been quite volatile. He acknowledges the adversarial nature of the relationship, but he also points out that both published and proprietary data were shared across the seemingly impermeable academic-industrial divide. In particular, the industry researchers who worked on detergents were open to sharing, he says, and “after Schweizerhalle, things opened up.” The city of Schweizerhalle, Switzerland, was the site of a warehouse owned by the major chemical company Sandoz. A fire in the middle of the night on November 1, 1986, destroyed the warehouse, and many of the pesticides and VOL. 42, NO. 17, 2008 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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other chemicals being stored there were washed into the Rhine River by the onslaught of water from firefighters’ hoses. Massive fish kills ensued; eel populations crashed. Walter and others from Eawag followed the deposits of chemicals downstream to the North Sea. He and his coauthors described the work in ES&T (1988, 22, 992-997). They modeled halflives, degradation, and soil persistence of the chemicals, eventually showing that the river would recoverswhile providing a lesson to chemists and others on risk assessment, accident containment (Sandoz had no containment plan to implement following the fire), and other issues. After the accident, Giger worked with other researchers to create international collaborations, such as the Rhine Basin Program, to help rejuvenate the long-polluted river. The Sandoz event also catalyzed his and other academics’ relations with industry, even though environmental awareness of detergents or other chemicals in the environment had begun a decade or more before, says Kohler. “Walter is interested in not only his analytical, let’s say, garden, but in all the themes that are going on outside: degradation, fate.... This is really one of his strengths,” Kohler says. His broad interests complement his ability to talk to scientists and policy makers alike in language they understand. Early in his career, Giger measured tetrachloroethylene in tap water from Du ¨bendorf, which is near Zurich. The source was a well that tapped contaminated groundwater below a dry-cleaning plant. Giger took his results to the town authorities, and they shut down the well, Reinhard recalls. That ability to communicate and the desire to make a difference are “really something that’s part of his personality,” Kohler says. The EU and Switzerland phased out the use of nonylphenolic compounds in detergents (they are still used in the U.S. and elsewhere), he explains, “probably [because of] Walter’s work on the toxicity of the compounds” and because he showed that those chemicals “really accumulated in the sewage sludge in high amounts.” 6316
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New York City’s Jamaica Bay turns out to have the highest levels of nonylphenol polyethoxylates anywhere, says Lee Ferguson, an environmental analytical chemist at the University of South Carolina. When he met Giger in 2002, Ferguson was a graduate student just getting started at Stony Brook University and working in the bay. After Ferguson made a presentation at a Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry session, he immediately went down into the audience to speak to Giger. “We had a conversationsand he agreed to be on my thesis committee” right then and there, Ferguson reports. “He was a great guide for me during the rest of my thesis work,” Ferguson says. “I took him to see firsthand what a polluted estuary looked like.... At any given time, Jamaica Bay is up to 10% wastewater by volume.... You could trace the sewage by community.” As Giger does with many colleaguesswhether graduate students or well-established researchersshe brought Ferguson to Eawag to give a seminar and then brought him into his home. “Walter and his wife, Erika, had us over to their house and served a traditional Swiss raclette meal,” Ferguson says. “My wife still talks about that evening.” Ferguson calls Giger “generous and gregarious” and says he is “not only an academic colleague but also a personal friend”sa sentiment that many of his students, postdoctoral researchers, and co-workers echo. Walter and Erika welcome people into their lives, for dinners in Zurich or for skiing, hiking, or mountain-biking excursions in the Alpssand often to their mountain farmhouse retreat in the Lower Engadin, an alpine valley in southeastern Switzerland. The number of people, both Swiss and foreign, who have traveled through Walter’s laboratory has grown over the years. His visitors include researchers and students based in Vietnam, who are working on a project established by Eawag colleague Michael Berg on arsenic in groundwater. Giger counts 18 people as his Ph.D. students, but more than 100 scientists have worked in his group over the past 30 years, with some returning several times. Giger continues to coauthor papers with people around the world, despite having retired in 2005 and left his position as the head of Eawag’s division for chemical pollutants. Euripides Stephanou, who worked with Giger for 2 years at Eawag in the 1980s and again during a yearlong sabbatical in the mid-1990s, recalls that “Walter was demanding, but in a very soft way.... As a leader, [Giger] maintained a nice atmosphere.” Each person had individual projects, and yet Giger managed to ensure that people could work together on various tasks. ROBERT EGANHOUSE
NAOMI LUBICK
The call of the Alps: Giger, pictured here with alpenhorns in Zurich, continues to climb and consult, keeping his balance of work, family, and outdoor play.
Personal touch
Giger with his wife, Erika, hiking near their home in the Lower Engadin.
Above all, Hites says, Giger is always very calm. “Nothing seems to fluster him. Walter can scope things out and solve things without much excitement,” Hites explains. “Sometimes the things he does, he makes them look too easy, instead of the angst it took to get there.... I think that comes from being a mountain climber.”
In search of a backpack “I thought Walter had totally misjudged us, but it turned out he didn’t,” Field says, recalling her mountaineering excursion with Giger, Kohler, and her husband to the Mo¨nch and Jungfrau. “And that’s typical of Walter: he really sizes up the situation. “I totally respect anyone who is close enough to summit but just says this was not meant to be, for safety reasons,” she continues. “So we still have a backpack we have to go back and get on the Jungfrau.” Even though Giger is now retired, he remains active, both in science and in the outdoors. He closed the ES&T office he ran at Eawag for nearly two decades. More than 2600
manuscripts passed through his hands during his tenure as an ES&T associate editor. However, he continues to publish in ES&T with colleagues from Switzerland, the EU, Vietnam, and the U.S. “This man embodies balance,” Field says, in the room that Giger has made in his life for his family and for his climbing and outdoor adventures, “but that’s not to say that it comes at the expense of his work.... I am astounded even nowshe’ll Skype me, and it’s 11 p.m. there or sometimes 2 a.m.! And we’re just chatting, and I’m looking at the clock, going, ‘Walter, what time is it there?’ This guy doesn’t quit.” Giger continues to keep an office as an emeritus researcher at Eawag, but it may be relatively hard to reach him there. Instead, he may be working hard in the Lower Engadin or traveling to Vietnam with Erika for their first trek in the northern part of the country or visiting Brussels or Atlanta for his consulting worksstill thinking, still climbing many peaks. ES8018989
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