LETTERS World security Dear Sir: A popular belief among Americans is that an exorbitant portion of our fiscal budget is spent on military activities. Many are calling for a major reduction in military expenditures in order to focus on the alleviation of domestic problems. The reduction of our defense budget must be done in such a manner as to eradicate unnecessary expenditures while increasing the funding of military programs that are essential. For instance, if the public outcry forces the political entities to call for reductions, which programs are the most susceptible to the deepest cuts? I am fearful that the Installation Restoration (IR) program (which is funded by the Department of Defense) will be most exposed to such actions. The group involved in this IR program consists of engineers and earth scientists who work to clean up hazardous wastes generated from industrial processes utilized by the military over the past five decades. A significant portion of the cleanup work is performed by private contractors. Besides working to remediate hazardous waste sites on military installations, the people involved in the IR program also provide a buffer between the contractors and the military and effectively save millions of tax dollars each year by keeping the contractors honest. As it stands, the IR program is understaffed and severely underfunded. Without the IR program in place, utter chaos would result at the expense of the environment and the economic stability of the private sector concerned with environmental remediation. An expansion of this program is imperative if there is to be any hope for cost-effective remediation of the hazardous-waste sites on our military bases. I am fearful that a simple “blind” reduction in military expenses will prove detrimental to both strategic defense and quality of life from an environmental perspective. When knowledgeable and caring individuals call for a reduction in the defense budget, they need to specify that military activities such as the IR program should be ex1434
Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 23, No. 12, 1989
panded while other nonproductive activities are eliminated. I therefore advocate a reduction and reallocation of military funding. A reallocation of the rescued funds should include an increase in salary for those qualified, civil servant environmental scientists who might opt for private sector careers because of financial pressures. This would solve many problems: qualified personnel could be retained at least until projects are completed; people unqualified for certain tasks would not be forced into attempting to bluff their way around technical issues; improved morale among employees would be observed due to the generation of increasing amounts of advancement opportunities; and greater respect from private and academic sectors would result from increases in quality and productivity.
posed to PCBs reductively dechlorinated the more highly chlorinated PCB congeners (4). The promise that strain DCB-1 holds lies in its availability as a model organism for the study of the mechanism, energetics, and genetics of reductive dechlorination in microbial systems. For example, using strain DCB-1 it has been found that microorganisms can derive energy from an (exergonic) aryl dechlorination (5).
References (l)Thornas, J. M.; Ward, C. H. Environ. Sci. Echnol. 1989,23(7), 760-66. (2)Shelton, D. R.; Tiedje, J . M. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 1984, 48, 840-48. (3)DeWeerd, K. A . et al. FEMS Microbiol. Ecol. 1986,38, 331-39. (4)Quensen. J. E 111; Tiedje, J. M.; Boyed, S . A . Science 1988,242, 752-54. (5)Dolfing, J. Arch. Microbiol. 1989, in press.
Jan Dolfing Department of Biochemistry University of Groningen The Netherlands
Mark Kram
Hydrologist Ventura. CA 93003
Biorestoration Dear Sir: In a recent ES&T feature on remedial action technologies, Thomas and Ward suggest that an obligately anaerobic dehalogenating bacterium, strain DCB-1, holds promise for initiating biodegradation of polychlorinated biphenyls (1).This suggestion is unnecessarily speculative. Strain DCB-1 has been isolated from an anaerobic 3chlorobenzoate degrading bacterial consortium and is the only anaerobe available in pure culture that is able to reductively remove chlorine substituents from an aromatic ring, but unfortunately this activity is restricted to chlorinated benzoates with chlorine in the meta position (2). Strain DCB-1 does not dechlorinate other classes of chlorinated aromatic compounds like chlorophenols or chloroanilines (3), and there are no reports that it dechlorinates chlorinated biphenyls. Microbial dechlorination of polychlorinated biphenyls can, however, be achieved by exploiting other microorganisms. Recently Quensen et al. showed unequivocally that microorganisms from Hudson River sediments that had been preex-
R e authors reply: We agree with the comments made by J. Dolfing concerning the metabolic capabilities of the bacterium, DCB-1. Our paper should have stated “. . .the results of studies using anaerobic sediments from the Hudson River hold promise for the biodegradation of highly chlorinated aromatic compounds such as the polychlorinated biphenyls (1).The obligately anaerobic bacterium DCB-1 has been reported to reductively dechlorinate 3-chlorobenzoic acid (2). Chlorine substituents are removed by these anaerobic organisms, which may allow further metabolism of the compounds to innocuous products by other organisms.” We thank J. Dolfing for his comments.
References (l)Quensen, J. E 111; Tiedje, J. M.; Boyd, S. A . Science 1988,242, 752-54. (2)Shelton, D. R.; Tiedie, J. M. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 1984; 48, 840-48
0013-936X/89/0923-1434$01.50/0
C, H. Ward J. M. Thomas
Rice University Houston, TX 7725 1
1989 American Chemical Society
