ON A LATE AFTERNOON IN EARLY FEBRUARY, DR. FARDIN OLIAEI drove to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency headquarters in St. Paul one last time. She had come for a bitter chore—to clean out her office and close a chapter in her life. Oliaei had worked at the MPCA for 16 years. A chemist and biologist by training, with a Ph.D. in environmental sciences, she spent the last five years as coordinator of the agency's emerging contaminants program, where she spearheaded the agency's research into the sorts of obscure and poorly understood pollutants that most laypeople have never heard of. But to Oliaei, the job was as much a calling as a career. Since 2001, she had become especially passionate about her investigation of a family of synthetic compounds called perfluorochemicals, or PFCs. That Oliaei would be interested in PFCs made plenty of sense. The compounds—developed for use in an array of stain- and water-resistant products—had been detected in the blood of people and animals worldwide. From the outset, Oliaei suspected that Minnesota would prove to be ground zero for PFC contamination, because the 3M Company had manufactured and disposed of the compounds here... More >>>