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I guess I can see some of you.

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Today I'm going to read you a letter that I'm going to be sending to the President and the First Lady as an environmental health analyst and as you can see a rapidly aging grandmother.

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This is at the very top of my bucket list and I want the White House family to read this letter and I want millions of homes around the world to read this letter as well.

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And the letter goes like this.

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Dear Mr. President and First Lady, have you ever reflected about what the future looks like today for young people who fall in love, marry and have children?

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I was so lucky when I carried each of my four children in my womb back in the 1950s.

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In those days, as soon as our babies were born, we counted their fingers and toes and my husband, of course, checked their gonads.

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The boys.

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After that, we heaved a sigh of relief.

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And as grateful parents went blissfully on with our lives.

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We gave no thought to the magic of the chemistry in the womb that has evolved over four billion years, enabling a single cell to split and keep splitting and splitting and moving about and miraculously create a baby in the womb.

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Nor did we give any thought to the numerous disorders afflicting children today.

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Think what the statistics tell us about the odds of children developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, commonly called ADHD or autism or diabetes or obesity.

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Today, one out of every three babies will develop diabetes and if you are an African American or among the minorities, that will be every other baby.

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One out of every 88 babies born today will develop autism spectrum disorder.

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And if you are a boy, that is one out of every 54.

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And in less than 10 years, 80% of the population will be overweight.

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No woman should have to live with knowledge about epidemics like that throughout her pregnancy.

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And then watch every day for any telltale sign that her precious baby might be diabetic or autistic because somehow the chemistry in her womb had become flawed.

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Many of these disorders that were once rare are the result of fossil fuel-derived chemicals interfering with our endocrine system, the overarching system that integrates all our body's glands.

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Like the pancreas.

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Like the pancreas, thyroid, adrenals, sex organs, and segments of the brain.

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And now we know even body fat, the stomach, and the intestines are all part of the endocrine system.

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And they all produce hormones and function under hormonal control.

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Hormones regulate how we develop in the womb and how our bodies function.

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They can affect our mood, our capacity for empathy, our sexuality, and our ability to process information so we can reach conclusions about what we are hearing and seeing and doing.

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And most important, our ability to look each other in the eye and socialize and solve problems.

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In essence, hormones humanize us.

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Today, checking our newborns is not as simple as counting fingers and toes to know if our babies are all right.

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So how could the delicate endocrine chemistry with hormones operating in the womb at concentration at parts per billion and parts per trillion suddenly be undermined in just three or four generations?

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When my babies were born in the 50s, no one could perceive the impending plethora of epidemics that chemicals would cause.

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In those days, we believed the mantra that there was a barrier in the placenta and a barrier in the embryo and fetal brain that would never let stray chemicals get through.

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The discovery in 1968 that alcohol consumption could breach those barriers should have opened the door for a flood of new research and intensive testing of other chemicals on fetal development.

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But it didn't.

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Back in the 40s and 50s, numerous corporate laboratories were built around the world in order to create more and more chemicals using as feedstock the toxic byproducts from fossil fuels to increase profits.

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We were sold pesticides, plastics, detergents, cosmetic ingredients, food additives, and more on the promise that there would be better living through modern chemistry.

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And then in the 50s and 60s, the US and Russia began to allocate vast sums of money for outer space research.

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In order to get to outer space, innovative chemicals were designed to make construction material lighter and stronger than steel.

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These innovations got us to the moon and on Mars and also got us more new products for our homes and offices and more new recreational products.

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If there was ever a need for inner space research on what these chemicals could do in our bodies, it was when outer space exploration began.

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But no one thought of that then.

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As a result, today the surface of the earth is saturated with man-made chemicals that society and the global economy have become totally dependent upon.

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Chemicals that can interfere in the womb with the delicate endocrine system that makes possible the development and differentiation of that precious single cell in the womb into a normal, healthy baby.

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Yes, a small number of the nearly 100,000 new chemicals produced up through 2011 were tested, but at high occupational level doses for the probability they could cause immediate harm, obvious birth defects, and cancer.

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And governments set standards using risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis to determine whether a chemical is safe based on the odds of getting cancer.

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But the odds that a baby born today will become compromised with one or more endocrine disorder are far greater than the odds of getting a malignant cancer.

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This has happened because of the old chemical safety standards that predominantly focus on cancer.

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Those standards are deeply embedded in the language of federal health regulations, allowing corporations to continue to put dangerous chemicals into their products, into the food we eat, and in the air we breathe.

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Chemicals are now in wide use that were never tested using assays that can detect disturbances in the womb that eventually lead to diseases that might not appear until puberty or even later in life, such as obesity, infertility, dementia, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's.

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Our laws have let this happen.

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We should have caught on when back in the 1980s it was discovered that animals at the top of the food web in the Great Lakes had been put at great risk by PCBs.

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Remember, PCBs made possible the electrification of rural US in the 1930s.

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They are made from benzene, a toxic by-product of oil and natural gas, and chlorine, a highly reactive gas, and are persistent in the environment for many years.

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These chemicals used as heat resistors and fire retardants had bioaccumulated 10 to 250 times or more at each level up the food web.

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A large number of the adult animals were unable to reproduce, while the offspring of others were so compromised they never made it to maturity.

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And in addition, many of the mature birds had lost their parenting instincts, displaying all forms of indifference in attending to the nest and the nestling.

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Another chilling warning came about 10 years later, when it was discovered that mothers eating fish from the Great Lakes had given birth to children who had symptoms of ADHD and reduced resistance to infection.

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And that the intensity of the brain damage was correlated with the level of PCBs in the mother's blood that, just like the birds, they shared with their babies before they were born.

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While everyone thought that the PCBs were being phased out, the chemical industry had already started using bromine as a substitute for chlorine on the benzene and selling the compounds to replace the PCBs.

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These brominated compounds were so universally sold and dispersed as fire retardants before the technology was developed to detect them in the environment.

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And then again, like the PCBs, were found in the animals and humans from the Arctic to the Antarctic because they too are persistent.

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And like the PCBs affect the brain, the immune and thyroid systems, sperm count and sperm quality.

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It is incomprehensible that any corporation would go ahead after the mistakes made with chlorine and bromine and take fluorine, one of the most highly reactive chemicals in the world,

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and a sister chemical to chlorine and bromine, and begin selling tons of fluorinated compounds that persist over geological time,

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to make fabrics waterproof and soil resistant, and to prevent scrambled eggs from sticking to the frying pan.

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These chemicals are in very personal products next to our bodies, in toiletries and clothing, in furniture and car seat fabrics, and in our cookware.

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However, in just the past two years, a cadre of independent, pioneering scientists incorporating the principles of endocrinology in their research found that these fluorinated chemicals affect prenatal development,

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the adrenals, the pancreas, the thyroid system, the male and female gonads, and even the liver, kidney, and immune systems.

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Yet current public health policy prevents regulators from using this information to protect us because of the way our laws are structured.

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Chemicals like these raise all kinds of questions about how decisions are being made within corporations and what is wrong with our toxic substance control laws.

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Nonetheless, there is hope.

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I believe that our salvation lies with the pioneers coming from the disciplines of endocrinology, immunology, biochemistry, developmental and molecular biology, neurodevelopment, electron microscopy, and more.

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Unlike toxicology, their research was not designed for regulatory purposes, but solely to better understand the mysteries of how we develop, reproduce, function, and behave.

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In other words, what makes us human.

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They now have thousands of peer-reviewed papers written about hundreds of chemicals interfering with the endocrine system, many at doses thousands of times lower than they were ever tested before.

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Now back in 2003, two years after 9-1-1-1, my college-age grandson, after a few hours at my computer reading some of these new research findings, turned to me and said,

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Why, this is nothing more than industrial terrorism in the womb.

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Mr. President, if you really want to go after the terrorists that pose the most imminent threat to our nation and our economy,

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you need to make these stealth chemicals your number one priority.

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Keep in mind that there is no safe level of exposure for many of these chemicals.

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They penetrate the body in the womb at levels so low, they have to be radio-labeled so that each atom can be counted and then their weight extrapolated from that to get the count.

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Mr. President, the best way to get out of the hole is to stop digging it deeper.

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And it is here where you, as the head of our nation, can step in and help.

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Keep in mind that both the ravages of climate change and the increasing endocrine-related epidemics are intimately connected with the increasing use of fossil fuels and their byproducts.

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By drilling deep into the bowels of the earth for coal, oil and natural gas, we have unwittingly and catastrophically altered the chemistry of the biosphere and the human womb.

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And something must be done immediately.

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You are in an excellent position to change the course of this tragedy and get right to the source of the problem.

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Remember the Manhattan Project?

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The U.S. built an atomic bomb in two years and ten months.

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The United States could again bring together some of the most brilliant minds in the world, this time for peaceful purposes, to provide renewable energy for the globe and significantly remove the fossil sources of chemicals that are the cause of so many disorders.

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And that would be a giant step toward world peace.

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Let's face it.

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Humankind is in the midst of a dire health crisis that requires immediate intensive care to survive.

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And sadly, the current health-related policies have failed to protect us.

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A new level of discourse is needed immediately between science and policy.

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And again, Mr. President, you can fill this need from the Oval Office by bringing together leaders from our nation and around the world who have records of independence and integrity,

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and those articulate scientists who understand the endocrine system and its vulnerability.

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Appoint them to serve on a council dedicated solely to inner space research with a platform that embodies the principles of endocrinology.

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The principles that encompass the very essence of life.

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Charge this inner space research council to create an entirely new set of 21st century rules and policies to address the chemically induced disorders that are dehumanizing us on a global scale.

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And you must do this, Mr. President, to save our children's future and indeed all our futures.

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Thank you for reading this letter, signed Theo Colborn.

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And for those of you sitting here in the audience, you're needed to start a campaign from the bottom up to support the president.

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Let him know you care.

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Send a YouTube copy of this talk to the White House and everyone on your listserv and get them to start sending copies to the White House too.

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And we may get something started.

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I want to thank you.

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What about this?

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What should be the head about this old plan?

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We'll help you from what it

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defense Is the common plan in the world of the parts of the world.

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Um, the kind of thing we need.

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I want to think about this.

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Thanks.