On April 29, 2007, Susanne Rust, the paper’s science reporter, co-wrote an article with investigative reporter Cary Spivak about the controversial rise of largely unregulated research organizations that worked both for the government and for various drug and medical manufacturers. In it, they briefly mentioned the chemical bisphenol A, which had long intrigued Rust. She first learned about it in 1996 during a graduate class on hormones and behavior. “It had always been something that I thought was really interesting and was sort of in the back of my head. And then when I became a reporter, I started seeing more and more of these kind of stories” about chemicals in the environment affecting health, she says.

Science reporter . Rust’s background was in biological anthropology. She had been working toward a PhD at the University of Wisconsin until a family tragedy caused her to drop out of the program and turn instead to writing. In 2002, Rust applied for a Mass Media Fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which placed scientists in newsrooms and paid them a small stipend for a summer. Rust won a fellowship, which sent her to the Journal Sentinel , where the temporary position turned into a job the following year.

Over the next few years, Rust wrote stories on a wide range of topics, from sleep apnea in children and human growth hormone in major league baseball to whale research and longer life expectancies for premature babies. But bisphenol A captured her interest and worried her in ways that some of the other scientific topics did not.