As Thanksgiving neared, the investigative team felt ready to write. They had interviewed more than 100 scientists, physicians, and industry and government officials, and examined thousands of pages of regulatory documents. The question was: what should they write? What was the lead? The failure of the EPA to carry out mandated testing? That industry-funded studies seemed biased in favor of BPA’s safety? That NTP research was shoddy? Or, explosively, Rust’s conclusion that BPA was not safe?

USA Today . In part, their decision would be influenced by the fact that on October 31, USA Today had published a 2,500-word piece on BPA called ‘ Everywhere Chemicals’ In Plastics Alarm Parents . The impressive article had upset the team at the time, because it feared that USA Today had beat the Journal Sentinel on the story. On second reading, however, they realized their information was far more extensive than what USA Today reported. On the other hand, now that it was time to write, the reporters wanted to make sure their story was as distinctive as possible. There were also new developments. In October 2007, California passed legislation banning certain phthalates—a family of chemicals that made plastics soft and pliable and which were used in many personal-care products to hold fragrance and color. The ban would come into force starting in 2009. The reporters would want to include that.

As they strategized, they consulted Special Projects Editor Katches about format. He still wanted a two-part series. One part, he stressed, should feature Rust’s findings on BPA. “[He] was insistent that what I had done should be almost like the basis of the story itself, and he wasn’t satisfied with it just being a paragraph somewhere halfway down in another story,” recalls Rust.

Dangerous or benign? After all her careful work, Rust had thought it would be fairly easy to write up her conclusion, based on her examination of the scientific evidence, that BPA was in fact far more dangerous than the EPA and other government regulatory agencies seemed to acknowledge. But as Rust weighed the facts, she began to second-guess herself. How reliable were her results anyway? She had a scientific background, and had “double, triple, quadruple-checked everything,” she says. But at the end of the day, she was still one science reporter, effectively taking on the chemical industry, plus the formidable National Toxicology Program and the Environmental Protection Agency. Was she just confirming her own biases?

What’s more, the conclusion that BPA was toxic was incendiary. Was it responsible of the paper to publish such a finding, knowing that readers could do little about it? At the same time, it was surely irresponsible to withhold her doubts from readers. Rust wished she could find a wise arbiter, a dispassionate observer who would confirm her results. But there seemed to be no such person. The burden was on her, and on her judgment. Says Rust:

I made sure that I had cited the right studies and the right information over and over and over again. But you know, I still felt like, maybe I’m just not getting this and somebody is going to call me on it… We were terrified.