AFTON, Minn. – A former one 3M Scientist says she now believes executives knew PFAS were potentially harmful long before they shared that information.
Inside Kris Hansen’s Afton home, it’s clear she has a deep love for the environment.
“We have our tomatoes here and some nice kale around them,” Hansen said. “It makes me feel good and it’s something I did often with my dad.”
But it also inspired her career as a scientist.
“My father worked at 3M for over 40 years. He was the highest ranked scientist they had,” she said.
And in 1996 she also joined the environmental laboratory. A year later, at age 28, Hanson says her boss gave her an assignment: find out what showed up in random human blood samples.
“I discovered that the interfering substance was PFOS, a fluorochemical compound manufactured exclusively by 3M at the time,” she said.
3M has developed PFOS, a specific fluorochemical, for its products. PFOS is now included in a larger group of chemicals known as PFAS.
They do not break down in the environment and we now know that they build up in our bodies and can make us sick.
But Hansen says she didn’t know that part in the 1990s. To be sure of her findings, Hansen says she tested more samples from the United States and other countries.
“All of these samples had a strong signal for PFOS,” she said.
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So she told her boss. This was 1997.
“He looked at it and said, ‘This changes everything,’ and he walked into his office. It’s a very special memory for me,” she said.
Hansen says she was “really shocked” by the discovery.
“I felt like I had discovered that PFOS, a substance that was really unique to 3M, was widespread in the general population,” she said.
From Hansen’s perspective, what followed was inaction.
“I really thought they would be as shocked and surprised and horrified as I was, and they would want to say, ‘How did this happen and how can we fix it?’” she said. “And I didn’t feel that for months.”
3M declined to appear on camera, but said in a statement in part: “Like the science and technology of PFAS, society’s and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves, have evolved, and so has the way we handle PFAS.”
The company also cited its industry-leading exit from production of other fluorochemicals and pledged to end PFAS production by the end of next year.
“3M has shared important information about PFAS for decades, including publishing many of its findings about PFAS in publicly available scientific journals dating back to the early 1980s. Those journals were and remain available to the scientific community and the public,” the statement said. read.
Hansen says she tested blood samples from the 1950s from Korean War recruits. They were negative.
“It just so happens that this was before the commercialization of 3M’s fluorochemicals,” she said. “At that moment the doubters were silent.”
Hansen says that during a meeting with a 3M scientist in 1998, she discovered that her discovery was not the first.
“He said, ‘I don’t understand why they’re making such a big deal about this. We knew about this in 1975,'” she said.
Documents released by 3M as part of a 2018 settlement show that an older type of 3M fluorochemical was found in the blood of the general population in the 1970s.
“He was told not to share that data outside of 3M,” she said. “It made me understand that there was a certain amount of cover-up within the company. And I think it’s one thing to lose track of a chemical. Inexcusable. But it’s another to deliberately to cover up.”
Hansen first shared her story with ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization.
Wednesday on WCCO 4 News at 10 a.m. we’ll dive deeper with Hansen, and you’ll hear what she says happened when she shared her findings with leaders at 3M.
Erin Hassanzadeh
