"A large body of science has linked phthalates to a variety of serious health conditions, including premature birth and infertility."
"CARY, N.C. — Earl Gray was astonished by what he found when he cut into the laboratory rats. Some had testicles that were malformed, filled with fluid, missing or in the wrong place. Others had shriveled tubes blocking the flow of sperm, while still more were missing glands that help produce semen.
For months, Gray and his team had been feeding rats corn oil laced with phthalates, a class of chemical widely used to make plastics soft and pliable. Working for the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1980s, Gray was evaluating how toxic substances damage the reproductive system and tested dibutyl phthalate after reading some early papers suggesting it posed a risk to human health.
Sitting on a screened porch on a humid summer day more than 40 years later, Gray recalled the study and the grisly birth defects. “It was in enough animals, so we knew it wasn’t random malformations,” said Gray, 80, who retired after nearly 50 years with the agency.
Gray and other scientists were awakening to the potential dangers of phthalates, which were making their way into nearly every human being on the planet as plastics became a way of life in the 20th century."
Jake Spring reports for the Washington Post December 2, 2025.
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