David Steinman - Early Career

Early Career

In 1985, David Steinman was writing for the LA Weekly when he learned that fish in the Santa Monica Bay were tainted with DDT and PCBs. He began to wonder how many poisons were in other foods he ate. He started doing research into the levels of industrial pollutants and pesticides in human blood and published his team’s findings in the Journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. The resulting human blood study led to the Heal the Bay movement that carried out a cleanup of Santa Monica Bay.

As a journalist, Steinman won awards for his reporting from the California Newspaper Publishers Association, Sierra Club, and the Society of Professional Journalists (“Best of the West: Environment and Natural Resources Reporting”).

In 1986, Steinman testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Health and the Environment as an expert witness on the levels of chemical contaminants in the blood of fishermen and women eating locally caught fish from the Santa Monica Bay. From 1989 to 1991, Steinman served as a member of the Committee on Evaluation of Safety of Fishery Products for the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine. Steinman was also a contributing author of Seafood Safety (National Academy Press, 1991).