Sixty years ago, there was no Global Public Health and the Common Good major at Boston College. There were also no regulations restricting lead in paint and gasoline, limited awareness of the dangers food pesticides posed to children, and no office in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dedicated to children’s health.
Thanks to Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Public Health and the Common Good program and Global Observatory on Planetary Health and BC ’63, all four of these things are no longer true.
What drives Landrigan from one challenge to the next is simple—a desire to help those who cannot advocate for themselves.
“The thread that connects those pieces is my desire to protect people, in general, but children in particular, from toxic chemicals in the environment,” Landrigan said.
As a child, this value was impressed upon Landrigan by his parents, particularly his father, who taught young men to become missionaries to Black and Native American populations.
“Long before I was even born, he was already thinking about protecting vulnerable populations,” Landrigan said. “And I was brought up that way.”
Landrigan’s desire to serve others was only strengthened when he came to BC as a commuter student from West Roxbury. At the time, 90 percent of BC’s student population were commuters, according to Landrigan.
“The values at BC then were expressed somewhat differently than they are today,” Landrigan said. “It was a different language in that time, 60 years ago, but the values were the same.”
After graduating from BC in 1963, Landrigan didn’t immediately pursue a career in public health. Instead, he attended Harvard Medical School to become a pediatrician.
Shortly after earning his pediatric certification in 1967, Landrigan was drafted into the Vietnam War doctor draft and assigned to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga.
“I went there thinking it was going to be for just two years, fulfill my service obligation, and come back to Boston and practice pediatrics,” Landrigan said.
Instead, he stayed at the CDC for 15 years, helping to combat epidemics across the world.
His first assignment: responding to the measles epidemic in Texarkana, Texas.
It was early 1970, and with the measles vaccine only a few years old, every outbreak had to be investigated.
As he mapped out each case, Landrigan noticed curious divisions along the Texas-Arkansas state line.
“The question is, ‘What was going on?’” Landrigan said. “And the answer was that it had to do with public policy and with structural racism, although we didn’t call it that at the time.”
This was not the usual straightforward medical diagnosis that Landrigan gave out on a day-to-day basis. But he found it fascinating.
“That was eye-opening to me, to see how politics and health could intersect, leading even to the death of children,” Landrigan said.
A year later, Landrigan was sent to El Paso, Texas, to investigate an outbreak of lead poisoning in children. Although Landrigan had worked with children who had lead poisoning at Boston Children’s Hospital, something was different this time.
This type of lead poisoning was not coming from lead chips, but rather from a factory that was spewing out lead-contaminated smoke.
Alongside the late Herbert L. Needleman, a renowned pediatrician and child psychiatrist, Landrigan’s studies documented the toxicity of lead to children. Equipped with these findings—and despite pushback from the lead industry—Landrigan and Needleman successfully persuaded the EPA to remove it from gasoline and paint.
This experience convinced him that the CDC was the place for him. But when he asked to stay, the only placement they could offer him was in Nigeria.
“‘Would you like to go to Nigeria for a year and help us eradicate smallpox?’” Landrigan recalled the CDC asking him. “I absolutely said, ‘Yes.’”
The next 15 years followed a similar path.
“It was episode after episode after episode like that,” Landrigan said.
This work proved deeply impactful—for both Landrigan and the communities he served.
“Chance to make a difference in the real world, chance to put into practice the principles I’d learned at Boston College,” Landrigan said. “That time at CDC transformed my life.”
The work Landrigan did there was quite unlike what he had trained in—but it turned out to be exactly what he enjoyed most.
“I found I really loved doing epidemiology, chasing epidemics, preventing disease, instead of treating children after they had become sick,” Landrigan said.
After his time with the CDC, Landrigan joined Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City in 1985, eventually becoming dean for global health at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 2010.
Around 2005, Landrigan began to consider returning to BC. What prompted him: the generosity of his peers.
“I noticed that some of my Boston College classmates and people who were in the classes right adjacent to me were making major gifts to Boston College,” Landrigan said.
Among these donors were Jack Connors, BC ’63—who made a major gift to establish the Connors Family Learning Center and Connors Center—and Chuck Clough, BC ’64, whose gifts established the Clough School of Theology and Ministry and Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.
Landrigan wanted to give back to BC in his own way, but he wasn’t sure what form this would take.
“I said to myself, ‘Well, I’m a doctor doing public health, I make a decent living, but I’m never going to be able to give seven-figure gifts to Boston College,’” Landrigan said. “‘But what can I do?’”
He landed on establishing an internship program called the Eagle Doc Program at Mount Sinai Hospital that would offer BC students hands-on experience in urban medicine.
The program invited 10 to 12 students every summer to New York and gave each an opportunity to explore their interests in medicine. At the end of the summer, Landrigan and his wife would host the students at their home in Westchester County for a barbecue.
“We were just so impressed by the BC students,” Landrigan said. “They were obviously very bright—we’d expected that. What I really hadn’t expected was how deeply the students were committed to social values.”
After seeing these students’ drive for service, Landrigan began thinking seriously about returning to Boston.
“Wouldn’t it be interesting to spend a few years at Boston College and have a chance to be around young women and men like those?” Landrigan said. “The thought was in my mind.”
Thomas Chiles, a professor, Deluca chair of biology, and vice provost for research and academic planning, encouraged Landrigan to take these thoughts seriously.
After Landrigan spoke at Global Public Health Day sponsored by the University, Chiles knew he had to find a way to bring Landrigan back to BC.
“His talk blew—as we knew—blew everyone out the door,” Chiles said. “He and I were just talking, and he kind of hinted that he’d like to come home at some point, maybe come back to Boston.”
Landrigan and Chiles went back and forth, mulling over the idea until Landrigan eventually decided to make the move in 2018.
“It wasn’t a hard sell because he was always someone that never left BC, if you will,” Chiles said. “And I think timing was right—he wanted to come back to BC.”
Part of what brought him back were BC’s core values.
“He could have stayed at Mount Sinai, but he wanted to come back here,” Chiles said. “There’s something that drew him back—the same thing that’s kept me here 30-plus years.”
Landrigan was tasked with creating a global public health program at BC.
“If you come here, we’d like you to help us envision what global public health should be, or at least build on what we’ve done, and really make it distinctive,” Chiles recalled telling Landrigan.
As inaugural director of the Global Public Health and the Common Good program, Landrigan set out to do exactly that.
“There’s ways this is distinctive,” Chiles said. “This—the uniqueness of this program—is embedded in ethics.”
Summer Sherburne Hawkins, a professor in the Boston College School of Social Work (BCSSW) and associate director of the Global Public Health and the Common Good program, worked with Landrigan to bring the program to life.
Before Landrigan stepped in, the deans of the BCSSW, the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, and the Connell School of Nursing had already begun discussing collaborating to offer public health courses.
“We came up with three courses,” Hawkins said. “Once that launched, we ran it for a number of years and realized there’s a lot of interest, a lot of excitement on campus.”
With Landrigan on board, the program began to take off.
“We really wanted to expand it, and then bringing in his leadership, it really was a way to help pave the way to say, ‘We’re having this inaugural director of the program, now we’re going to really formalize it into a minor,’” Hawkins said.
Today, the program offers students the opportunity to pursue either a bachelor of arts or bachelor of science.
Even before the program was officially established, Landrigan was advising students interested in studying public health on their own. One of these students was Ella Whitman, BC ’23, who was so taken by the field that she decided to create an independent major in it.
At the time, the program was only offered as a minor. As a sophomore, Whitman worked directly with Landrigan to develop her own curriculum.
“I worked with Professor Landrigan to get approval as an independent major and go through that process, which was really meaningful for me because I didn’t even know what public health was when I came to BC, but I saw it shine through in so many courses that I took,” Whitman said.
Taking a course with Landrigan solidified Whitman’s interest in public health.
“I took his class in Children’s Health and the Environment, which was probably the most pivotal academic experience I had as an undergrad because it not only expanded my intellectual horizons, but it also showed me the way I want to lead my career,” Whitman said.
The type of career she envisioned was guided by Landrigan’s approach to moral philosophy.
“He carries with him the values that BC imparts on us, to be an advocate for the vulnerable, to take care of others, to be a man and a woman for others,” Whitman said.
Whitman put her studies to practice when she joined Landrigan’s Global Observatory on Planetary Health as an undergraduate research fellow.
The Observatory specializes in children’s environmental health, investigating how exposure to both particulate and plastic pollution affects children.
The issues Landrigan and the Observatory team tackle are of global significance.
“These are really complex problems,” Chiles said. “And that’s what draws him because they’re so complex and impact so many people. I mean, you’re taking hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people.”
It is not just the number of people Landrigan can help that motivates him, but his desire to help those who truly need it.
“It’s in his DNA to care for others that can’t defend their own rights and care for themselves,” Chiles said. “That is his core—as soon as he got his medical degree he jumped into it, and he hasn’t stopped.”
According to Chiles, Landrigan was thinking about these issues long before he obtained his medical license.
“I think he asked that of himself very early on in his life,” Chiles said. “I think he decided, ‘The best way I can do this is to get a medical degree and be a physician.’”
For Landrigan, advocating for others has never been solely about research. Instead, his work has always been led by the goal of driving policy change.
“He has spent his life studying and working with lawmakers to change the laws to protect children from environmental toxins,” Chiles said. “Healthcare is a human right, and he’s fighting for the rights of others and for the general population.”
Landrigan has taken his fight all the way to the U.S. Congress—and not just once.
“I’ve always had trouble keeping my mouth shut,” Landrigan said. “On numerous occasions, over many years, I have spoken out in various venues about the need to protect people against pollutants and toxic chemicals.”
Whitman has taken inspiration from Landrigan’s outspokenness.
“I’m so empowered by that aspect,” Whitman said. “Because you can certainly train to be the best clinician or the best research scientist in the world, but it means nothing if you can’t translate your findings to help those most vulnerable and those most impacted.”
Chiles has also experienced the power of Landrigan’s advocacy.
“Working with Phil, I would say, What have I learned?,” Chiles said. “I’ve learned not to give up the fight because you’re advocating for others that can’t advocate for themselves.”
One moment when Landrigan saw injustice and acted upon it was the response of Congress members to Sept. 11 first responders.
Landrigan oversaw the medical response to the World Trade Center attacks. He found that many first responders developed abnormalities in lung function because of their service.
Yet, Landrigan found that lawmakers weren’t looking out for the first responders’ health.
“They would pose for pictures with the fire, with the cops and firefighters, with the American flags in the background,” Landrigan said. “And then they would go back to Washington and they would vote against funding for the medical programs to protect those workers.”
Landrigan urged Congress to take meaningful action in support of the first responders.
“That really made me quite angry,” Landrigan said. “I thought it was just wrong, hypocritical. And so I must have testified before the Congress 25 or 30 times about the need to get funding for the brave women and men who had been the first responders after 9/11. And we finally did.”
Landrigan sees similar patterns repeating themselves in the current administration. He believes the rhetoric of lawmakers speaks to upholding children’s health while their actions appear to degrade it.
“The Trump administration has said that their goal is to make American children healthy and get toxins out of American children,” Landrigan said. “And yet, the actions they’ve taken go in exactly the opposite direction.”
According to Landrigan, the Trump administration is rolling back regulations surrounding emissions from coal power plants, specifically mercury.
“I just find it very hypocritical that an administration that claims to be right-to-life is in fact allowing children—even children in the womb—to be poisoned by pollutants that they’re allowing into the atmosphere,” Landrigan said.
Landrigan pointed out that these rollbacks will only lead to disease.
“If we relax the standards and allow more pollutants to come out into the atmosphere through the stacks of power plants, it’s going to cause disease,” Landrigan said.
Landrigan calculated 20,000 unnecessary deaths as a direct consequence of rollbacks to environmental and occupational rules during Trump’s first term.
“I fully anticipate that we’re going to see at least as many unnecessary deaths this time around, if, unless things change,” Landrigan said.
Landrigan sees three concrete avenues to curb these setbacks: Congress blocks these policies, states band together to pass strict pollution rules, and people vote in the next election with American health in mind.
“People need to turn out in the next election and vote, not for one party or another, but to protect American health,” Landrigan said.
A group Landrigan views as particularly important to changing the public health political landscape: young people.
“It’s very important that everybody coming of age in America today at least know a little bit about public health,” Landrigan said.
Landrigan believes part of the problem is that public health issues aren’t as prevalent as they once were.
“Public health is—in a way—we’re victims of our own success,” Landrigan said. “Over the past 75 years, people in medicine and public health have made enormous strides in conquering disease.”
What happened, according to Landrigan, is that people have gotten healthier.
“Diseases that were commonplace a century ago are now gone,” Landrigan said. “They’re just not part of American life. And most people today, if they’re sick, first of all, they’re much healthier than they were, so people have forgotten how powerful the infectious disease and plagues can be.”
Now, Landrigan urges BC students to take at least one public health course.
“I go out of my way to invite students in every school at BC, every school, without exception, to come and take at least one public health course with us,” Landrigan said.
For many students, Landrigan has not only served as a teacher, but an invaluable mentor.
“He’s extremely generous with his time,” Whitman said. “I see the amount of students who walk through the door with maybe doubts or questions about their career or their life choices, and I have watched so many leave with a new sense of how they want to lead this life.”
Many students might not even understand the privilege of receiving Landrigan’s mentorship, according to Whitman.
“When you speak with him, you probably won’t realize that he’s the reason why we don’t have lead in our gasoline anymore, or lead in our paint, and the trillions of dollars that has saved for our country in the future of children is astronomical,” Whitman said.
Hawkins highlighted how Landrigan has also become a mentor to the faculty working under him.
“He’s really supportive of students, he’s supportive of faculty, all of us, but, and it’s really that opening opportunities, really getting people to perform to their highest potential really opening the doors for people,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins believes a major part of Landrigan’s success as a director stems from his commitment to the people he works with.
“Whether it’s introducing somebody just to some other person that they want to meet, writing letters of recommendation, introducing people to others that are thinking about careers—that is what a true director does,” Hawkins said.
Landrigan’s commitment to the BC community is mutual, according to Hawkins.
“When Professor Landrigan either asks you to do something or is leading something it’s very easy to say ‘yes,’ knowing that his ideas are fantastic,” Hawkins said.
Whitman experienced this firsthand when Landrigan offered her a position as an early career researcher at the Observatory.
After six years of working with him, she has come to understand his commitment to his work, as well as to those who will continue it forward.
“Dr. Landrigan makes you feel like you can do anything,” Whitman said. “To be able to give back to the next generation is such a gift, and I know he recognizes that he has it and he’s doing an incredible job sharing that with other kids and students at BC.”
His work is not done yet, and Chiles doesn’t see it slowing down anytime soon.
“He has an inexhaustible supply of energy,” Chiles said. “He doesn’t rest, because the work is never done. I mean, it’s amazing.”
Chiles cannot find an adequate comparison for Landrigan.
“He’s a rare individual,” Chiles said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in my lifetime. I’ve read about it.”
After a long career of reshaping public health across the globe, Landrigan has returned to his roots here at BC. But in many ways, he never really left.
“There’s no question that all through my professional life, I had tried, to a greater or lesser extent, to live those values,” Landrigan said.
Leave a Reply