Chemical makers knew the harms. It didn’t matter.

By Becca Rothfeld | The Washington Post | May 2, 2025

Read the full article by Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)

"In the cult-classic film “The Stuff” (1985), workers manning a quarry happen upon a mysterious, gooey substance burbling out of the ground. When they find themselves oddly compelled to taste it, they discover that it is improbably delicious. Soon, the miraculous goop is ubiquitous. Advertisements with the catchy jingle “Enough is never enough!” blare on every television set; cartons of the Stuff appear in every refrigerator. As befits the centerpiece of a delightfully campy ’80s horror movie, however, the Stuff is not the harmless ice-cream-adjacent treat it appears to be. Naturally, it is an extraterrestrial being that colonizes the minds of those who consume it. The executives distributing this highly lucrative product are aware of its origins and its addictive properties, but they go to extraordinary lengths to hide the ugly truth from an increasingly addled public in the hopes of safeguarding their profits.

The story of “The Stuff” is, for all intents and purposes, true, with one crucial modification. The real-world Stuff is not an alien concoction but something even more horrifying: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a class of synthetic chemicals that have been linked to a litany of cancers, as well as to thyroid problems, obesity, infertility, weakened immune systems and more. And as the investigative journalist Mariah Blake documents in her riveting and horrifying new book, “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals,” PFAS were not devised by Martians with no investment in humanity’s health or survival. They are the work of members of our own species: scientists subsidized by the United States government."