While pursuing a public health degree in the 1980s, Mark R. Farfel visited a clinic at the Kennedy Krieger Institute where scores of lead-poisoned boys and girls spilled into the hallways awaiting treatment.
There, he reached the central epiphany of his career: Youngsters already harmed by deteriorating lead paint were receiving world-class care. But who was "treating" the inner-city rowhouses that were sickening kids in the first place?
"All we were doing was waiting for children to be poisoned," said Farfel, who then spent two decades at Kennedy Krieger and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health studying ways to reduce the hazard posed by lead in and around homes.
A self-described "shy guy," Farfel now finds himself in a predicament he would never have expected during a career in which he won praise tackling one of the city's most persistent public health problems. For the second time in the past decade, he faces criticism that he exposed poor black children to environmental hazards in the name of science.
The current outcry concerns the spreading of compost on the lawns of nine Baltimore homes in 2000 - a study he said protected children by chemically binding up lead in the soil but that black leaders say may have exposed youngsters to hidden contaminants.
Marvin L. "Doc" Cheatham Sr., president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said at a news conference last week: "We don't want to do this kind of work at the expense of turning our children into guinea pigs."
The issue has spilled over into Congress, where Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, plans to investigate the experiment as part of a wider look into the health impact of using sludge and compost as fertilizers.
For Farfel, hired three years ago to run New York City's registry of people exposed to environmental fallout from the World Trade Center attacks, the criticism flies in the face of everything he's tried to accomplish.
"I've really dedicated my career to public health, to the health of children," Farfel, 50, said in a phone interview. "I feel very hurt by the things being said, and I certainly never would do anything that would hurt children or families."
The "things" people are saying started in 2001 when the Maryland Court of Appeals likened an earlier study of Farfel's to Nazi experiments and to the Tuskegee study in which government researchers in Alabama purposely left black syphilis patients untreated to study the disease's progression.
