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his slides to a pathologist, who looked them over and immediately suggested a visit to an oncologist—it appeared to be a form of leukemia. A doctor at Baylor confirmed the worst: Gros most likely had B-cell chronic leukemia.
    â€œHe gave me all the stats, and said there was no chemotherapy for it,” Gros said. “He basically gave me a fifteen-year life span. It was hard to digest. A transplant would have been an option, if we had a bone-marrow donor.”
    Devastated, Gros shared the diagnosis with his family, and none of them could believe what they were hearing. There was no history of cancer in their family, and Gros himself seemed as healthy as ever. About a week later, Gros sought some respite on the golf course. But during the round he got a call from the Baylor doctor, who apologized for a mistake in reading his slides. “Itturned out it was not B-cell, it was T-cell, and it’s worse,” Gros said. “You die soon. It could be tomorrow.”
    Gros and his wife sought a consultation at the Mayo Clinic, where they met with an oncologist who confirmed the diagnosis of T-cell leukemia. The only possible treatment, the doctor said, would be a bone marrow transplant. Gros then decided that since he had one of the best cancer hospitals in the world in his own backyard—the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas in Houston—he should go there. The head of the cancer center’s Department of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Biology, Dr. Richard Champlin, who had volunteered to assist victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986, was considered one of the best in his field.
    Champlin and Dr. Michael Keating, a well-known specialist in leukemia, took on the case together. First they tried treating Gros with two types of drugs: interferon, which has side effects such as extreme drowsiness, and psoralen, which has a one-year regimen that involves the use of ultraviolet radiation. Neither of these drugs worked, however, and Gros was out of options. Champlin and Keating told Gros they needed to monitor his condition closely and would let him know when the time came for a bone marrow transplant.
    Two years into the waiting period, in November 1999, Gros was working in his office when his secretary said someone from the CDC in Atlanta wanted to talk to him. Gros assumed he was being contacted about some emerging threat to public health. In a way, he was right, but it was a threat that had emerged years ago, when Gros was stationed at Camp Lejeune from 1980 to 1983.
    The caller said the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry had recently discovered that some of the drinking water at the military base was poisoned during the time he was there. Gros said he knew immediately why he was ill. But rather than askhim about his health, the ATSDR representative started asking questions about his youngest son, Tom, who had been conceived and born at Camp Lejeune. Gros said that Tom was fine, thank you, “but let me tell you about me!” The response was that there was no indication that adults had been affected by the water contamination. “Are you serious?” Gros said he replied.
    It didn’t take long for Gros to confirm his suspicion that his leukemia was very likely caused by poisoned water at the Marine Corps base. The ATSDR ’s Public Health Assessment, published in 1997—the year Gros had been diagnosed—stated that people there were exposed to volatile organic compounds including TCE and PCE , possibly for as long as thirty years before the contaminated wells were shut down in 1985. Scores of studies available online linked both chemicals to cancer, including leukemia, with an incubation time of about ten years between exposure and effects. For Gros, it was twelve years. “It’s well proven now,” he said more than fifteen years after his diagnosis.
    The doctor was grateful, at least, that neither of his boys or