The Accidental Ethicist

The Hero Scientist of Flint sat in his mountainside home talking about all the ways in which he has failed.

“I’m a lousy adviser, I’m a lousy husband,” he said. “I’m pretty much lousy at everything I do.”

Marc Edwards sipped a 55-calorie Budweiser. He is lean and handsome in a Crispin Glover kind of way, with prominent cheekbones and a mouth that tapers down at the corners, adding a note of ambivalence to every smile.

In interviews, Mr. Edwards cuts a sharp-elbowed figure. The professor of civil and environmental engineering from Virginia Tech, whose work on water corrosion has won him more accolades than he can fit on his wall, says the institutions entrusted with protecting the public welfare are overrun by cowards and cheats. The highlights on that wall include distinctions from the White House and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which in 2007 gave him a “genius” grant.

Informally, Mr. Edwards was recently lavished with another title, “hero,” for helping the residents of Flint, Mich., with an emergency research effort that uncovered high lead levels in the city’s drinking water and discredited state and local officials who had told them the water was safe.

Time magazine this year named Mr. Edwards and Mona Hanna-Attisha, a Flint pediatrician whose blood-lead-levels research complemented Mr. Edwards’s work there, in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The pair gave Virginia Tech’s commencement address in the spring, running into the football stadium to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” as hundreds of students and faculty members cheered.

That was in May. Now the summer was nearly over, and Mr. Edwards was adjusting to life in his new role as standard-bearer for watchdog science. I visited Mr. Edwards in August, the night before the first meeting of a course he teaches on ethics in engineering. He started the course in 2010, after his first brush with heroism, in Washington, D.C., where he fought the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over issues relating to lead in the water there.

At home, the professor spoke with the same uninflected voice that he used to condemn his opponents in hearings and interviews, but his righteous self-confidence was nowhere to be found. Mr. Edwards was tired. He had just returned from the West Coast, and in two days he would be going to Flint; Virginia Tech had given him money to support his research team’s work in Flint and elsewhere.

“I definitely don’t feel like I deserve it,” he said.

“I’m a coward, like, 99 percent of the time.”

“If this had backfired, I would have been cut loose.”

If it’s true that the water crises in D.C. and Flint represent the “tip of the iceberg” of nationwide infrastructural decay and environmental injustice that government officials are loath to acknowledge, the country might need more engineers who think like Marc Edwards.

But should they want to?

Above the fireplace hangs a drawing that Mr. Edwards’s son, Ethan, made him for Father’s Day a decade ago, with a title in crooked letters: “My Hero is: My Dad.” In the adult world, the dynamics of heroism have proved complicated. The professor’s attempts to act ethically have harmed his relationships and left him feeling harassed and haunted. Last November, after his work helped turn the tide in Flint, Mr. Edwards asked Ethan, then 16, to change the trigger-lock combination on the family gun. The professor was having thoughts of suicide.

“Sucks to be me,” he said now, at home, on the mountain.

Night was falling. The next day, the professor would greet the two dozen or so graduate students in his ethics class and warn them that the engineering world is rife with temptation and betrayal, it is easy to become the person you always hated, and if you manage to avoid that, you still might have trouble sleeping at night.

Mr. Edwards, who is 52, has a long memory. His first memory is from when he was about 2 years old, resting in the arms of his grandfather, comforted by the thought that someone in the adult world was pleased with him. After his grandfather died of cancer two years later, anxiety caused young Marc’s hair to fall out in patches.

Growing up in Ripley, N.Y., near Lake Erie, Mr. Edwards embraced responsibility and disliked babysitters. Once, after he injured his hand with a hatchet, he hid the wound from his parents because he feared they would stop letting him cut firewood. In school he excelled at science, and came to admire the great skeptics of history — Galileo, Copernicus, Charles Darwin — who had been denounced by the church as heretics.

“Loyalty,” he said. “That’s what ethics is about: What are you ultimately loyal to?”

In recent years, Mr. Edwards has discovered how answering that question can pull people apart.

When he was a graduate student at the University of Washington, he befriended an older engineer named Steve H. Reiber. Mr. Edwards considered Mr. Reiber to be a mentor, and has credited him for sparking his interest in the science of water corrosion in plumbing systems. They wrote papers together and saved money by sharing hotel rooms at engineering conferences.

In 2003, after officials in the nation’s capital noticed a spike in lead levels in the city’s water supply, they tapped Mr. Edwards to help figure out why. But the professor soon had a falling out with the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority.

Mr. Edwards had agreed to serve as an expert witness for a property owner who was suing the utility, claiming it was supplying his houses with corrosive water that had damaged his plumbing. An official at the water authority asked Mr. Edwards to stop helping the property owner, citing a conflict of interest. When the professor refused, the utility cut ties with him. The EPA, which supervises the D.C. water authority, later dropped Mr. Edwards from a project to study the lead problem and brought in Mr. Reiber to replace him.

The D.C. lead crisis created a rift with his former colleague. Mr. Edwards challenged the water utility and its federal overseers, arguing that the lead had caused serious damage to the health of residents, especially young children; Mr. Reiber sided with the government scientists who maintained that the impact was not as devastating as Mr. Edwards was portraying it. In recent years, the two men have been called to testify as experts on opposing sides of several lawsuits from D.C. residents.

Their rivalry spilled into the scientific literature; Mr. Edwards fought to get a pipe-corrosion study by Mr. Reiber retracted from a prominent journal (The editor instead appended an “expression of concern.”).

“I had to betray a best friend,” said Mr. Edwards. “It’s such an unspeakable boundary. And that circle of friends will never forgive you.”

Mr. Reiber lives in Washington State, where he runs a consulting company. He still considers Mr. Edwards a friend, he said, though he seemed surprised to learn that the professor ever thought him a “best” friend. Mr. Reiber also denied that lead in the drinking water in D.C. and Flint had caused major public-health problems.

He said that while Mr. Edwards does not manipulate the truth, his rhetoric tends to exceed his evidence. His former colleague “becomes emotionally invested in things and begins to see things in black and white, hero or villain,” said Mr. Reiber.

Mark M. Benjamin, an emeritus professor of environmental engineering who was Mr. Edward’s adviser at Washington, called Mr. Edwards a rare talent and “a profoundly good person” who is more than capable of seeing scientific nuance in the cases he studies. But when it comes to people, he said, Mr. Edwards “categorizes people’s behavior in more of a black-and-white fashion than many of us, including myself. That inevitably leads to conflicts and tension and difficulties in relationships.”

That includes the professor’s relationship with himself. “He holds himself to a very, very high, some would say unrealistic, expectation,” said the former adviser, “as he does other people.”

On the night before his first ethics class of the fall, Mr. Edwards did not sleep well (“I should not have discussed ethics with you so late!” he wrote in a 2:15 a.m. email). The subject of loyalty was still on his mind the next morning when the professor, wearing a dark herringbone suit and a maroon tie with elephants on it, sat down at McDonald’s with an egg-white-and-sausage breakfast sandwich and a gigantic Diet Coke.

He had been thinking about hell. Dante’s version, specifically.

“The innermost ring in Dante’s Inferno is for people who betray their friends,” he said. It fascinated him to think that traitors should suffer a worse fate than frauds and murderers.

Traitor or hero, Mr. Edwards has been pushed by his crusades to stretch beyond his formal engineering training. Doing so has been costly. He has acted as an amateur sleuth, paying out of his own pocket to obtain emails and health data from recalcitrant government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act. He has taken to the stage for a TEDx event, a knockoff of the popular lecture series, to talk not of pipes and water but of heroism and cowardice.

After publishing research suggesting that hundreds of D.C. children had been harmed by lead in the water, the professor volunteered as a key witness for families who sued the water authority. Lawyers for the utility went after Mr. Edwards, saying that by testifying to the poisoning of specific children, he was overstepping the boundaries of his expertise in water corrosion, and into the fields of epidemiology and toxicology.

They sent an open-records request to Virginia Tech for pretty much every document of the professor’s work on lead in D.C., including correspondence with his collaborators and an accounting of his use of university resources in his battle against the utility. (A Virginia Tech lawyer rebuffed most of the request.) They subpoenaed records and deposed Mr. Edwards several times.

Last year the D.C. water-authority lawyers delayed a trial so they could question whether Mr. Edwards was qualified to serve as a “catch-all causation expert” in a $13-million lawsuit against the utility by the family of an autistic teenager who was thought to have consumed lead-heavy water as a child. The lawyers for the water authority argued that the lead found in the victim’s blood could have come from other sources, like lead paint. They suggested that Mr. Edwards’s testimony was coming not from a scientist with good evidence but from an advocate with a grudge. (The case was settled last month, before the judge could rule on what parts of the professor’s testimony would be admissible.)

Mr. Reiber, who was slated to testify for the other side, was in the courtroom on the day Mr. Edwards was called in to defend his bona fides. As the professor was being questioned, he could swear he saw his former mentor smirking. (Mr. Reiber disputed this. “I took no joy in watching Marc there,” he said.)

That was a low point. Mr. Edwards said it always comforted him to think of the D.C. saga as a marathon; no matter how isolated and weary he felt, he knew that every little step was taking him closer to the finish line. Last November he hit a wall.

“This is what was supposed to be the end of the race,” said Mr. Edwards, “and I have to sit in this kangaroo court and face these people who have lived to harm me, and harm kids, and obfuscate since 2003. And essentially I’m the one that’s on trial here?”

It was when he returned home to Virginia that he told his son to change the trigger lock on the family gun.

“To be clear, I don’t think I would have done it,” he told me. “I have too much to live for. But I did want to remove the option, just in case.”

After breakfast, we went to Mr. Edwards’s lab, where a film crew was setting up.

Public relations is another skill the professor has cultivated over the past decade. He used to believe scientific reasoning would be enough to sway colleagues and the public, but not anymore.

“You quickly learn, if you want to get kids protected, that facts, logic — they’re useless,” he told me. “One of the things I learned in D.C. is the power and necessity of a narrative.”

He has fashioned himself into a journalist’s dream. He makes time for reporters and is glad to speak in dramatic, quotable terms. In an email to me, he once referred to Mr. Reiber and his other rivals as “vampires” whom he had to kill “over and over again.” He keeps an array of corroded pipe segments and bottled samples of discolored water in a cardboard box in his lab for when the cameras visit.

This morning he had three interviews scheduled back to back. The first was with William Hart, a 24-year-old filmmaker from New York City with a button-down shirt and brown hair swept stylishly across his forehead. By the time Mr. Edwards took his seat on a stool against a backdrop of lab equipment, any lingering self-doubt from the night before appeared to have evaporated.

“What happens when the environmental police, the EPA, becomes the environmental criminal?” he said. “The miracle in Flint is, they got caught.”

“We have to put aside this tribalism and get this culture fixed.”

Mr. Hart gave the professor a thumbs-up, grateful for the sound bites.

Near the end of the interview, he asked Mr. Edwards what motivates him. The professor answered that he does not see fighting for the public good as a choice; it’s his destiny.

“For whatever reason, there’s no one else out there like me,” he said. “In some ways, it’s a curse. But I do get up every morning with such a sense of purpose, and I feel like I’m doing the job I was born to do. And why there are not more people like me, I can never understand.”

Mr. Edwards’s flair in front of the camera has helped elevate the issue of waterborne lead in the public consciousness, but some of his activist allies have criticized the professor for buying into the role of scientific savior.

One particularly stinging criticism came from Yanna Lambrinidou, a medical ethnographer and water activist. Ms. Lambrinidou met Mr. Edwards in D.C., where they worked closely to help expose the lead threat. Mr. Edwards taught her about lead pipes and water corrosion; Ms. Lambrinidou taught him about the dangers of scientific hubris and how better to listen to people directly affected by environmental injustices. They created the ethics class in 2010 and taught it together for several years.

Ms. Lambrinidou recently told The New York Times that Mr. Edwards had contributed to an unhealthy “hero narrative” about Flint. She suggested that the professor could have stayed out of the spotlight and allowed the residents of Flint to be the heroes of their own story.

That criticism gnawed at Mr. Edwards. “If someone’s going to want to call us a hero, what am I going to do about that?” he told me. “I never called us a hero. We’ve always made it a point to call the residents the hero. But in the mind of the press everyone plays a role.” (During our interviews he repeatedly deflected praise and doled out credit to his collaborators, especially Ms. Lambrinidou.) He could not imagine how his team of engineers could have done things differently in Flint and achieved the same result.

If the D.C. saga was a marathon, Flint had been a sprint. In April 2015, LeeAnne Walters, a mother of four, contacted the professor about orange-colored water coming out of her tap, which seemed to be making her family sick. Fed up with the dubious reassurances of Michigan officials, she started studying the city’s water-quality reports for herself and found that Flint was not using a chemical that prevents pipe from bleeding into the water.

An alarmed official at the EPA’s regional office put Ms. Walters in touch with Mr. Edwards. The professor tested a water sample from her home and found lead concentrations at more than 1,000 times the rate considered acceptable by health authorities.

Soon Ms. Walters was leading an effort by city residents to collect more water samples for Mr. Edwards and his team to analyze, and by the end of summer the Virginia Tech team had enough evidence to sound the alarm about lead in Flint’s water supply. Their work, combined with a blood-lead-level study led by Dr. Hanna-Attisha, the local pediatrician, made it hard for the state to keep arguing that Flint’s water was safe. By the spring, the people of Flint had won several significant victories: The city had switched water sources, key officials from the EPA and the state health department had resigned, and federal authorities had opened an investigation.

The triumph in Flint came as a relief. Mr. Edwards had despaired of the painfully tedious and incomplete deliverance of justice in D.C., according to Amy Pruden, a professor of environmental and water-resources engineering at Virginia Tech who works in the office next door. “I think he had reached a point of hopelessness,” said Ms. Pruden. “Then Flint came along.”

This time, the professor knew how to make a scene. “We had everyone playing their role and doing so brilliantly,” he said. “I had the pediatrician, I had the activists, I had the mom.”

Now, months later, the engineering professor had something else: an academic critique of his role in the Flint story that he could not comprehend.

“The analogy is, like, a fireman is going to a house with all their training to put out the fire, and rather than do that they’re supposed to stop and train the homeowner to do it themselves so that the fireman is not mentioned in the paper the next day as a hero,” said Mr. Edwards. “If the house burns down, and the whole neighborhood burns down, who’s at fault then?”

Ms. Lambrinidou declined to expand on her criticism of Mr. Edwards’s approach in Flint, but in an email she explained some of her general concerns about how such interventions tend to unfold.

“Over the years,” she wrote, “I’ve observed that technocentric narratives about scientists’ involvement in community fights for justice often rest on what I perceive to be a simplistic and perhaps even crude conceptualization involving ‘renegade’ scientists bringing ‘the truth’ to the public sphere": Scientists diagnose the problem and generously tell the people about it; the people, so enlightened, spread the word and agitate for a fix.

The problem, said Ms. Lambrinidou, is that “environmental injustice is rarely, if ever, only a technical problem requiring simply a technical solution.” Scientists who parachute in to a troubled city like Flint, she said, run the risk of condescending to the people they are supposedly saving from harm, possibly without realizing they are doing it, thus reinforcing the social hierarchy that made those people vulnerable in the first place.

Donna M. Riley, interim head of Virginia Tech’s engineering-education department, invoked the “moral remainder,” an idea that philosophers have used to describe the tension that can arise between people when one genuine moral concern is addressed while a related one is ignored.

“Moral remainders can be disheartening to people who long for a cut-and-dried solution,” said Ms. Riley. The key, she said, is to stay engaged with the unsolved parts of the problem and the people who can explain why they are meaningful. “It’s as much about those relationships,” she said, “as it is about the engineering.”

Ms. Riley commended Mr. Edwards for his willingness to aggressively pursue solutions, however partial, to the injustices facing people in Flint and elsewhere.

“It’s easy for people in the ivory tower to say, well, I’m not going to do that because I would do it wrong,” she said. “So, it is to Marc’s credit that he’s willing to go in where others wouldn’t.”

That afternoon, about two dozen graduate students gathered in a windowless classroom for the first meeting of Mr. Edwards’s ethics class. The professor stood behind a lectern at the front of the room and spoke without notes. He assured the students that the class would not involve thought experiments about whether it would be right, given a time machine, to kill Baby Hitler.

“This is real stuff,” he said.

“Moral dilemmas that people face day to day are often deeply personal and very upsetting emotionally.”

“This is something that’s not addressed by any rules, theory, code, or research.”

The professor admitted that if he had been asked to teach an ethics class a decade ago, he would have thought it a waste of his time. He showed statistics that suggested he wasn’t alone; that most engineers don’t see ethics as relevant to their jobs. “They are 100 percent completely and willfully blind,” he said.

Opening his students’ eyes is part of the goal. Many of the reading assignments are aimed at catching them up on what happened in D.C. and Flint. They are also required to do a book report on another public-health catastrophe abetted by “willfully blind” bystanders. The readings are designed to give students a compressed version of the rude awakening Mr. Edwards experienced at age 40, baptizing them into a world of professional risk, possible alienation, and enormous responsibility.

“People get depressed very quickly,” said Siddhartha Roy, a graduate student who took the class years ago and now teaches it with Mr. Edwards. There is community in this clear-eyed cynicism. The professor’s message inspires a certain kind of student, and even critics like Mr. Reiber agree that he is a dedicated and supportive mentor. “He has produced some very good students, and I think he is pretty damn loyal to his students,” said Mr. Reiber. “From an academic perspective, which still is my trade, I admire that deeply.”

Ultimately, Mr. Edwards tells students they should be accountable for their own lives and careers. A Republican with a fondness for Ayn Rand, he believes that political and moral power lies in individuals. When he talked about that hard day on the witness stand last November, he quoted Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, An Enemy of the People, whose hero, a doctor who takes on his town’s government over contaminated bathwater, concludes that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.”

The goal of the ethics class, as he teaches it, is not to train students to be martyrs — “I would never ask anyone to be like me,” said Mr. Edwards — but to create a tribe of individuals who are loyal to their own values rather than those of their institutional overseers.

The professor has sought out figures who have engaged in solitary acts of righteous rebellion, like Peter Buxtun, the former U.S. Public Health Service worker who blew the whistle on the Tuskegee experiment, a 40-year clinical trial in which federal health officials purposely failed to treat black men in Alabama for syphilis in order to study the long-term effects of the disease.

Mr. Edwards recalled the experience of calling Mr. Buxtun and talking to him for three hours. The professor was struck by the idea that while science’s great minds are etched in bronze, a man who forced scientists to reckon with the ethics of doing research on human subjects was just sitting at home by a phone that rarely rings. He has asked Mr. Buxtun to come speak to his class this fall.

“This guy should be in the Science Hall of Fame,” Mr. Edwards said. “A lot of people don’t even know who he is, who the key whistle-blowers in history are.”

As the first ethics class drew to a close, Mr. Edwards introduced the assignment that would serve as a bookend for the course: a personal essay called the “story of self.” Students were to write down who they are, how they got here, and what they value. At end of the semester, they would have the opportunity to change their stories.

The assignment was one of Ms. Lambrinidou’s contributions to the class. It has roots in the political-organization theories of Marshall Ganz, a Harvard lecturer who said that people who cultivate a strong personal narrative can inspire courage in themselves and others.

Back when Ms. Lambrinidou taught the class at Virginia Tech, she noticed that the exercise can sometimes also inspire other feelings in the young engineers: humility, uncertainty, and vulnerability. Those feelings are important, she told me. “It’s always a dialogue,” she said in an email, “always a negotiation.”

Mr. Edwards wrote his first “story of self” in 2010, the same year he and Ms. Lambrinidou started the class. “Nothing was attained without sacrifice, hard work, persistence, purposefulness, self-criticism and detachment — characteristics that I have cultivated to an unhealthy excess,” he wrote then.

“Before reaching the end of my journey,” he added, “I wish to acquire wisdom at the expense of anxiety and selfishness.”

The professor says he considers himself lucky and has no regrets, but his career in academe feels haunted. He sees enemy fingerprints on harsh peer reviews and rejected grant applications. The individualist streak that made Mr. Edwards famous in the public eye has brought him a measure of infamy in the water industry for not being a “team player,” said Mr. Benjamin.

Mr. Edwards also said he feels guilty about neglecting his family, anxious about money, and very tired. “My future,” he told me near the end of my visit, “is going to have to be different from my past.”

On a sunny Sunday morning, a few days later, an email from Mr. Edwards arrived. Subject line: “The fall.” It read like a doomsday prophecy delivered with the generalized certainty of a scientific principle.

“First, you will be shunned, losing colleagues and funding,” wrote the professor. “Your family, financial security, sanity, and will to live — they can go at any time.” If the fall proves fatal, he wrote, the best one can hope for is “a two-second professional eulogy, after which you are immediately and willfully forgotten.”

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.