In the 1950s the prune and apricot orchards began to disappear to make space for the more than 2,500 electronics manufacturing firms that, by the early 1980s, had come to dominate the valley and would eventually lend it a new name, after the most common semiconductor substrate: silicon. The IBM campus, occupying approximately 1 square mile below Coyote Creek to the north and above the West Valley Freeway to the south, was built in 1959 on the commercial promise of the disk drive and solid-state electronics. At its peak it employed between 10,000 and 15,000 workers.

Virtually every computer currently manufactured owes something to the research carried out by IBM ARC scientists and the products then manufactured at the Cottle Road plant. ARC researchers came up with things like thin-film inductive heads, rotary actuators and sector servos -- technologies found in most every modern hard drive, be it Quantum, Western Digital or any other brand owing its skeleton to IBM patents. Without a hard drive, no computer, not the IBM Thinkpad 600E on which this story is being typed, nor any of the rack of high-powered Web servers on which this story is being served, would be anything more than so much heavy metal and miscellaneous plastics.

Today, the Cottle Road plant is still the principal factory transforming the research and development of IBM ARC into salable product. This is where patented chemical formulations used in optical lithography -- a process in which chip circuitry patterns are transferred onto silicon wafers -- and disk-drive coating are mixed, packaged and shipped. It is where proprietary microcircuitry and subassemblies for new generations of disk drives are manufactured in the famous clean rooms -- the factory floors of high-tech production whose highly protected environments require that workers take air showers before entering the "fab," and wear head-to-toe "bunny suits" to protect the wafers from microscopic debris.

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"The tiniest speck of dust on a chip could ruin thousands of transistors," reads an exhibit at the Intel Museum in Santa Clara. Nowhere in the museum is it mentioned what health professionals and activists have attempted to point out since the late 1970s: that this "clean" environment has very little to do with safeguarding worker hygiene. The bunny suits may do an excellent job of preventing particles on employee clothes from damaging silicon wafers, but they are deplorably inadequate to protect workers against skin contact with the acids, solvents and other chemicals they use as a daily part of their job. Even worse, most clean-room ventilation systems are designed to recirculate the majority of the air used in the workplace, so as to prevent new infusions of airborne dust -- in effect, workers are breathing the same chemically suffused air over and over again throughout the workday.

"Had I known that I was working with anything that could cause cancer, I would have had second thoughts about going to work there," says Alida Hernandez, a former IBM employee and plaintiff in the Santa Clara lawsuit, who began her 14-year career at IBM washing residue from the surface of disk drives. She never knew what chemicals were in the wash, but a likely suspect is trichloroethane (TCA), a so-called safe substitute for the known carcinogen trichloroethylene (TCE), which itself was once touted as a safe substitute for the carcinogen perchloroethylene (PERC). In relatively low doses TCA can damage the liver, nervous system and circulatory system, and has been associated with brain cancer in gerbils exposed through inhalation. It is one of the contaminants in the solvent plume spreading beneath the Cottle Road plant, and shows up in Cottle Road's Toxic Release Inventory data as late as 1991 -- the year Hernandez left IBM.

Most of Hernandez's 14-year career, however, was spent in the disk-coating operations, where she was exposed on a daily basis to another mix of solvents and resins that also included known or suspected carcinogens, in addition to liver and nervous-system toxicants. "We were given classes as to what to do in case of an explosion, what kind of a fire extinguisher to use if it was electrical or if it was chemical -- those were the instructions they gave us. They didn't say anything about the chemicals being bad for your [biological] system, or possibly cancer causing, or anything like that."

Before starting each shift, it was Hernandez's responsibility to inspect the back of her "operation" -- as the coating workstations were called -- to ensure the machine was running properly. If the mixers were running too fast, for example, air bubbles could end up in the coating formulation and ruin a batch of disk drives, not to mention an employee's performance record. Workers were also responsible for cleaning the coating equipment with solvents several times throughout the workday.

"In coating you could only run 50 disks at a time without having to stop your operation and clean [the machine]," Hernandez says. Machines were cleaned chiefly with acetone, a moderately toxic solvent that is rapidly absorbed by the skin and is narcotic in high concentrations. Symptoms of acute exposure include convulsions, kidney and liver damage, and coma. Lower exposure symptoms include "slight intoxication, central nervous system depression, lassitude, drowsiness, loss of appetite, insomnia, somnolence, loss of strength, shallow respiration, weakness of the limbs, lightheadedness and general malaise."

The National Toxicology Program safety data sheet on acetone recommends that workers wear "a full face chemical cartridge respirator equipped with the appropriate organic vapor cartridges" when handling this chemical. Hernandez was never provided with a respirator, or any other means of scrubbing organic contaminants from the air.

Hernandez, who was frequently in charge of running several machines at once, estimates that she passed from 350 to 375 disks through each machine per shift.

"Sometimes the [machine] lines would plug up and it was up to the operator to unplug those lines. You'd get coating all over yourself -- I mean, it went right through your clothing. It went down to your skin. After you finished cleaning you just went and changed the outside smocks -- the bunny suits -- but your own clothing was all stained. It went right through the bunny suits."

After the film had been applied, the disks were placed in drying machines that spewed mists filled with acetone and coating. That coating, states the complaint, contained the organic solvent xylene. An aromatic hydrocarbon -- like benzene -- xylene has long been implicated in toxicological literature for its adverse effects on the peripheral nervous system. Additionally, commercial formulations of xylene -- at least in the early 1980s -- contained concentrations of up to a few percent of its carcinogenic cousin benzene, according to a 1986 journal article, "Carcinogens and Cancer Risks in the Microelectronics Industry." It too is one of the chemicals found in the Cottle Road groundwater plume.

Epoxy resins were another ingredient in disk coating, made from the compounds epichlorohydrin and bisphenol-A. The former chemical is mutagenic and genotoxic, and the latter is a known endocrine disruptor. Mutagenic and genotoxic "events" -- in which genetic material is changed or damaged -- are part of the first stage of cancer development, and may be indicative of cancer-causing chemicals. Epichlorohydrin is, in fact, a carcinogen. Endocrine disruptors are associated with reproductive and developmental harm.

Even today, clean-room workers continue to breathe recirculated air throughout their shifts. Machines are still cleaned, and metal surfaces degreased, with solvents, the most common being acetone and isopropyl alcohol, though more than a few companies -- particularly the smaller, less recognizable firms -- still use the carcinogen trichlorethylene or its cousin trichloroethane, according to annual Toxic Release Inventory data. To this day, the single most important chemical formulation in the manufacture of computer chips -- the photoresist -- is almost always a mixture of xylenes, carrier solvents, formaldehyde-based resins and genotoxic photoactive compounds. Other potential exposures in modern clean rooms include hydrofluoric acid, antimony, boron, phosphorous, gallium and arsenic.

Hernandez was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993, two years after leaving IBM. Hernandez has no family history of the disease. At the time of her departure, two of her immediate colleagues had fallen ill, says Hernandez. One female engineer was on a leave of absence as a result of breast cancer, and the employee who had trained Hernandez on disk-coating operations came down with skin cancer. Another colleague suffered a miscarriage.

Hernandez never connected the illnesses with the job until she was diagnosed with the disease herself. "It's something you tell yourself always happens to somebody else, and never to you. When it happened to me, I started to think something was wrong."

"My mother's death should not have happened," says Carmen Navarro, daughter of former IBM worker Alicia Apodaca, who rinsed and inspected silicon wafers in the clean rooms of Cottle Road from 1980 through 1989, and died of breast cancer at age 51. As with Hernandez, and the great majority of women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, there was no history of the disease in Apodaca's family. "She was vibrant, healthy. She didn't smoke, she didn't drink, she took good care of her health. She was loved by her six children, and by her grandchildren, whom she adored."

"She had friendships with fellow employees at IBM -- a few of them have also passed away with cancer," Navarro says. One acquaintance died of lung cancer, another of brain cancer, says Navarro. "And it's continuing," she says. In mid-April, Navarro says she learned of another IBM worker of more than 20 years who was diagnosed with breast cancer. (IBM declined to comment on Navarro's and Hernandez's statements, citing pending litigation.)

"I believe that [IBM] knew that the chemicals were dangerous to the employees," says Navarro. I do believe that. This should not have happened."

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