Steingraber is optimistic, looking back at the example of the pesticide DDT for encouragement. "Whole books were authored on how if we banned DDT, agriculture would wither on the vine, and yet we've figured out better, safer ways to do things. I think when workers stand up and say, 'Enough already, we're not going to make computers possible on the backs of our health, and die -- we need to find a better way of doing this,' human ingenuity and innovation will come through, and suddenly we'll find better ways."

There are researchers making genuine progress on low-impact ways to manufacture chips. One of the more prominent is Fahrang Shadman, director of the Engineering Research Center for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Council, Shadman and his team of over 100 Ph.D.s and graduate students and approximately 30 faculty members from a dozen academic disciplines have done some amazing work in just half a decade. They have replaced the spin coating process -- in which organic solvents are often used to deposit thin films on the wafer surface -- with a totally "dry" process that deposits these films "without any solvents whatsoever."

Already, they have substantially reduced the need for photoresist -- possibly the most critical and toxic formulation in chip making -- by developing chemistries in which certain films are directly imprinted on a chip. They've created radical new ways of reusing and reducing the need for water, traditionally one of the largest resource drains of fabrication plants -- and a reason for the semiconductor industry's tense relations with the water-poor regions of the Southwest, whose aquifers it has not only poisoned but consumed.

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"We are not sitting here trying to figure out how to meet the regulations," Shadman says. "We are trying to revolutionize certain aspects of semiconductor manufacturing. Environmental issues, after all, are international, and the semiconductor industry is an international industry. It is truly global. And yet there is no [research center] anywhere in the world with this kind of vision."

That vision is devoted to the research and transfer of radically new chip-making technologies, developed according to a project philosophy called "Design for Environment." "What this means is that we're looking at the environment in the same way we would at other manufacturing factors, like cost. Why is it that we have to lower cost? Because cost is a factor. Why is it that we have to improve performance? Because performance is a factor. So we put environmental impact exactly in the same category, and the environmental motivation becomes a driver for new technology."

Environmental motivation of a different kind is being shown by the semiconductor industry with respect to the cancer question. In November 1999, as the number of plaintiffs was beginning to multiply in various lawsuits, the SIA announced the formation of a Science Advisory Committee "to review existing data on potential cancer health risks, if any, within the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry." SIA president George Scalise prefaced the announcement with a carefully worded disclaimer: "While we do not believe there is credible evidence of increased risk of cancer associated with working in the semiconductor industry, we believe it will be useful to assess the existing data to determine whether more extensive evaluation is warranted."

The recommendation of the Science Advisory Committee is due early next year. According to Dr. Mark Cullen, professor of medicine and public health at Yale University School of Medicine and one of the six expert scientists picked for the current panel, "This represents what I would consider to be, as a professional in the field, a very positive evolution in the industry over the decade-plus that I've been involved. I take at face value their serious interest in wanting to know where they are and what they need to do in order to do the right thing."

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