About Dr. Kilburn

Dr. Kaye H. Kilburn was the Ralph Edgington Professor of Medicine at the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. His career spans problem-solving in respiratory failure, emphysema, asbestosis and byssinosis at Duke University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. More recently neurobehavioral and pulmonary impairment as a result of exposure to common chemicals: mold, hydrogen sulfide, diesel, pesticides, and insecticides, have been a primary focus for study.  Since 1982 he has investigated chemicals and the brain. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Archives of Environmental Health and has published over 250 scientific papers and 3 books.

A message from Dr. Kilburn:

These books have an extremely important message for mankind. I have never felt so strongly before about anything in which I have been involved. In this case we are talking about the collective human nervous system mankind’s brains that is the highest level of evolution on this planet. The brain’s preservation represents the only possibility of survival for mankind. To find in many parts of the country and in many individual patients that its function is eroded seriously by chemicals, chemicals that have been introduced into the environment basically in the last 50 years, is bad news indeed.

This scenario is terrifying. Therefore, I find it important that these books be composed in such a way that the message and the carefully constructed proof, brick by brick, be available to the skeptical, the curious, and the motivated reader who will in the beginning buy into a consideration of this causation as a possibility. In fact it is a nightmare scenario.

My first book is called Chemical Brain Injury, but I am inclined to think it might be called "Rendered Witless", not exactly a professional title for a scientific book. These are the debates that have gone back and forth. I feel deeply about these books. I am impelled that way by experience with over 800 patients and over 4,000 people, exposed to myriad of common chemicals studied in neighborhoods and communities across this land.

I want you to have a flavor of my motivation and the reason for my persuasion and my further attempts to make the arguments as cogent, as telling, and as well reasoned as possible. I am most aware of the fact that the field is opening with extreme suddenness and as such that I am learning more every day. Do I put off broadcasting almost till the end of my time, because of this? No, I think a watershed has been reached and it’s time to let go the first discharge over the spillway.