A scholar for his people

SIMON COLLINS speaks to a world-renowned environmental scientist who has returned home to join the fight against industrial contamination.

What do you want to do with it?" asked the Maori Education Foundation when Gary Raumati Hook began a doctorate in biochemistry in Wellington in 1964.

Hook was truthful. He told the selectors he planned postdoctoral research overseas, but then "my intention would be to come back to New Zealand and encourage a whole new generation of Maori scholars".

It was the answer the foundation wanted, awarding him the first Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship for a Maori doctoral student.

Hook also meant it. But what he did not realise at the time was that it would take him a third of a century, from the time he left in 1968 until he quit his job as US-based editor-in-chief of the world's leading journal on environmental health last September, to head the North Island's smallest public tertiary education centre, Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, in Whakatane.

"It took me 34 years to do it," he says. "But actually I never forgot [my promise], and over the years I have thought about it.

"When this came up, I realised that I could fulfil my obligation as intended - an obligation to New Zealand - to put back into the system that which I have taken."

H OOK'S life has turned an extraordinary full circle. At 60 he has returned to Whakatane, a town whose major industrial employer, Carter Holt Harvey, cut its board mill staff from about 1200 to 267 in the past 15 years.

The mostly Maori families of mill workers have called upon Hook's professional expertise as a leading researcher on the health effects of industrial pollution, claiming that 43 people have died since the main sawmill closed in 1988 as a result of ingesting dioxins in the mill's heyday.

His origins make him ready to listen. Hook began life as a ward of the state. His birth mother, a member of the Raumati family of the Ngati Mutunga people at Urenui in North Taranaki, "could not support me - she was a young girl".

As a baby, he was adopted by Winifred Alice Hook, a Pakeha single mother in Wellington. "I was with her ever since I was 3 weeks old," he says.

From Winifred Hook, he learned that "hard work is the secret to any success.

"She was not a woman of great learning, or formal training," he continues, "but she certainly was a woman of principle."

Young Gary loved pulling things apart. "I had crystal sets, electric motors, model aeroplanes, and rockets, which all exploded.

"I made wine. I bought a camera and I developed photos - I had all the chemicals and trays and things you need. I took radios apart. I learned science from play."

Because his Hutt Valley High School mates were going on to Victoria University, Hook did too. Although he had met his birth mother as a child, and made contact again when he was at university, he was wary.

"You actually hold yourself back," he says. "One of the things I remember being known for as a student was that I had a certain reserve. That was a reflection of being unsure, and maybe a little afraid perhaps.

"So while I went into that quite deliberately, I partially separated myself from it and did not pursue it until I had graduated."

Hook developed a lasting singlemindedness, concentrating on his studies. "I gave up rugby and cricket. I loved to play those games, I was quite good at them. I thought that if I failed because I spent too much time doing other things, I would have an excuse for my failure and there should be no excuses.

"Miria Simpson, who was a librarian at the university, was always trying to get me to come down to the Maori club. I wouldn't. It would have taken me away from things I needed to do.

"As a student I set my life goals. I still pursue them. I have achieved some of them. I still have others that I have yet to achieve."

Although he found time to marry in 1965, he and his wife Gaynor deferred children until his doctorate - looking at how animals absorb insecticides into their bodies - was finished and they had a decent income.

He then spent two years lecturing at the University of Wales, Cardiff. "My wife and I decided to come back to New Zealand, but I didn't have a job," he says. "So I arranged a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences [in North Carolina] for a year.

"After a year we thought another year won't hurt, and before I knew where I was I had stayed 31 years. You have children. You put down roots."

T HROUGHOUT his career Hook focused on environmental causes of lung diseases such as silicosis, a disease of miners that killed more than 500 men working on quartz-rock tunnels for hydro-electric power stations during the Depression.

"They worked without safety equipment and after a time they began to get sick. The company doctor was prescribing a black pill, which was of no value whatsoever.

"When the men started to die, the company started to bury them in unmarked graves alongside country roads.

"The chronic form of silicosis takes about 20 years to develop," he continues, "and I wonder if the company policy said, 'Twenty years from now, who's going to care? Who can prove that this silicosis was caused by working in our tunnels?"'

Well, Hook cared. By the time he came along the basic work on silicosis had been done, but he found that another lung disease, pulmonary alveolar proteinosis, had similar causes. And in more than 150 papers and abstracts in academic journals written over 20 years, he and his colleagues published the results of studies into the differences between the lungs of smokers and non-smokers and the effects on the lungs of asbestos, cadmium chloride, phosphorous compounds and other substances.

"I have been told that 90 per cent of all cancers have an environmental origin," he says. "Causes included benzene, coke oven emissions and, of course, tobacco. The problem is that the banning of such agents doesn't occur until after the fact [of deaths]."

At the same time as doing his own research, Hook co-edited his institute's journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, sending free copies to more than 1300 institutions in 123 developing countries. In a 1999 editorial explaining the policy, Hook and his co-editor George W. Lucier wrote: "Information must reach those who need it in order for it to be useful."

A LONG the way, Gary and Gaynor produced four children, now aged 30 to 17 - and Hook always regretted that they grew up without aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents.

When he returned to Victoria University in 1986 to receive a rare Doctorate of Science, a degree that recognises research done after a first doctorate, he asked his birth mother to introduce him to her Raumati relatives at Urenui.

A Vic colleague from the 1960s who is now teaching at the university, Dr Bill Jordan, recalls the large group of iwi who travelled to Wellington for the occasion and gave Hook a cloak, which he wore during the ceremony. "I think they marked him at that point as a person of stature," says Jordan.

Hook himself says: "Truth to tell, most of them knew about me anyway. They just let me be, just waiting for me to step forward."

Among those who met Hook at that time was US-educated Dr Hirini Mead, then Victoria's professor of Maori studies and an organiser of the acclaimed exhibition of cultural treasures, Te Maori. Mead kept in touch, and eventually, after helping to establish the Maori tertiary institution Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, he invited Hook to come home to head it.

"He showed me around the place and talked to me about their intentions," says Hook. "And I decided that it was just perfect for me, because I had reached the stage in my life where what I really needed was a different career, something that involved new things and had different paths." He took the job.

His daughter Arika, 27, came with him and is studying Maori at the wananga with her dad. His wife and their other three children are still in America, but he hopes they will join him when the youngest finishes high school.

One of Hook's aims is to raise money for a laboratory at the wananga for environmental health science. Eventually he hopes to add a marine biology lab and - remembering his own childhood - a children's lab.

"I learned science from play, and I believe that is the secret to turning children on to science," he says. "So I want an institution, or a building, where part of it will be a place for children - a mechanical workshop to build things. I want to bring in kids from the local high schools at 12 and 13 years of age, feed them up, and after school we are going to have some fun. There is so much stuff around that is so exciting in the world."

He also hopes to tap into the whole community, by bringing in "the people who are recognised as thinkers in their field" and has already invited his old boss, the director of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Science, Dr Ken Olden, and a former Wellingtonian who is now an expert in underwater exploration in Hawaii, Professor Alex Malahoff, to lecture at the wananga. Both have agreed.

As well, local Maori have drawn him into a debate over whether Carter Holt Harvey should compensate the families of former workers at the Whakatane board mills who may have been affected by dioxin and have since become sick or died.

Hook says it would be difficult and costly to establish whether the dioxin actually caused the sickness and deaths. The Government has given $500,000 to a study at several North Island mills. However, in Hook's opinion, Carter Holt should not wait for that work to be done.

"I believe that complaints that have been made against corporations which have used cheap labour of indigenous people should not be resolved on the narrow issue of cause and effect for human health, but on the basis of reciprocity," he says.

"When you came to my area, you offered me money in exchange for my labour. But what have you offered me in exchange for the change you have made in my life, for the degradation of my own particular lifestyle?

"The people who inhabit those regions have to change their lifestyle because of the agents that have been released into their environment.

"What one should be looking for," says Hook, who wants to convene an international conference on dioxins next year, "is a reciprocity - compensation for what you have done to our lives."

First however, he plans an environmental assessment of the local rohe or district "to find out what problems there are, and then to develop research programmes to investigate them and figure out where they came from and what we can do about it".

His approach to the wananga, too, is both world-scale and intensely local.

"A wananga should be two doorways: a doorway into Maori culture and language and all things that nurture and sustain Maori; and a doorway into the rest of the world," he says.

To those who say that teaching in the Maori language is anachronistic, he points to Maori as just one of a family of Pacific languages.

He has just appointed to the wananga Dr Mark Laws, a computer scientist whose speciality is Polynesian languages and who is the founder of the National Association of Maori Mathematicians, Scientists and Technologists.

"Maori are part of the world," Hook says. "They are not some insignificant aberration which exists on the far side of the world. They are part of humanity, and must be allowed to contribute to humanity.

"If you look at the history of Maori, there were explorations over the whole Pacific, so exploration and looking over the horizon are not new to Maori.

"I do not want Maori to turn inward, to always look at themselves. I want them to look abroad and see how they stand in the world and contribute actively to the world.

"The knowledge that Maori have is a sub-set of the total human experience. We should go abroad with our experience too, so that those people can learn from us."