The Air Pollution in Our Homes

Vance studies air quality, and, last June, she was one of two scientists in charge of Homechem, a four-week orgy of cooking, cleaning, and emissions measurement, which brought sixty scientists and four and a half million dollars’ worth of high-tech instrumentation to a ranch house on the engineering campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Homechem—House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry—was the world’s first large-scale collaborative investigation into the chemistry of indoor air. According to the architectural historian David Gissen, debates about the relative dangers of household emissions versus urban emissions, and indoor air versus outdoor air, have swung back and forth between Franklin’s and Adams’s positions ever since, depending on each era’s prevailing beliefs and concerns.

Source: www.newyorker.com