Lead poisoning: a failed response and sick children: a team of reporters and a photographer...

My first reaction was that I didn't want to work on the project my editor at The Star-Ledger was suggesting. I'd done a fairly comprehensive look at lead poisoning in New Jersey a decade before. A good one. The issue had been done to death. This time around it seemed just another case of an editor trying to force new life into a tired, button-pushing ghetto story about the hopelessness that comes when poverty, ignorance and disease converge.

It took me about four hours to change my mind. That was all the time it took to discover that most of the remarkable innovations