The living mark · teal-ink caduceus, branched & rooted
01 · The story
A building made its teachers sick.
For years, PCBs leaked from aging fluorescent-light ballasts and degraded caulking inside the Sky Valley Education Center near Monroe, Washington. The teachers and staff worked in those rooms day after day.
Many developed neurological and cognitive injury — memory, concentration, and processing problems, alongside headaches and other neurobehavioral symptoms. In Erickson v. Monsanto, they sued the company that made the PCBs. The first three teachers went to trial in 2021; more followed. Dr. James G. Dahlgren, M.D. served as their toxicology expert.
PCBs are persistent, fat-soluble industrial chemicals — and established neurotoxicants. Chronic exposure disrupts thyroid-hormone signaling, interferes with dopamine systems, and dysregulates calcium signaling inside neurons. Those mechanisms map onto the deficits the teachers reported: memory, learning, attention, and executive function.
Because PCBs accumulate in fatty tissue and clear over years, the dose builds with every year in the room.
Every claim is rated by evidence tier — regulatory bodies (IARC, ATSDR, EPA) first, then systematic reviews, then peer-reviewed studies. Nothing is asserted without its sources attached, so a claim can go straight into a Daubert analysis.
The AI workspace reads only from that curated evidence — it answers with citations, and says plainly where the record is thin.
A Daubert-grade exhibit packet — the theory of harm, the certified-vs-contested table, the cited record — normally costs an expert and a paralegal 40+ hours and roughly $10,000. Here it is Dr. Dahlgren’s fifty years × the force multiplier of AI: the same packet in minutes, defensible, every line traceable to its source. One packet pays for the platform.
Behind the public summary sits the complete case file — 1,959 documents: depositions, expert reports, exhibits, motions, and correspondence. Because it also holds protected medical records, it is gated: authorized counsel and retained experts sign in to read it; everyone else sees the de-identified summary.
Sky Valley is one worked case — and a glimpse of where this is going. The same Knowledge Garden runs the entire toxicology lifecycle and frames the evidence for everyone who touches it: plaintiffs, the public, clinicians, scientists, and counsel — then carries its design to a family of gardens beyond toxicology.
The seven-stage workflow
Every investigation moves through one shape — each stage a working, AI-assisted tool. It is the same skeleton every Knowledge Garden inherits.
IdentifyWhat is it?AssessHow dangerous?PlanWhat do we do?ActRespondAdaptIt changedResolveWrap it upReflectLearn from it
Each Knowledge Garden applies the same principle — verifiable, source-backed knowledge with an AI that only speaks from the record — to a different field. Toxicology is the first; the design, the evidence model, and the seven-stage shape carry across all of them.
