narrator: rebecca jim is the director of l.e.a.d., a community-action agency. through the years, she has witnessed firsthand the effects of toxins in picher. jim: i was an educator here in this community for over 25 years. and what i found when i first got here was children that were ready to learn, and they were able to, and they were eager, and they were excited, and they could learn easily. and through those years, those children became more exposed, and, i think, became damaged. man: rebecca jim contacted me in the mid-1990s and asked me whether i could measure some of the teeth that she had collected from school-age children for lead. we measured those teeth. the levels were relatively high. narrator: the tests further confirmed rebecca jim's suspicions -- that the children were being affected by lead poisoning. many of the problems lead causes in the human body appear to be associated with its ability to mimic or inhibit the action of another metal -- calcium. calcium can only enter the body's cells by binding to a specific protein. once in the cells, it