John Froines

John Froines was born in Berkeley, CA on June 13, 1939.  His mother, Katherine, raised John and his younger brother Robert as a single parent after her husband, the boys’ father, an Oakland shipyard worker, died in 1942.  His mother was employed as a secretary in the Berkeley public school system.

A student athlete at Berkeley High School in football and track, John graduated in 1957. He served in the Air National Guard and received an Associate’s Degree at Contra Costa Community College, before enrolling in U.C. Berkeley and graduating in 1962 with a B. S. in Chemistry.

Froines entered Yale University graduate school in Chemistry and earned his PhD in physical organic chemistry in 1966.  His graduate work was done in the laboratory of Dr. Kenneth Wiberg, Yale Professor Emeritus. He then won a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation to work in the laboratory of Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Dr. George Porter, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London (September 1966- May 1968).

While at Yale, Froines was active in a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organizing project in the Hill neighborhood, adjacent to downtown New Haven.  Community organizing projects inspired by SDS, and in particular, its first president Tom Hayden, were launched by civil rights and anti-poverty activists in various cities such as Newark, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Oakland. Just as civil rights organizations in the American South were organizing for voting rights and political power for Black Americans, a northern SDS-led movement supported peoples’ community organizations in urban areas to gain some control over policies that were affecting their lives, in particular the severely sub-standard housing and inadequate social welfare programs.[10] 

John met Ann Rubio Froines, his first wife, an SDS community activist and graduate of Swarthmore College, in the Hill Neighborhood Union project in New Haven, and they married in the Fall of 1965. Ann Froines was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and taught Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Their daughter Rebecca was born in London in 1968. 

John Froines was indicted along with seven others by the U.S. Justice Department under President Nixon in March 1969 for their participation and leadership in events at the protest demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The two-count indictment cited “conspiracy to travel interstate to incite a riot,” and inciting a riot.[11]

After a lengthy trial that drew national media attention, two of the defendants, John Froines and Lee Weiner, were acquitted of the charges against them; the others were found guilty on one count. One of the defendants Black Panther leader Bobby Seale had his case severed from the other defendants after the judge refused to acknowledge his right to have an attorney of his choosing, and had him gagged and bound in the courtroom in an effort to silence him. Upon appeals all convictions in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (the “Chicago Seven”)  were overturned along with the contempt of court charges leveled by trial judge Julius Hoffman against all defendants.

In 1970-71 John and wife Ann lived in New Haven, CT where both worked with the Black Panther Party Defense Committee in support of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins during their controversial trial for conspiracy to murder.[12]  That trial resulted in a hung jury and the freeing of both defendants. John Froines was also involved with organizing the May 1971 antiwar demonstrations in Washington, D.C., a demonstration which resulted in the largest mass arrests in U.S. history. 

In September 1968 Froines joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Oregon as an Assistant Professor.  Upon the federal indictments for the activities at the Chicago Democratic Convention, he requested and was granted a leave of absence at the end of his first year of teaching because of the impending trial in Chicago. The University administration resisted the calls for his firing from the university from some Oregon state legislators.

After the two years of full-time anti-war activism, Froines returned to teaching chemistry to undergraduates at Goddard College in Vermont. Two years later he was hired to head the Occupational Health Division of the Vermont Health Department,[6] a position he held for three years. His work focused on health standards for the state’s nuclear power plant.  

Froines later served as Director of the office of Toxic Substances Standards of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) during the Carter Administration. He was the principal author of important federal standards for regulating workers’ exposure to lead and to cotton dust.[13] 

Upon the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1981 Froines took his focus on occupational and environmental health to the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, where he became a faculty member. During his tenure at UCLA, he held many leadership roles, including as the Director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (for 25 years), the Director of the Southern California Particle Center and Supersite, Associate Director of the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center, the Director of the UCLA Fogarty Program in Occupational and Environmental Health, and the Director of the Sustainable Technology and Policy Program.[14] His research focuses covered the toxicology of arsenic, chromium, and lead, air pollution, and pesticides.[13]

Also during his career at UCLA, he served for nearly 30 years with other scientists on a state advisory commission, the Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants, and was in later years its chairperson.  “Over the decades, the nine-member panel has reviewed 450 assessments on a witch’s brew of toxins: Chloropicrin, methidathion, metam sodium, benzene, tobacco smoke, endosulfan, and many other pesticides and air contaminants that are potential carcinogens, genotoxins, neurotoxins, or all of the above. The panel reviews other scientists’ work, draws conclusions and turns over its best assessment to such regulators as the California Air Resources Board and Department of Pesticide Regulation to develop policy."[15]

Froines was among five University of California scientists who were not re-appointed to the Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants in 2013 after issues were raised about the independence of their scientific recommendations and number of years of service. Part of the controversy involved claims that Froines was in contact with scientists who had stated that some chemicals under review were a public health risk. Froines wrote the SRP maintained “our commitment to doing the best science possible and we never wavered from that. That is why we were trusted although not always agreed with.”[16] One example of this disagreement was the decision by the California Department of Pesticide Regulations to “ignore its own staff of scientists and a peer review panel led by Froines when setting legal exposure limits of farmworkers to the strawberry fumigant methyl iodide. The department set the limit at more than 100 times what had been recommended.[16] The pesticide was later removed from the market by its manufacturer.[17]

In 2011 the California Air Resources Board honored John Froines as an “outstanding individual who has made significant contributions toward improving air quality throughout a lifetime of commitment and leadership and innovation in research and environmental policy.”[18] 

Physicians for Social Responsibility in Los Angeles recognized Froines and his wife Andrea Hricko in 2012 for their "courageous commitment to scientific integrity and for of increasing our understanding of the health impacts of toxic chemicals on the health of workers and communities."[19]

In 2013, John Froines was the Ramazzini Award Recipient and Lecturer for his “pioneering work the develop the federal occupational lead and cotton dust exposure standards in the United States, and his work in California that led to the recognition of diesel exhaust as a significant toxic air contaminant, preserving the health and lives of millions.” The Collegium Ramazzini in Bologna, Italy is an independent, international academy founded in 1982 of internationally renowned experts in the fields of occupational and environmental health.[18]

John met and married his second wife Andrea Hricko while living in Washington, D.C. They moved to Santa Monica, CA in 1981 when John Froines took up his position at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.  Andrea Hricko was director of the Community Outreach and Education Program at the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center (SCEHSC), uniting community groups and scientists to address environmental justice in communities of Los Angeles. Their son Jonathan Froines was born in 1983, and is a garden designer. Froines' daughter Rebecca Stanley is Director of Nursing, Psychiatry and Behavioral Health and Psychiatric Emergency Services at Yale New Haven Hospital.

• David Kagen played Froines in the 1987 film Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8.
• Froines was portrayed by Daniel Flaherty in the 2020 film The Trial of the Chicago 7.

• Edited by Mark L. Levine, George C. McNamee and Daniel Greenberg / Foreword by Aaron Sorkin. The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Official Transcript. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. ISBN 978-1-9821-5509-4. OCLC 1162494002
• Edited with an introduction by Jon Wiener. Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Seven. Afterword by Tom Hayden and drawings by Jules Feiffer. New York: The New Press, 2006. ISBN 978-1-56584-833-7
• Edited by Judy Clavir and John Spitzer. The Conspiracy Trial: The extended edited transcript of the trial of the Chicago Eight. Complete with motions, rulings, contempt citations, sentences and photographs. Introduction by William Kunstler and foreword by Leonard Weinglass. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1970. ISBN 0-224-00579-0. OCLC 16214206
• Schultz, John. The Conspiracy Trial of the Chicago Seven. Foreword by Carl Oglesby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. ISBN 9780226760742. (Originally published in 1972 as Motion Will Be Denied.)