Out of the Frying Pan

Abstract

How could we as a society produce and use such large quantities of what were once “laboratory curiosities” with so few questions asked and such limited knowledge of the environmental fate of so many of these materials? And how is it that we have now launched into the world’s atmosphere and the innermost workings of our biological lives so many engineered materials that seem to be interfering with the most fundamental biochemical processes of life—whether as endocrine disruptors or other in- ducers of cellular dysfunction? One place to start to understand how we’ve arrived at this point is by recognizing that historically, as illustrated by synthetics like bisphenol A, to assess the safety of commercially manufactured chemicals, investigators have attempted to gauge what acute toxic effects—if any—chemicals may have and to establish what is often described as a safe level of exposure. The goal of this testing, in other words, has been to discover how much of a substance an individual can be exposed to before adverse effects result. Such tests have often entailed conducting experiments designed to determine how much of a given substance would kill a lab animal, usually a mouse, rat, or rabbit.