Just had another horrible thought. If you're reading this right now, you're
staring at a few pounds of plastic.
(runs away screaming)
"Tracey de Morsella (formerly Tracey L. Minor)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
i'm not going to tell try to put together a list of all the plastic
in our house. Kinda disturbing.
Tracey
Martin Pratt wrote:
> So, Tracey, you tell me this after I've cracked open our plastic bowls and
> two more cellophane wrappers in order to fix my dinner.
>
> "Tracey de Morsella (formerly Tracey L. Minor)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: The dark side of plastics.
> Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 22:40:33 -0500
> From: Chris de Morsella <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> The dark side of plastics.
>
> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nature/interviews/vomsaal.html
>
> Vom Saal is a Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri.
> A leading researcher in the field of developmental biology, Vom Saal has
> studied the effects of both natural and synthetic hormones at extremely
> low doses. His studies have shown that extremely low doses of hormones
> can permanently alter development of the reproductive system in mice. He
> has also studied how manmade chemicals, including plastics, can mimic
> hormones at extremely low doses.
>
> DH: You've said that the doses at which hormones affect the body are
> extremely low. Give me an example to make me understand that.
>
> FvS: The issue of the amount of hormone that actually causes effects is
> very difficult for scientists to talk to people about because we're
> dealing with numbers that are outside of the frame of reference that
> anybody is going to be thinking about. We see changes, profound changes,
> in the course of development of essentially the whole body of
> experimental animals, and we're working with mice and rats, and we see
> these changes at fifty femtograms of the hormone per milliliter of
> blood. That's 0.05 trillionths of a gram of this hormone in a milliliter
> of blood.
>
> DH: And what sort of effect does it have?
>
> FvS: We see changes in the functioning of the prostate. We see
> dramatic change in the sprouting of glands within the fetal prostate. We
> see changes in testicular sperm production. We see changes in the
> structure of the endocrine control region in the brain, which is
> accompanied by changes in sex behavior, aggression, the way these
> animals behave towards infants, their whole social interaction, the way
> they age, the time that they enter puberty, the age at which they cease
> reproduction. It changes their entire life history, and these changes
> are capable of occurring at very low levels of hormones.
> I remember when we first did this and I was a post doctoral fellow, and
> my advisor and I looked at the hormone levels and said, "My God, these
> levels are so staggeringly small and the consequences are so immense
> it's amazing." Even to biologists, it's amazing.
>
> But what you have is the entire field of toxicology thinking of a
> millionth of a gram of a hormone or a chemical as being this
> staggeringly tiny amount, and to most people if I said there's only a
> millionth of a gram of it here you'd say, "How can it do anything?" A
> millionth of a gram of estradiol in blood is toxic. The natural hormone
> is actually operating at something like a hundred million times lower
> than that. So when you have a physiologist thinking of a millionth of a
> gram, you have that physiologist thinking this is a toxic high dose.
> When you are raised in the field of toxicology you are looking at that
> from the other perspective of "My gosh, that's such a tiny dose, it
> couldn't do anything."
>
> So now what we have are two different fields coming into this issue and
> looking at a dose as either staggeringly high or staggeringly low, and
> it's not surprising that there is a clash occurring with regard to dose
> effects.
>
> DH: Can you again describe the results, the developmental effects in
> your laboratory mice, that you are seeing with these unbelievably small
> changes in hormone levels?
>
> FvS: We published a paper just a few months ago in the "Proceedings of
> the National Academy of Sciences" in which we experimentally elevated
> estradiol levels in mouse fetuses during the period when their
> reproductive organs were forming. And what we did was we experimentally
> elevated estradiol by one tenth of one trillionth of a gram of estradiol
> in a milliliter of blood. We estimate that we're increasing estradiol by
> about one molecule of estradiol per cell in the body. Okay? The
> consequence of this is that at the end of the first day of development
> of the prostate in the male fetuses we could see dramatic change in the
> sprouting of prostate glands. We rendered the prostate abnormally
> enlarged, and this was detectable within twenty-four hours of the
> beginning of its embryonic development. And when we looked at these
> treated animals as adults, that difference had persisted. They had
> abnormally enlarged prostates that were hyper-responsive to hormones.
>
> Now, prostate disease is for every male in this country and for every
> male in the world a very, very serious concern. It's the largest bill to
> the medical community. It's the most prevalent disease of aging in
> humans. Seventy percent of men, by the time you're seventy years old,
> will have an abnormally enlarged prostate. We caused this to happen at
> the first day of embryonic life with that change in estradiol. That's
> how sensitive embryonic organs are to these staggeringly tiny changes in
> hormones.
>
> DH: How might the changes you are seeing in mice relate to prostate disease?
>
> FvS: With this experimental manipulation in mouse fetuses, we have
> caused the prostate of the mouse to become enlarged. And it would appear
> that this is an animal that's then going to have a higher probability of
> developing a clinically enlarged prostate that's going to cause it
> physical problems as it ages, because as the prostate gets bigger and
> bigger it squeezes down on the urethra and you can't urinate. And if you
> don't fix that you'll die.
>
> DH: These hormone levels you're talking about are inconceivably low,
> staggeringly low. How do we even begin to measure them?
>
> FvS: For some chemicals, and for some hormones, the technical capacity
> to measure them is actually less sensitive than the body's ability to
> detect them. We've been working with a chemical, bisphenol-A. It's what
> polycarbonate plastic, hard plastics, are made out of: CD's, the plastic
> in your glasses' lens, milk containers, baby bottles. It's the chemical
> that they use to line cans with, it's the chemical they put on your
> teeth as a sealant and it is a very potent estrogen. It mimics the
> hormone that women produce in their ovaries, and it mimics this hormone
> estradiol that is actually being produced in fetuses and during
> pregnancy that is a major coordinator
>
> or an alligator or any other animal.
>
> Estradiol plays a critical role in development and then normal
> functioning of the body for the rest of an individual's life. The amount
> of estradiol you're exposed to throughout your life is also the best
> predictor of breast cancer. This chemical mimics that hormone. The body
> can't tell the difference between bisphenol-A and estradiol. In other
> words, it sees this chemical and it thinks it's getting exposed to its
> natural hormone.
>
> DH: So you're saying that the hormone that has the clearest link to
> breast cancer, the hormone that is responsible for sexual development in
> any animal or human, is found in plastics?
>
> FvS: Absolutely. The plastic materials, if they are polycarbonates, are
> made with this chemical bisphenol-A. And you can think of polycarbonate
> as a house made of bricks. Essentially you take this brick, this
> building block, which is bisphenol-A, and you link it together with
> other bisphenol-A molecules. That's a polymerization reaction. The
> bisphenol-A is the monomer used to construct these plastic materials.
> When it's attached to another one, that forms a polymer. And
> unfortunately in the process of making these plastics not all of the
> bisphenol-A gets linked together. So you put your food or other material
> in the plastic and it absorbs the unreacted bisphenol-A into it. And now
> in your food is a sex hormone.
>
> DH: And what are you finding to be the effect?
>
> FvS: Okay, the chemical bisphenol-A passes out of the plastic or out of
> the dental sealant that's put on your child's teeth or out of the lining
> of cans, into the food or liquid that's in contact with the plastic. Now
> the important point about detection by instrumentation of the
> bisphenol-A is that, based on our research, the ability of the current
> instruments used to monitor for bisphenol-A in food is a much lower
> level of detection than what our animals are able to detect. It's a huge
> difference as a matter of fact. So that you can put food that you have
> in contact with plastic into a chemical analysis and say there is no
> plastic material there. We extract from that same food, put it into
> animals and we get a big effect. The animals are more sensitive to the
> chemicals than the machinery. So detection limits, where people say our
> machine didn't detect this, doesn't mean it's not there and doesn't mean
> that it won't damage your baby. We have shown that in our experiments.
>
> DH: So the plastics we use in daily life, the baby bottles, the food
> containers, leach chemicals into the food at levels that cause effects
> in lab animals?
>
> FvS: One of the things that we started doing a number of years ago is we
> started looking at the effects of the materials that plastics are made
> out of in cell culture. We used human cells to see how responsive these
> cells were to these chemicals, and at what doses the chemicals could
> influence human cells to start growing and doing things differently. So,
> in other words, we're getting biological responses out of the cells and
> we were astonished at the incredibly small amounts of these chemicals
> that were actually able to alter human cell function.
>
> So what we did in mice was based on the studies using human cells. We
> know that mouse cells are essentially identical to human cells in the
> way that they respond to these hormones. That's been known actually for
> quite a long time. So we used our information from human cells to then
> start treating animals with these very, very low doses of estrogenic
> chemicals found in plastics. So we had mechanistic information that
> really directed us towards very low doses.
>
> Now one of the surprising things is that when we started looking into
> the literature concerning the amounts of these chemicals that were being
> released into food from plastic containers, and we compared that to the
> doses active in our cell culture studies, they were the same doses. But
> they were also doses that the toxicological community was saying were
> absolutely safe.
>
> And so we looked into the bases of how could they say these doses were
> safe when our studies were saying that they wouldn't be safe. And the
> answer is they had never actually tested those doses. They had tested
> higher doses and then, based on assumptions about how the systems should
> work, they just said the lower doses must be safe. But there were no
> actual experiments that had ever tested to see if that was true. So we
> did something that had never been done. We started doing animal
> experiments at these very low doses, where our cell culture experiments
> had said these chemicals would cause effects. We actually administered
> these chemicals at the amount that we're consuming them. The average
> person in the United States is consuming these chemicals from plastics
> at the levels we administered them to pregnant mice.
>
> DH: And what did you find?
>
> FvS: For the males, decreased sperm count and enlarged prostates. The
> treatment altered virtually every aspect of the reproductive system. The
> place next to the testes, the duct system called the epididymis where
> the sperm are stored prior to being ejaculated -- it was abnormally
> small, which could account also for lowered sperm count in the
> ejaculate. But we know also the testis is making fewer sperm. We see
> changes in growth rate as well. One of the interesting things is that
> these very low doses of estrogen increase rates of growth. The animals
> were actually growing larger than they would have normally. It was
> really quite a dramatic effect. The females went into puberty early. And
> we saw changes in behavior, changes in reactivity to the presence of
> other animals in the environment. Essentially the animals looked to be
> somewhat hyper-reactive to stimuli. We have, in other words, effects on
> brain and behavior. We're also seeing changes in liver enzyme activity
> which determines the way we respond to external chemicals, how fast we
> clear drugs, how we metabolize drugs.
>
> In other words, in every aspect of physiology that we look for, we see
> effects. And they're permanent. And the important thing about what I'm
> talking about is we are only exposing babies to these chemicals for
> very, very short periods of time in development and the consequences are
> for the rest of the life of that individual. Once you change the
> development of an organ there is no way to undo that effect. It's a life
> sentence -- that's a lifetime consequence. Medical science can't undo
> the development of organs.
>
> DH: And you're finding that organs are affected at levels as low as
> those that are leaching into our food from common plastics?
>
> FvS: That's correct. The evidence provided by industry concerning the
> levels of plastic materials that are coming out of plastic into food
> that is put into a plastic container is, in fact, causing an effect in
> experimental studies. We're putting those levels into developing mice
> and we're altering, profoundly, the development of mice.
>
> The reason the industry reported these data is that they were convinced
> that they could say, "Oh see, we're dealing with a billionth of a gram
> of these chemicals per gram of food." They thought it was such a small
> number that it couldn't possibly matter. Well, human cells respond to
> this chemical bisphenol-A at ten times lower than that. And that's been
> shown by at least four major independent academic laboratories and is
> now being repeated within the chemical industry itself. We understand
> now, with new techniques, that, in fact, cells are extremely responsive
> to these chemicals. This is information that people didn't have seven or
> eight years ago.
>
> DH: But what you're saying stands what we currently know about
> toxicology on its head.
>
> FvS: In science, this is called a paradigm inversion. The paradigm is
> the way people are doing things, and then periodically information comes
> along that says it's upside down, it's backwards, and if you ask the
> question a different way you get a totally different outcome. And
> whenever this happens, there is a convulsion in the field that is being
> turned upside down and there's a very documented series of responses
> because this has happened over and over through science. It's not the
> first time that the fundamental tenets of a field of science have been
> shown to be wrong, and the first thing is absolute denial. The second is
> a feeling that it may be true, but it's only true in very limited
> circumstances. The third is, it's true but the economic consequences are
> so great that we can't do anything about it. Just time after time, the
> response to these kinds of changes follows a very distinct pattern.
>
> DH: And where are we now in that pattern?
>
> FvS: Well, it's very interesting where we are in the progression. As of
> a year ago, people were saying the data from my colleagues and I stands
> alone and we can't believe it. In the last few months there have been a
> whole series of papers essentially confirming effects of this chemical
> bisphenol-A way below all of the published, absolutely "safe" level
> amounts that were in place in all the government regulatory agencies. So
> now, all of a sudden, we have three independent labs and also
> information coming out of institutions associated with the chemical
> industry that are saying, "Oops, got a problem here."
>
> We have to be beyond the denial phase, because in science independent
> replication to the order of two, three, four times takes it out of the
> realm of impossible. When one person shows it, it may not replicate.
> Replication in science is critical. That's happened. So now what we're
> getting to is: well this is maybe true here but it can't be true
> everywhere else.
>
> This is where you get to the issue of the endocrine system. It operates
> through mechanisms that are hard for people to really accept. The way
> estrogen works in a fish and the way it works in an alligator and a frog
> and a bird and a mouse and a woman is no different. That's been known
> for decades. Molecular biologists refer to this as incredible, extreme
> conservation of a fundamental system to life and you muck around with it
> and essentially it takes you out of existence. And so the assumption for
> this kind of system is that it's so profoundly central to life and
> reproduction that it has been subjected to only the most minor changes,
> so that this is a system that essentially works the same in everyone.
> And the important consequence of that is that if we're seeing these
> kinds of effects in experimental animals, we can't assume that humans
> aren't going to experience the same kind of consequence of this. And it
> also means that we have to begin thinking about the consequences of the
> amounts of these chemicals that humans are exposed to and the effects
> they can cause in people based on the work that we're now seeing in
> experimental animals.
>
> DH: Could I just get you to repeat that in simpler terms?
>
> FvS: OK. If you look at the fish or the human or the frog or the bird at
> the earliest stages of embryonic development, when the reproductive
> organs are forming, you're hard pressed to tell them apart. And if I
> were to show you the developing prostate in a human at the very
> beginning of its development, and the developing prostate in a mouse at
> the beginning of its development, you wouldn't tell them apart. And at
> the functional level they're essentially identical.
>
> DH: One of your colleagues actually stumbled onto this problem with
> plastics. How did that happen?
>
> FvS: Well, it's a fascinating detective story. At Tufts University, they
> were doing the same types of studies that we have been doing with human
> cells: culturing them and then looking at the ability of the cells to
> respond to chemicals in the environment. They had purchased some new
> test tubes and the test tubes were made of polystyrene plastic, and the
> cells that we're using to detect estrogens require estrogens to grow and
> to proliferate, to go through development. And they put the cells in
> these test tubes and they started growing. And so the natural assumption
> was, "Somebody spilled some chemical in the lab that is infiltrating all
> of our cultures, and oh my gosh this is a disaster." Contaminated labs
> are a real serious problem.
>
> Instead, after months and months of work, they realized that the lab was
> absolutely clean and that it was the test tube that was causing the
> cells to grow. So they called up Dow Corning, from whom they had
> purchased these test tubes, and said, "Your test tubes are causing our
> estrogen-responsive cells to grow. They must be releasing an estrogen.
> What could that be?" And Dow Corning said, "We won't tell you. We won't
> tell anybody what's in our products." And I'll come back to this because
> this is an extremely critical issue with regard to knowing what
> chemicals we're exposed to. Because the chemical industry will not
> inform scientists or the public what the chemicals in the products we're
> using are, and so it took months of work, of chemical analysis of these
> plastics, to realize that it's an additive material.
>
> It's an antioxidant that stops discoloration of the plastic and it's
> added to the plastic to stop it from discoloring, and it's present in
> soaps, detergents, hand creams, vaginal creams. It's used in loads of
> different types of products. This same chemical is also used as an
> antioxidant in plastics. And it's a potent enough estrogen that when you
> put human cells into a plastic material made of polystyrene, but it's
> got this additive material in it, it can cause human breast cells to
> start proliferating. That's not a good thing.
>
> DH: Could it be cancer causing?
>
> FvS: Well, you can't have breast cancer if you don't have enough
> estrogen to cause the breast cells to undergo differentiation in
> development. Women who, at a young age, have their ovaries taken out and
> their estrogen levels reduced don't get breast cancer. It's an
> estrogen-dependent disease, and the amount of estrogen you're exposed to
> through your life is the best predictor of the likelihood of getting
> breast cancer. So from an epidemiological point of view, if you can
> account for something in the environment that's going to elevate a
> woman's lifetime exposure to estrogen, the evidence is clear that that
> is a risk factor. We don't understand what causes breast cancer, but it
> is a factor in the probability of getting breast cancer.
>
> DH: And this is coming from soaps, creams, plastics that are in our
> daily lives?
>
> FvS: That's correct When you take this plastic material at levels way
> below what the government in the United States and in Europe has deemed
> a safe daily intake amount, and for just eleven days you administer that
> to a rat, you get dramatic increases in breast proliferation, in breast
> cell proliferation. And the conclusion of these authors who just
> published this in a major scientific journal a few months ago is that
> there is absolutely no doubt that extensive proliferation of breast
> cells is a recognized risk factor for breast cancer.
>
> DH This issue can't be talked about without getting into politics, it
> seems. Why is that?
>
> FvS: The political aspects of dealing with the endocrine disrupter issue
> have really altered the course of what is happening dramatically. If we
> were dealing with a topic that didn't have incredible economic
> consequences, there wouldn't be the kind of resistance to what we're
> talking about right now. Paradigm shifts in science are always
> difficult, but if they only impact a scientific issue that impacts a few
> scientists that are wedded to an idea, the general scientific community
> is going to look at it and say, "Gosh, this really makes sense." The
> transition is going to be relatively easy.
>
> In the case of the endocrine disrupter issue, where the chemical that
> we're publishing about happens to be one of the fifty top chemicals made
> in the United States, it is worth billions of dollars to a few major
> corporations such as General Electric, Shell Oil, Dow Chemical. Each of
> them makes billions of dollars from this chemical. That's what I hear.
> And the consequence of that is that if there is a shift in the
> government's approach to regulating this chemical, it could impact
> billions of dollars of profits. So instead of just looking at the
> scientific issues, now you have this huge force that has tremendous
> influence over the way our government operates -- and everybody
> recognizes the amount of money spent in lobbying is somehow related to
> legislation. I don't think that's a wild assumption anymore. And so you
> have this tremendous infrastructure of industry trade groups arguing
> that we don't know enough yet to do anything of a regulatory nature
> based on the scientific findings.
>
> And my response to that is for billions of dollars of products and
> profits, how much information will you ever need to get to the point
> where you know enough? And my attitude is, essentially, as far as those
> industries are concerned, never. And the model for that is tobacco.
> Because it has been clearly known within the tobacco institutes and the
> tobacco manufacturers for at least, now we know, three decades that
> these are cancer causing. It's addictive, but that wasn't going to be a
> factor in them doing business.
>
> DH: There's just not enough known here to assume that the industry is
> following those traditional patterns.
>
> FvS: There is an important distinction between what we're doing right
> now and what was done by the tobacco industry thirty years ago. For
> thirty years, let's say, the tobacco manufacturers have clearly
> understood the extreme negative health consequences of smoking, and they
> lied and they hid that from the public. It's very clear that the people
> who manufactured these plastic materials twenty years ago thought they
> were safe.
>
> What we are now in is this paradigm inversion that I've taken you
> through, where what you do is you step through these sequences of
> denial: now we accept it, but it's limited, but it's going to cost too
> much. What you have now is clearly enough scientific information to
> warrant concern and a change in the regulatory approach to these
> chemicals. You have at least six major laboratories essentially
> concordant with the findings concerning how potent, one, this chemical
> really is.
>
> If that information had been known at the time that this chemical was
> first put into commerce, it would not have been put into commerce,
> alright? But because it already is in commerce, and chemical industries
> have a huge stake in maintaining their market share using this chemical,
> how do they now respond to evidence that it really is not a chemical
> that you would want your baby to be exposed to? We're still in the
> attack phase.
>
> Dow Chemical sent a representative down to my lab a number of months ago
> and essentially asked if there were a mutually beneficial outcome that
> we could arrive at where I held off publishing the information about
> this chemical until they had repeated my studies, and after repeating my
> studies approval for publication was received by all the plastic
> manufacturers.
>
> DH: They were trying to buy you off?
>
> FvS: We didn't get to anywhere beyond that. My response was, "Do you
> have a scientific criticism that would justify not publishing this
> paper?" Because if anybody can ever provide a valid scientific criticism
> on the research that I've done, that would be a reason not to publish an
> article. But this was research funded through the National Institutes of
> Health. I have an absolute obligation to take public money and report
> the findings from research conducted with those public funds. To not do
> so would be a gross violation of professional ethics, and I don't need
> to tell you would be totally inappropriate.
>
> So I don't know what mutually beneficial outcome they were thinking
> about, but there was no beneficial outcome that I would have found
> acceptable and so I simply shut that conversation off. But clearly that
> was an example where they would have preferred that the information not
> be seen by the general community, and not be discussed about in this format.
>
> DH: Dow Chemical said this didn't happen. There may have been a
> misunderstanding, or whatever, but they certainly weren't trying to
> influence your research.
>
> FvS: Well, if you say that Dow says this didn't happen, there were a
> number of other people in the room during this conversation and I wrote
> a letter to the Food and Drug Administration documenting the
> conversation in detail. Quite a detailed letter that was sent to the
> government with copies all through my university hierarchy.
>
> I never received a letter back from anybody at Dow suggesting that there
> was anything in that letter that wasn't exactly as it had happened
> which, again, was also witnessed by numerous other people. If they have
> any problem with what I am saying here, they can deal with that however
> they want. What I am saying is exactly what happened and could be
> corroborated by a number of other people who were in the room and heard
> this.
>
> DH: Why would they do this?
>
> FvS: I was stunned. I can't answer for the people who would have made
> that decision. It was a stupid decision as far as I am concerned. I
> can't imagine how they would have thought I would do something like
> that. It was totally inappropriate. Scientists simply don't put away
> their findings until industry lawyers decide it is appropriate for them
> to publish.
>
> But it does raise an absolutely critical issue that when an industry
> funds "science" -- I put "science" in quotes there because there is an
> inherent contradiction. Science is the pursuit of knowledge and the
> dissemination of that knowledge. Industry typically puts constraints on
> the ability to disseminate that information.
>
> The chemical industry has shown an absolute unwillingness to give any
> money not attached to strings where they control the process of putting
> together the experiments and then publishing the experiments. And that
> is just unacceptable. And this is a perfect example of what would happen
> if I had a contractual arrangement with them that allowed them to shut
> me down in terms of providing you with the information I am providing to
> you.
>
> What we have been calling for, in the scientific community, for a number
> of years is for the chemical industry to set up a mechanism to give
> money to address the basic issues of how chemicals work without
> controlling the design of the experiments and the ability to publish the
> work once the research has been done
>
> DH: Do you think that Steve Safe is close-minded to the truth?
>
> FvS: I think what you have is a complex web where what is the cause of
> what behavior is impossible to sort out. He was adamantly opposed to the
> concept of endocrine disrupters. So who did the chemical industry give
> money to? Stephen Safe. They are not funding me. So one of the important
> issues here is, did the fact that he then received that money in any way
> contribute to his unwillingness to look at the accumulation of
> scientific evidence and alter this absolute position that he had locked
> himself into?
>
> Science is the pursuit of knowledge. Nobody has a crystal ball to look
> down the line and see where the science is going. And if, in fact, over
> the last four years all of these experiments that people are probably
> talking about on this program had been negative, with regard to effects
> of endocrine disrupters, we probably wouldn't be here having this
> conversation. Because there would be nothing to talk about.
>
> But Steve Safe, while taking money from the chemical industry, still
> rejects entirely the possibility of endocrine disruption, if you in fact
> believe what he wrote in "The New England Journal of Medicine" where he
> refers to the possibility of this as a phobia -- an irrational fear. I
> think that most scientists looking at the totality of data here would
> certainly not call concern about endocrine disruption an irrational fear.
>
> So let's say you get a million dollars and it comes into your lab and
> you set up an infrastructure based on that million dollars. And people's
> jobs depend on you. There are pressures associated with maintaining the
> funding and keeping that environment going, and anybody who would claim
> that getting money has no influence on your behavior I just think is not
> making a credible argument. I don't think anybody would accept that as a
> legitimate argument.
>
> The next issue, then, does it cause you to lie? And I am not suggesting
> that anybody is overtly lying. You don't need to do that in science. It
> is very easy for someone who understands the way a system works to set
> up an experiment to find exactly what you want to find.
>
> When the amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act were passed and the
> Food Quality Protection Act was passed, industry knew that there was a
> mandate that within a two-year period of time there had to be a whole
> new method of testing environmental endocrine structures. Not because
> industry wanted to, but because Congress said, "This must be on our desk
> in two years or there is going to be hell to pay."
>
> What you have is something very different when the chemical industry is
> funding people to provide information about chemicals in commerce, and
> then that information goes into determining whether that chemical is
> actually allowed to be used in products or not allowed to be used in
> products -- when that is based on the outcome of those experiments. And
> that is the type of research we want separated from industry control.
> The industry should also be putting money into basic mechanisms of which
> systems are appropriate to test chemicals and these sort of foundation
> issues.
>
> The problem is that all chemical screening is controlled by industry
> hiring contract labs to screen those chemicals, and then that
> information doesn't go through intermediates. It goes directly to
> corporations through their legal departments. And then they decide
> whether to provide it to the government or not. They decide whether the
> outcomes are adverse. That could be very subjective. And they just say,
> "Well, we didn't provide this information because we didn't think it was
> a problem."
>
> I essentially don't trust the system because every time you look into
> it, you find that there is abuse. Because we are dealing with chemicals
> that are worth billions of dollars, and that kind of money inherently
> corrupts.
>
> DH: Steve Safe says if he has had any PR impact it is only infinitesimal
> compared to the effect that others, including yourself, have had in this
> issue of endocrine disruption.
>
> FvS: The issue of impact is very difficult to assess. What is very clear
> to me is that what industry has done is they have found a very effective
> spokesman in one person who travels extensively around the world
> presenting this issue as being debated broadly by members of the
> scientific community who disagree with the possibility that chemicals in
> the environment may pose a threat to health, and other scientists who
> think there could be a problem.
>
> DH: There are an awful lot of dissenting voices: Nobel Laureates that we
> have talked to, others who think it is an interesting hypothesis but
> don't feel that there is anywhere near enough information now to
> completely accept this hypothesis. We are still very much in a discovery
> process.
>
> FvS: You are saying you are interviewing Nobel Laureates, for instance.
> One of the problems is in this field the information is moving extremely
> quickly. If you don't do this type of work, you may know what is
> currently going on behind the scenes in your field, but none of the
> people you are talking to probably are, themselves, involved in research
> in this field. And so they are playing catch-up with information that
> may be two years out of date.
>
> Because what we are finding is that people come in with an immense
> amount of skepticism, do an experiment, and go, "My god, I never would
> have imagined getting this outcome." And then they change their ideas
> when they see the data.
>
> DH: Isn't it hard to assess where this issue really stands, from where
> you sit? You certainly are at the cutting edge, which is an exciting
> place to be in science. But people who are the deepest into it don't
> always have the clearest perspective. Might you be in the wrong position
> to really know where we are?
>
> FvS: Is the fact that you are involved on a daily basis in studying a
> subject and learning about it, is that going to put you in a position to
> not be able to understand where this information fits in the larger
> picture? There is always a concern that you can buy into an idea and
> begin to ignore reality. All right. But that is definitely going to get
> obvious in a very, very short order of time because people are
> replicating studies and moving forward very quickly in this field.
>
> What is important is clearly that information that is presented by one
> group be replicated by another group, and information extended. And this
> is the case with our finding concerning bisphenyl-A that we only
> published one year ago, where we said that this is a chemical that
> operates at very, very low doses and can have profound effects that were
> not predicted based on the way chemical testing was done. And in the
> last six months, two other studies from major independent laboratories
> have come to exactly the same conclusion. Now, all of a sudden, it is
> not just me anymore. And that is the kind of information that wins over
> the scientific community. Now we are up to three independent
> replications coming to the same conclusion.
>
> The question I have is: who is looking at that series of replications
> and saying, "I still don't believe that anything can happen"? Because
> the scientific process says that as replications occur, the degree of
> confidence goes up dramatically. And so I would say they may just not be
> aware that the replications occurred. Because if they were aware of it,
> I think that skepticism would decrease dramatically. How could three
> studies, independent of each other... Apparently none of us knew the
> other people were working with this chemical, and the outcomes are all
> the same. That is very compelling. We had no agenda, with regard to
> economic outcome, of finding one chemical dangerous and one chemical not
> dangerous.
>
> DH: You are both an advocate for this issue and a scientist. Do you see
> any conflict between those two roles?
>
> FvS: I don't see myself as an advocate for any position other than the
> results of my experiments. What I am doing is, I am saying that we took
> a chemical that is deemed to be safe at fifty parts per million: fifty
> millionths of a gram per gram of your body weight. If you eat that much,
> you are absolutely "safe". We dropped that down 25,000 times, and just
> totally perturbed the whole course of fetal development. Because of
> that, I say, "That concerns me." All right?
>
> Now we did it with a whole series of chemicals. Every time we challenge
> the model of "here is a safe amount, anything below that should do
> nothing", we find out that the safe amount as published in the
> government registry is wrong. We started giving low doses to animals,
> and it was only after that that we were absolutely astonished to find
> that nobody had ever done that.
>
> I am a developmental biologist studying the effects of natural hormones
> on development. I had been doing that for twenty years before I got into
> this, and had no intention of actually ending up working in toxicology.
> That was the farthest thought from where I was ten years ago. I have
> lots of other questions in science that I am very interested in, and the
> last thing I want to do with my scientific career is waste my time
> working on something that ten years from now is going to be looked at as
> nonsense. Why would I want to do that?
>
> And so I have a reputation because I have conducted experiments that
> were reporting new information that were thought of as controversial,
> and then turned out to be replicated and extended and, in fact, are now
> totally accepted. Because of the weight of evidence that has accumulated.
>
> If you have industry throwing bricks at you, saying, "This is untrue.
> This person is incompetent. This is junk science," and you are brand
> new, you are vulnerable. But it is very easy not to find something. The
> trick is to find that needle in the haystack. It is very easy not to
> find it.
>
> DH: I think the impression that's often put out there is that industry
> is spending all this money to try to influence science and influence the
> media. Their point of view is that there are also an awful lot of
> groups, environmental groups, that are working with these scientists --
> and they're using some of the same PR tactics that industry is. Are they
> right that PR is just a necessary way that you get a message out?
>
> FvS: I don't know of very many scientists who have actually been
> involved in PR activities in an overt sense. What I have been willing to
> do is sit down with reporters, just as we are right now, and I've been
> willing to discuss the findings from my experiments. Now if that is
> considered PR, then... I think that disseminating the information that
> you have to the public is an important part of the scientific process,
> as long as it's not done prematurely.
>
> If, in fact, you go through the proper channels of publishing scientific
> information and then you have industry saying this is junk science, I
> think sitting down with you and explaining my research findings to you
> is an appropriate part of the process of getting information out to the
> public that is actually accepted by the scientific community. I've never
> really thought of that as PR in some kind of marketing sense, but I
> suppose it really is. I'm engaging in public relations with regard to
> the research going on in my laboratory. But I'm not putting a spin on
> it, I'm simply telling you what I found.
>
> MC: Steve Safe said to us that the levels of chemicals in the
> environment have all gone down.
>
> FvS: DDT is at much lower levels in the United States today than it was
> in the 1970s. Of course it's also being used all over the world, and
> it's in the atmosphere. And the very current evidence is that while
> levels decreased after it was banned, we're now somewhat stabilizing.
> The same with PCBs.
>
> Those two chemicals do not encompass endocrine disrupters. And we
> absolutely, desperately need Congress to fund broad monitoring studies
> of chemicals in the environment that are being identified as endocrine
> disrupters. This is all of the components of plastics. Every four years,
> one trillion pounds of plastics are made in the world. They are being
> thrown away in the landfill. They are leaching these products back into
> our water. No one is looking for them. So as a general statement, to say
> that all endocrine disrupting chemicals are at lower levels today than
> they would have been twenty years ago is just ludicrous. Because
> nobody's looked. Nobody knew they were endocrine disrupting chemicals.
>
> DH: You've said that the doses at which hormones affect the body are
> extremely low. Give me an example to make me understand that.
>
> FvS: The issue of the amount of hormone that actually causes effects is
> very difficult for scientists to talk to people about because we're
> dealing with numbers that are outside of the frame of reference that
> anybody is going to be thinking about. We see changes, profound changes,
> in the course of development of essentially the whole body of
> experimental animals, and we're working with mice and rats, and we see
> these changes at fifty femtograms of the hormone per milliliter of
> blood. That's 0.05 trillionths of a gram of this hormone in a milliliter
> of blood.
>
> DH: And what sort of effect does it have?
>
> FvS: We see changes in the functioning of the prostate. We see dramatic
> change in the sprouting of glands within the fetal prostate. We see
> changes in testicular sperm production. We see changes in the structure
> of the endocrine control region in the brain, which is accompanied by
> changes in sex behavior, aggression, the way these animals behave
> towards infants, their whole social interaction, the way they age, the
> time that they enter puberty, the age at which they cease reproduction.
> It changes their entire life history, and these changes are capable of
> occurring at very low levels of hormones.
>
> I remember when we first did this and I was a post doctoral fellow, and
> my advisor and I looked at the hormone levels and said, "My God, these
> levels are so staggeringly small and the consequences are so immense
> it's amazing." Even to biologists, it's amazing.
>
> But what you have is the entire field of toxicology thinking of a
> millionth of a gram of a hormone or a chemical as being this
> staggeringly tiny amount, and to most people if I said there's only a
> millionth of a gram of it here you'd say, "How can it do anything?" A
> millionth of a gram of estradiol in blood is toxic. The natural hormone
> is actually operating at something like a hundred million times lower
> than that. So when you have a physiologist thinking of a millionth of a
> gram, you have that physiologist thinking this is a toxic high dose.
> When you are raised in the field of toxicology you are looking at that
> from the other perspective of "My gosh, that's such a tiny dose, it
> couldn't do anything."
>
> So now what we have are two different fields coming into this issue and
> looking at a dose as either staggeringly high or staggeringly low, and
> it's not surprising that there is a clash occurring with regard to dose
> effects.
>
> DH: Can you again describe the results, the developmental effects in
> your laboratory mice, that you are seeing with these unbelievably small
> changes in hormone levels?
>
> FvS: We published a paper just a few months ago in the "Proceedings of
> the National Academy of Sciences" in which we experimentally elevated
> estradiol levels in mouse fetuses during the period when their
> reproductive organs were forming. And what we did was we experimentally
> elevated estradiol by one tenth of one trillionth of a gram of estradiol
> in a milliliter of blood. We estimate that we're increasing estradiol by
> about one molecule of estradiol per cell in the body. Okay? The
> consequence of this is that at te components of plastics. Every four
> years, one trillion pounds of plastics are made in the world. They are
> being thrown away in the landfill. They are leaching these products back
> into our water. No one is looking for them. So as a general statement,
> to say that all endocrine disrupting chemicals are at lower levels today
> than they would have been twenty years ago is just ludicrous. Because
> nobody's looked. Nobody knew they were endocrine disrupting chemicals.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> "Excuse me while I whip this out."
> Cleavon Little , "Blazing Saddles"
>
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"Excuse me while I whip this out."
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