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SARAH A. VOGEL
FORUM
from 'the dose makes the poison' to 'the timing makes the poison': CONCEPTUALIZING RISK IN THE SYNTHETIC AGE
| FOR SCIENTISTS AT GENERAL ELECTRIC in the late 1950s, the future was plastics. The GE scientists dreamed that scientific understanding of carbon-based (or organic) compounds, specifically polymers such as carbohydrates and proteins, would one day culminate in the creation of the ultimate machine—the "synthetic man." Though at the time only a dream, the rapid development and commercial success of synthetic polymers, notably plastics in the 1950s, fed such grandiose visions of the future. Today General Electric's dream of the "synthetic man," although not actualized as the science fictional character "The Terminator," has nonetheless become a reality. Traces of compounds used to make plastics, as well as pesticides and other industrial chemicals, have been detected in human blood, breast milk, placental tissue, amniotic fluid, and fat. We have literally merged with our material environment to become synthetic humans, a reality discussed and examined in this issue's forum essays by Michelle Murphy and Linda Nash. Determining the biological impact of our new synthetic bodies and the necessary political response to such a transformation informs a contentious contemporary debate about the meaning of chemical risk and toxicity. |
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This essay begins with a general overview of how chemical risks were conceptualized in regulatory law and articulated within the discipline of toxicology over the past half century. I then describe how research on endocrine disruptors beginning in the early 1990s challenged the meaning of risk and safety by providing empirical evidence of biological effects at extremely low doses of exposure—levels often long presumed to be safe. By challenging the safety of low-dose exposures, endocrine disruptor research undermined the long-standing regulatory approach to protecting the public's health, which upheld the notion that above all else, the dose makes the poison, and exposure at low levels was safe. |
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RISK AS RELATIVE | |
| FROM THE DEBATES over the safety of leaded gasoline beginning in the 1920s and pesticide residues on foods beginning in the 1950s to the institutionalization of risk assessment as the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) regulatory policy under President Ronald Reagan, the prevailing assumption about chemical toxicity was that the risks of disease or injury were relative to the amount of exposure. Put another way, any chemical would have some probability greater than zero of causing an adverse health effect. Conversely, no risk is absolute. In order to reduce risk, exposure to a given hazard must be minimized. A simple equation resulted: risk = hazard x exposure. As Arthur Daemmrich describes in his essay in this forum (pp. 685–695), the development of new methods and technologies for quantifying exposure inside the body (i.e. biomonitoring), meant risk equaled the hazard x presence. |
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In either equation, the logic only holds true given that the hazard remains constant, and for the hazard to remain constant, it must be considered absolutely necessary and therefore, exposure to it deemed unavoidable. Indeed, this narrative on risk was used to legitimize the proliferation of industrial chemicals throughout the twentieth century. As Jerry Markowitz and David Rosner detail in Deceit and Denial, in the mid-1920s the lead, oil, and automotive industries defended the introduction of lead into gasoline by arguing that it was necessary for American economic progress and that all technological development required some form of risk.1 |
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