The Learning Curve Researchers Say that Some Chemicals have Unexpected and Potent Effects at Very Low Doses — But Regulators Aren’t Convinced
Author:
Dan Fagin
Date Published:
10/2012
Description:
Near the end of an adventurous life spent wandering the fortress towns of central Europe, clashing with blood letters and other tradition-bound healers of the day, the irascible sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus wrote a defence of his unorthodox use of mercury, opium and other potentially dangerous medicines. “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison: the dose alone makes a thing not poison,” he wrote. Centuries later, after many of his once-radical ideas found wide acceptance, Paracelsus’s pronouncement would be distilled into a pithy phrase that became foundational dogma for the modern science of toxicology: “the dose makes the poison.”
The contemporary interpretation of Paracelsus’s famous declaration, for which he is often called the father of toxicology, is that dose and effect move together in a predictably linear fashion, and that lower
exposures to a hazardous compound will therefore always generate lower risks. This idea is not just a philosophical abstraction; it is the core assumption underlying the system of chemical-safety testing that
arose in the mid-twentieth century. Risk assessors typically look for adverse effects of a compound over a range of high doses and, from there, extrapolate downwards to establish health standards — always
assuming, like Paracelsus, that chemicals toxic at high doses are much less risky at lower, real-world levels.
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