Environmental intoxicants and their fundamental interactions

Abstract

The biological sciences are and should be responsive to the needs of medicine: thus the deficiency diseases (e.g. ben-ben and scurvy) stimulated the search for vitamins, just as contagious diseases fathered immunology and the study of antibiotics. It has been said that we live in the era of environmental disease, which suggests that an important fraction of human disease in technological societies is induced by environmental conditions, including some which are more commonly referred to as life styles. While this assessment requires further amplification (see below), it is clear that the sheer number and variety of potentially dangerous environmental agents has become so great that a better understanding of their fundamental interactions with the living system is clearly needed. As of the end of 1977, the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstract Service contained over four million entities, and it is estimated that there are about 63000 chemicals in common usage. The toxicity of only a very small number of these has been investigated.