4 ms·

I did an undergraduate in Chemistry, and I occasionally get the question of, "Is X bad for me," or "Will Y give me cancer?" My response is always that our moder

by dexwiz 11y ago

I did an undergraduate in Chemistry, and I occasionally get the question of, "Is X bad for me," or "Will Y give me cancer?" My response is always that our modern world is bad for you. There are millions (maybe billions) of chemicals produced by thousands of companies. Most are probably harmless. But it only takes one or two being really bad for you to get sick. PFOA is one more to add to this list of shit that's not good for you. Most people are lucky enough to not be Wilbur Tennant and live right next to a chemical dump that poisons their water. But most people do get low doses of chemicals like PFOA. And they probably get low doses of another thousand things that are just as deadly, but unknown. We live in a poisoned world, but its not poisoned enough to kill the people that make the decisions, yet.

sohkamyung 11y ago
In other words, "The dose makes the poison".
- ori_b 11y ago
  This is always the case. The concern here is that the people who profit from being able to dispense harmful doses are also the ones that are responsible for monitoring its safety.
- cschmidt 11y ago
  Or more positively, "dilution is the solution"
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    Dilution is a solution (in a figurative sense) if you know you won't want the substance later on. In some ways, though, pollution is a materials technology problem, in that we don't know enough about materials technology to either use the pollutant directly or cheaply reprocess it into something we can use.
- kefka 11y ago
  Unless it's bioaccumulative. Just look at the wonders of methylmercury.
apsec112 11y ago
"My response is always that our modern world is bad for you." Is there any other place or time that would be less bad? Going back through history: - In the 20th century, factories were far dirtier than today; the gasoline was still full of lead; London had its infamous killer smogs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog); rivers routinely caught on fire from industrial waste (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River); etc. - In the 19th century, all kinds of common products (especially medicines) were hideously toxic. Mercury was used to make hats, so people became "mad as a hatter" from heavy metal poisoning. Famous artists painted with arsenic paint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green). Abraham Lincoln's doctors gave him mercury poisoning (http://www3.uah.es/farmamol/The%20Pharmaceutical%20Century/Ch1.html http://www3.uah.es/farmamol/The%20Pharmaceutical%20Century/C...). There's a history book called "The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, & Play" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Arsenic-Century-Victorian-Poisoned/dp/0199605998 http://www.amazon.com/The-Arsenic-Century-Victorian-Poisoned...). - In the 16th century, the popularity of pale skin lead women to use lead-based pale makeup, with accompanying lead poisoning and skin damage (http://www.elizabethancostume.net/makeup.html http://www.elizabethancostume.net/makeup.html). - In Roman times, lead was ubiquitous. Of course, lead was used for the plumbing which carried the water supply. But just in case that wasn't enough, they would boil juice in lead pots to create "sugar of lead", which was used as a sweetener in cooking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate). - Even in hunter-gatherer times, all kinds of naturally occurring substances would have been toxic. Poisonous plants were ubiquitous, as were poisonous substances in the water (drunk straight from the river or pond, remember). "Clostridia bacteria, for example, live in the soil but infect humans in a variety of nasty ways. These germs will grow on food, leaving the toxins that cause botulism".
- roymurdock 11y ago
  The difference is that today, we know these chemicals and pollutants to be harmful, and yet we still allow them to be produced on an increasing scale. Mercury, arsenic, lead, natural bacteria and fungi - we didn't know these were bad when they were prevalent killers - as you point out yourself, we even thought they had medicinal properties in some cases. Nobody is going to go around today sprinkling PFOA in their daily oatmeal for its purported medicinal properties, but they might get their ground springs poisoned as the result of known and accepted runoff from a nearby plant. The environmental poisoning of today is the result of negligence and fraud rather than ignorance.
m_mueller 11y ago
I feel like there should be a big effort for investigating health effects of chemicals before they even get tested in the lab, basically going back to first principles. Couldn't we build an inventory of every damn molecule occuring naturally in human bodies, tagged by the subsystems they are associated with (blood circulation, cell cores, digestion etc.) and then run simulations that tell you for a new chemical what they can bond with and what exposure is safe? Even just a molecular bonding database that you can query like this could be very powerful, maybe full scale simulation isn't even needed to get a qualitative view on health effects. Am I naive about what this could do or the feasibility of the implementation? Is it being done since a long time and chemical enterprises just keep it for themselves?
- adrianN 11y ago
  I have only a very cursory understanding of computational chemistry, but I believe that finding out what molecules bind to the proteins in your body in what way is a hard problem. This is the reason why pharma corporations have to do lots of experiments with the actual stuff even though simulations exist; the necessary use of heuristics in these simulations make results unreliable. And even with all that testing it happens quite frequently that a new drug happens to have serious adverse effects that are only discovered during late stage clinical testing. I therefore don't think that it's feasible to determine the safety of all the chemicals we dump in the environment in this way.
- quanticle 11y ago
  Couldn't we build an inventory of every damn molecule occuring naturally in human bodies, tagged by the subsystems they are associated with (blood circulation, cell cores, digestion etc.) and then run simulations that tell you for a new chemical what they can bond with and what exposure is safe? In a word? No. Not at all. Modeling the behavior of individual proteins is a NP-hard problem [0]. Modeling the behavior of multiple proteins interacting is even worse. And modeling the behavior of thousands of proteins, under the influence of thousands of unregulated chemicals is a combinatorial explosion of NP hard problems. [0] http://www.piercelab.caltech.edu/assets/papers/proeng02.pdf http://www.piercelab.caltech.edu/assets/papers/proeng02.pdf

by dexwiz 11y ago

sohkamyung 11y ago

In other words, "The dose makes the poison".

ori_b 11y ago
This is always the case. The concern here is that the people who profit from being able to dispense harmful doses are also the ones that are responsible for monitoring its safety.
cschmidt 11y ago
Or more positively, "dilution is the solution"
- cbd1984 11y ago
  Dilution is a solution (in a figurative sense) if you know you won't want the substance later on. In some ways, though, pollution is a materials technology problem, in that we don't know enough about materials technology to either use the pollutant directly or cheaply reprocess it into something we can use.
kefka 11y ago
Unless it's bioaccumulative. Just look at the wonders of methylmercury.

apsec112 11y ago

"My response is always that our modern world is bad for you." Is there any other place or time that would be less bad? Going back through history: - In the 20th century, factories were far dirtier than today; the gasoline was still full of lead; London had its infamous killer smogs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog); rivers routinely caught on fire from industrial waste (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River); etc. - In the 19th century, all kinds of common products (especially medicines) were hideously toxic. Mercury was used to make hats, so people became "mad as a hatter" from heavy metal poisoning. Famous artists painted with arsenic paint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green). Abraham Lincoln's doctors gave him mercury poisoning (http://www3.uah.es/farmamol/The%20Pharmaceutical%20Century/Ch1.html http://www3.uah.es/farmamol/The%20Pharmaceutical%20Century/C...). There's a history book called "The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, & Play" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Arsenic-Century-Victorian-Poisoned/dp/0199605998 http://www.amazon.com/The-Arsenic-Century-Victorian-Poisoned...). - In the 16th century, the popularity of pale skin lead women to use lead-based pale makeup, with accompanying lead poisoning and skin damage (http://www.elizabethancostume.net/makeup.html http://www.elizabethancostume.net/makeup.html). - In Roman times, lead was ubiquitous. Of course, lead was used for the plumbing which carried the water supply. But just in case that wasn't enough, they would boil juice in lead pots to create "sugar of lead", which was used as a sweetener in cooking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate). - Even in hunter-gatherer times, all kinds of naturally occurring substances would have been toxic. Poisonous plants were ubiquitous, as were poisonous substances in the water (drunk straight from the river or pond, remember). "Clostridia bacteria, for example, live in the soil but infect humans in a variety of nasty ways. These germs will grow on food, leaving the toxins that cause botulism".

roymurdock 11y ago
The difference is that today, we know these chemicals and pollutants to be harmful, and yet we still allow them to be produced on an increasing scale. Mercury, arsenic, lead, natural bacteria and fungi - we didn't know these were bad when they were prevalent killers - as you point out yourself, we even thought they had medicinal properties in some cases. Nobody is going to go around today sprinkling PFOA in their daily oatmeal for its purported medicinal properties, but they might get their ground springs poisoned as the result of known and accepted runoff from a nearby plant. The environmental poisoning of today is the result of negligence and fraud rather than ignorance.

m_mueller 11y ago

I feel like there should be a big effort for investigating health effects of chemicals before they even get tested in the lab, basically going back to first principles. Couldn't we build an inventory of every damn molecule occuring naturally in human bodies, tagged by the subsystems they are associated with (blood circulation, cell cores, digestion etc.) and then run simulations that tell you for a new chemical what they can bond with and what exposure is safe? Even just a molecular bonding database that you can query like this could be very powerful, maybe full scale simulation isn't even needed to get a qualitative view on health effects. Am I naive about what this could do or the feasibility of the implementation? Is it being done since a long time and chemical enterprises just keep it for themselves?

adrianN 11y ago
I have only a very cursory understanding of computational chemistry, but I believe that finding out what molecules bind to the proteins in your body in what way is a hard problem. This is the reason why pharma corporations have to do lots of experiments with the actual stuff even though simulations exist; the necessary use of heuristics in these simulations make results unreliable. And even with all that testing it happens quite frequently that a new drug happens to have serious adverse effects that are only discovered during late stage clinical testing. I therefore don't think that it's feasible to determine the safety of all the chemicals we dump in the environment in this way.
quanticle 11y ago
Couldn't we build an inventory of every damn molecule occuring naturally in human bodies, tagged by the subsystems they are associated with (blood circulation, cell cores, digestion etc.) and then run simulations that tell you for a new chemical what they can bond with and what exposure is safe? In a word? No. Not at all. Modeling the behavior of individual proteins is a NP-hard problem [0]. Modeling the behavior of multiple proteins interacting is even worse. And modeling the behavior of thousands of proteins, under the influence of thousands of unregulated chemicals is a combinatorial explosion of NP hard problems. [0] http://www.piercelab.caltech.edu/assets/papers/proeng02.pdf http://www.piercelab.caltech.edu/assets/papers/proeng02.pdf