Fat frogs
I just got back from a presentation by a developmental biologist at UCLA. He was talking about environmental "obesogens" - he accidentally discovered, while researching endocrine disruption, that organotins had an effect they hadn't been anticipating. Organotins are a group of toxicants used (among other things) as fungicides, marine pesticides, and as ingredients in PVC. PVC is ubiquitous - it makes up the pipes through which our water travels, the plastic wrap in which we wrap our food, and all kinds of other great stuff.
Anyway, here's an article about it. And here's an abstract of some of their research. A lot of his research went way over my head, but the gist is that these pollutants seem to turn stem cells into fat cells. They discovered it when they exposed some frogs to tributyl tin, and found that the intersex weirdness they were anticipating didn't happen. The frogs' testes didn't get really big or really small - they were just replaced with fat.
So then they got busy with some more experiments to try to figure out what was going on, and found that when mice are exposed to organotins while they are pregnant, the newborn mice have crazy amounts of fat in their bodies. The baby mice, allowed free access to exercise and food and whatever other thrills can be found in the life of a laboratory mouse, stay small for a while, and then they get super-fat. All it takes is prenatal exposure, and not very much of it.
And it turns out that human stem cells exposed to the stuff turn into fat cells. All of these experiments showed effects at levels that are well within the range of levels of organotins found in the average person.
Anyway, this all made me feel like lying down under the table and weeping. I know a lot more than your average organotin-riddled person about environmental toxics, and I thought I had kind of reached maximum depression levels on the topic. But I hadn't - I am exploring previously virgin fields of depression!
So much of the way we deal with societal problems is to blame the individual. Quit smoking, stop eating so much junk food, go out of your way to recycle, buy a more environmentally responsible car. But so much of our lives involve such a limited range of choices. We have crappy choices. If we could just look up from the individual responsibility paradigm and say "Yes, you do have a responsibility to make good choices. But it is the job of government, and of the whole society, to ensure that we actually have good choices to make." I'd like to be able to choose between a range of attractive AND responsible options, not between lots of crappy choices and a few difficult and less attractive responsible options.
But for now, while I'm waiting without much hope for government to address the issues of toxicants in the environment, I'd just like somebody to tell me how I can procure water (in the city) for my daughter that's not contaminated with stuff that screws with her hormones. I'd really like that.
I came home after all this and found Dutch in the bathtub (Cook was in character as Pierre, who has an atrocious French accent and runs the spa). She said "Mama, I'm a whale!"
Anyway, here's an article about it. And here's an abstract of some of their research. A lot of his research went way over my head, but the gist is that these pollutants seem to turn stem cells into fat cells. They discovered it when they exposed some frogs to tributyl tin, and found that the intersex weirdness they were anticipating didn't happen. The frogs' testes didn't get really big or really small - they were just replaced with fat.
So then they got busy with some more experiments to try to figure out what was going on, and found that when mice are exposed to organotins while they are pregnant, the newborn mice have crazy amounts of fat in their bodies. The baby mice, allowed free access to exercise and food and whatever other thrills can be found in the life of a laboratory mouse, stay small for a while, and then they get super-fat. All it takes is prenatal exposure, and not very much of it.
And it turns out that human stem cells exposed to the stuff turn into fat cells. All of these experiments showed effects at levels that are well within the range of levels of organotins found in the average person.
Anyway, this all made me feel like lying down under the table and weeping. I know a lot more than your average organotin-riddled person about environmental toxics, and I thought I had kind of reached maximum depression levels on the topic. But I hadn't - I am exploring previously virgin fields of depression!
So much of the way we deal with societal problems is to blame the individual. Quit smoking, stop eating so much junk food, go out of your way to recycle, buy a more environmentally responsible car. But so much of our lives involve such a limited range of choices. We have crappy choices. If we could just look up from the individual responsibility paradigm and say "Yes, you do have a responsibility to make good choices. But it is the job of government, and of the whole society, to ensure that we actually have good choices to make." I'd like to be able to choose between a range of attractive AND responsible options, not between lots of crappy choices and a few difficult and less attractive responsible options.
But for now, while I'm waiting without much hope for government to address the issues of toxicants in the environment, I'd just like somebody to tell me how I can procure water (in the city) for my daughter that's not contaminated with stuff that screws with her hormones. I'd really like that.
I came home after all this and found Dutch in the bathtub (Cook was in character as Pierre, who has an atrocious French accent and runs the spa). She said "Mama, I'm a whale!"
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