Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in the San Francisco Marine Medicine Journal.
After Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and I published Stolen Future in 1996, we received a “slap” from one of the most prominent science journalists of the time, New York Times contributor Gina Kolata. I received
Among her criticisms was that one chemical does not cause many diseases. It was one chemical and she was one disease, like asbestos and mesothelioma.
Talk about progress. That “paradigm” is now too broken, and how science editors who have kept track of advances in environmental health science, including endocrine disruption, know that such arguments pass the test of editorial laughter. It’s hard to imagine or allow. Yes, there are non-asbestos examples that follow that pattern, but especially with endocrine disruption they are the exception, not the rule.
As Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the current scientific paradigm is highly inert. This is still true. And that is even without an aggressive disaggregation focused on resisting change, deliberately and heavily funded by vested interests.
Despite strong and insidious opposition, the environmental health science community that has used science and communication in the past two decades has shattered multiple paradigms that medicine has cherished for decades, if not centuries, It prevented its practitioners from accepting the opportunity to prevent disease by reducing exposure. Simply treat them (usually with medicinal chemicals).
Some of my favorite broken paradigms?
- “The dose makes the poison.” (We now know that high-dose exposure does not predict the effects of low doses.)
- “Nature vs. Nurture” becomes “Nature and Nurture”.
- “These statistically significant adverse effects are not the same in men and women and are therefore toxicologically irrelevant.”
Indeed, for endocrine-disrupting compounds, the default expectation is that men and women respond differently to exposure. And there is still a ubiquitous practice among regulatory bodies to test chemicals one at a time rather than in mixtures where chemicals are always present.
The Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) community has played a pivotal role in breaking down these outdated paradigms over the past two decades. How? It is a multi-disciplinary approach in which new ideas and results can be considered, discussed and debated, not only by those who throw bricks at the old paradigm, but also by thoughtful scientists who are willing to listen to new ideas, new ideas. We deliberately and steadily created a safe space, both real and virtual. Data, new hypotheses that challenge some of their most cherished concepts.
Moreover, these spaces have a genuine commitment to bringing the debate into the real world, to sharing this continuing thunder of scientific understanding with the media, policy advocates, and even provocateurs. Deliberately welcoming. These safe spaces are of immense value to progress. They may not be the flashiest new shiny objects on the block, but they’ve helped get past old, outdated, and sometimes even harmful ideas.
CHE has done all this as waves of new scientific achievements have been published and the media landscape has changed dramatically. The CHE community has embraced new outcomes and adapted to a sweeping revolution in communication challenges and opportunities.
And that’s exactly what the next 20 years of environmental health science and communication need, turbocharged.
Pete Myers is the founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of EHN.org and DailyClimate.org.
This essay was originally published in the San Francisco Marine Medicine Journal.
