Tuesday, May 27 — I’m looking at a stack of poster reprints that I collected Monday and today, and wondering how I’m going to assimilate all this information. And it’s only the second day of the meeting!
Well, I guess I could say it’s almost the third day. Eight parallel sessions on extremely different topics, with four talks every hour and a half or so… and the organizers said they cut back a bit !
But I’m not complaining!There’s so much interesting stuff out there to think about. Paul Westerhoff of Arizona State University gave an excellent plenary on nanomaterials today, and I think it energized a lot of people in the audience who don’t work on the topic. I certainly ended up with a bunch of questions at the end — he mentioned some promising new detection techniques using ICPMS, and a few other things that got me excited.
Earlier in the day at the pharmaceuticals session, Tom Hutchinson gave an interesting overview of some of the ERAPharm results, which came out of a meeting at the beginning of the year to examine environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals. Hutchinson used to be at Astrazeneca and recently made the move to Plymouth Marine Labs — I’m looking forward to talking to him in the near future about some of this stuff. He mentioned some of the U.S. EPA “Intelligent Testing” ideas, and I think he wanted to rename it something more modest, like “Informed Testing,” for investigating potential problems with products before they crop up.
We have a “toolbox of life,” Hutchinson said, in a lovely turn of phrase to describe all of the data available on the genomes and behavior of Drosophila, C. elegans, zebra fish, sea urchins, and more. Harm may not be the only possible outcome, I think he was trying to say. For example, a betablocker for our heart diseases seems to have neurobehavioral impacts on the larva of barnacles — it prevents them from laying anchor, so to speak, on ship hulls, which could make the pharmaceutical a good anti-biofouling compound. He also mentioned something about how brevetoxin from marine toxic algal blooms is about to go into Phase 1 testing under USDA for an asthma treatment. Amazing stuff.
Still, the rest of the session shows that long-term, low level effects may be the problem to focus on, not the acute effects on human analog receptors… fascinating.
What else did I hear today? Refugia for insects living near GMOs and pesticides help the populations survive. The Carbon Trust, a private company funded by the U.K. dedicated to finding ways to move to a low-carbon economy, is working on revising its carbon footprint label a bit (these are the guys who figured out the carbon footprint of chips). An excellent talk on the SETAC Pellston Workshop “Tissue Residues”, by Roman Ashauer, now of EAWAG (he was at CSL last year when I wrote about his work on pesticide mixtures). Metals and other toxicants may be better measured by their activity before they get to a cell–the toxicokinetics, rather than toxicodynamics. This is a topic I need to delve into more to understand it better, but for those of you that do, I think the report is coming out soon!
There was so much more that I saw that I want to write about. And I’ll have more for you tomorrow!
