A few weeks ago was the 10th anniversary of the death of Dr. Theo Colborn. She was a pioneering giant that actually started the whole field of endocrine disruption from chemical pollutants in the environment.
It was due to her efforts that the term "endocrine disruption" (hormonal disrupting effects) was coined in 1991. Dr. Theo Colborn co-authored the groundbreaking 1996 book on endocrine disruptors: Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story.
I read the book when it first came out, and my advice is to: YES - please read this book! It is absolutely worth it. By the way, one of the co-authors is Pete Myers, who is the founder of Environmental Health Sciences, which publishes Environmental Health News.
Unfortunately, even with all the knowledge we have about endocrine disruptors and the harms to humans and wildlife - they are still all around us, including personal care products (e.g., parabens in many lotions). Industry pushback is huge, of course.
Excerpts from Environmental Health News (EHN):
Dr. Theo Colborn, who passed away December 14, 2014, was the founder of the endocrine disruption field, connecting the dots among the different health problems seen in wildlife with those seen in humans, tying them to the endocrine system and to chemical pollutants.
She organized the first gathering of scientists in 1991, where the term “endocrine disruption” was coined, and the Wingspread Consensus Statement was written. She co-authored the groundbreaking 1996 book Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story, along with Dianne Dumanoski and Pete Myers, the founder of Environmental Health Sciences (which publishes Environmental Health News).
One of Theo’s major skills was her ability to integrate large amounts of information from diverse areas of science. Although her focus was on wildlife, in 1989 Theo read a just published article about findings from studies with litter-bearing laboratory rodents about the life-history reproductive consequences caused by their exquisite sensitivity to very small differences in serum estradiol and testosterone during the vulnerable period of fetal sexual differentiation. The laboratory data was based on whether an animal happened, by chance, to be located in the uterus between female or male littermates, not due to environmental chemicals. This was my work, and it convinced Theo to contact me because she realized this was a part of the puzzle on which she was working.
Theo had been studying the disruption of development in wildlife in the Great Lakes region, and she was struck by the similarities in the life-long consequences of fetal exposure to toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes and the life-long consequences in laboratory animals due to their intrauterine position and exposure to very small differences in steroid hormones.
This “aha Moment” led Theo to a dramatic departure from the toxicological dogma that “the dose makes the poison” and that only very high exposures to chemical “poisons” were of concern. Instead, in the field of endocrinology the focus was on the exquisite sensitivity to hormones such as estradiol as a result of binding to estrogen receptors at concentrations below a part-per-trillion, with exposure during the fetal period of sexual differentiation being of greatest concern.
Her wide-range of reading of the scientific literature led Theo to predict that abnormalities being observed in wildlife could be due to exposure to environmental chemicals that disrupted endocrine function due to chronic exposure to very low doses. This prediction led to Theo organizing the 1991 Wingspread conference on environmental endocrine disrupting chemicals and creation of the new field of environmental endocrine disruption, which has transformed the fields of toxicology as well as endocrinology.