Welcome!

Syllabus

Assignment 1 due second week of semester

What is it all about?

Click to find organizations, videos and other resources describing the variety of endocrine disruptors in our environment, and their impacts.

Word version of the critique of a Scientific Research Paper

due for each paper we examine of teh day that review begins

Chance has a lot to do with the process of science. And all scientists build on the shoulders of those who came before. Consider this example.

In the last part of the 20th century, Dr. Louis Guillette was doing a study for the State of Florida to estimate the population of alligators in order to provide details about harvesting eggs for the alligator farming industry. What he discovered in Lake Apopka Florida changed his focus of research and he has become a premier scientist in the field of endocrine disruption. I met Dr. Guillette in 1997 at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington when I was a newly minted PhD. He resparked my interest in Environmental Endocrine Disruptors. I learned about them for the first time in about 1994 as a graduate student at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, OR. The director of the center had a screening of

1994 BBC production called Assault on the Male.

The field really took off with the

concensus statement from the work session

at the Wingspread Conference in Racine Wisconsin in 1991and the publication of the book

Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn in 1997.

My interest and concerns with the impacts of chemicals on all aspects of Environmental Health continues to grow the more I learn.

While the process of science is self-corrective over time, conflicts of interest do arise in individual peer-reviewed publications, often when the stakes are high (economically). For example, here is south Florida Krista McCoy and Jason Rohr from USF showed such a conflict in their 2008 review of the effects of the herbicide atrazine.

Here is a news story about that issue:

Conflicts of Interest Affect Conservation Science Examination of Atrazine Shows Report Funded By Chemical Maker Flawed

Here is their review article:

A Qualitative Meta-Analysis Reveals Consistent Effects of Atrazine on Freshwater Fish and Amphibians

and here is a paper they wrote about the process of science:

Preserving environmental health and scientific credibility: a practical guide to redusing conflicts of interest

This is an upper-division course where we critically evaluate current topics in Biology. For several years now I have settled on the topic of environmental endocrine disruptors since the research shows they have far-reaching effects and yet, most people have not heard of them or their potential impacts.

Below is is a daily RSS feed from Environmental Health News.

They archive shows stories on endocrine disruptors from around the globe. Find that link in the lower right corner of the page is a chronology of endocrine disruptors news stories.