© THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY

m
2 1230 YORK AVENUE NEW YORK. NY 10021

April 9, 1979

 

JOSHUA LEDERBERG.

PRESIDENT

Memorandum to all Faculty and Students

SEMINAR
ON
COMPARATIVE TOXICOLOGY

Scientific foundation for regulation and public policy
in re drugs, food additives, environmental pollution
radiation, toxic substances.....

On April 25 at 4:00 p.m., in Caspary 1A, we will
hold the organizing session for a projected seminar on
an important but poorly developed discipline that might
be called 'comparative toxicology’. Innumerable and
costly decisions and choices are made that are based on
the extrapolation to people of risks inferred from studies
of hazard in other species. The policy methods used in
such choices are often defective, but so is the underlying
scientific foundation. This seminar, although directed at
improving our own, and public, insights in these choices,
will be focussed more sharply on the scientific issues in-
volved in the assessment:-of toxic risks in various species,
and on how most validly to extrapolate these to the human.
Involved is the reconstruction of toxicology as a conver-
gence of biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, pathology,
epidemiology....but with particular emphasis on a compara-
tive genetic and evolutionary perspective. Particular at-
tention will be paid to critical experimental design in
risk assessment, to pathophysiological mechanism, to in-
tervening and interfering variables, and to a comparative
genetic perspective.

In addition to student-initiated seminars that stress
the critical scientific themes in the examination of par-
ticular cases, guest lectures might be sought, especially
for the policy oriented uses of scientific insight.

The seminar is open to all interested students and -
faculty of the University, and its detailed organization
will be the subject of the discussion on April 25. It is
an extension of a course that I taught for many years at
Stanford; but it should be attuned to the special interests
and skills of the Rockefeller University community.