!! spellx done
175   Environmental Chemicals' Hazards Still Little Known
      The Washington Post, Saturday, November 1, 1969

     The conservation of our genes from the impact of environmental
damage has urgent human importance at two levels.  One is the concern
that all parents must have for the health of the children they wish to
produce.  The other is the social and material burden of handicapped
and retarded children.  Furthermore, no one can be totally indifferent
to his responsibility as a vessel of the species, to a role in human
evolution that answers to the most profound religious instincts.

     Research geneticists are beginning to speak up more and more
pointedly about their concerns for genetic hazards.  Not too many
years ago, I was able to compartmentalize my own thinking to such a
degree that I did not immediately grasp the relationship between an
abstraction, like the statistics of "lethal mutations" in fruit flies,
and the human impact of malformation in the newborn.  The current
generation of young scientists is less likely to miss such
connections.

     However, we all have a basic responsibility to go beyond an
emotional expression of concern; to use it to energize the search for
authentic scientific measures of potential hazards and for means to
neutralize them.       

     Unfortunately, just as many academic scientists have rediscovered
the importance of relating basic science to human needs, the political
establishment which controls the purse strings has turned away --
perhaps in bafflement or resentment at the difficulties that more
careful scientific thinking discovers about the world we make for
ourselves.  Yet to ignore new viruses arising in nature may conceal
them from being promptly seen but will not make them disappear.  Nor 
will blinking them change the facts -- only our insight into them --
about the importance of viruses, food additives or drugs as agents of
genetic damage.

     We biologists have still not done the badly needed job of
assessing the really important hazards of environmental chemicals in
such areas as cancer, teratology (embryo damage) and mutation.  We do
know that these effects are often associated with one another, so that
when cyclamate derivatives are proven to break chromosomes, we should
be alert to cancer potential.

     The legally rigidified concept that any agent must be banned if
it "causes" cancer in any test animal at any concentration makes sense
if the agent acts directly on cells, but in the absence of basic
biological knowledge, it is a show of desperation of policy that may
well be distracting attention away from the real culprits.

     We do have a few fundamental tools today, especially in genetic
studies of cultured human cells, that might begin to clear things up.
We can also be looking more closely at the fundamental chemistry of
DNA.

     For example, a report that LSD forms chemical complexes with DNA
in the test tube (Dr. T. E. Wagner in Nature magazine in June) was
somewhat surprising, and puts more weight on claims that LSD breaks
chromosomes.  Even more recent work indicating that a whole class of
related compounds, the tryptamines, which occur naturally in the
brain, also react with nucleic acids may unify these findings.  We 
have still to work out how these agents can affect brain function at
all in such low concentrations, and nucleic acids in brain cells may
well be their targets.

     A group of geneticists and cell biologists headed by Dr.
Alexander Hollaender, retired director of biological research at the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has organized a new "Environmental
Mutagen Society" to help further the scientific understanding of these
difficult problems.  Such a group will fill a vital function if it
does nothing more than provide a channel for communication among a
wide range of separate disciplines; the DNA biochemist ordinarily
does not have his attention directed to matters like outbreaks of
chromosome diseases of newborns.

     It is not likely that we will -- and certainly we do not wish to
-- learn very much about genetic hazards from observations of
catastrophes in human populations.  We have a great deal of taxing
work ahead in trying to set up scientific valid and politically useful
criteria from laboratory studies for these elusive but all-important
hazards.
----------------------------------------------------------------------