Take for example the case of Atrazine which is the herbicide in widest use in the United States today.  It’s used on corn fields, among others, to kill plants that are competing with corn.  Work by an Endocrinologist at the University of California Berkeley named Tyrone Hayes has shown that this compound, Atrazine, herbicide, can alter the development of tadpoles at less than a part per billion which is an astoundingly low level.

Theo began professional life as a Pharmacist.  She ran a pharmacy in New Jersey for a long, long time.  Her brain during those years was trained to remember palosolabic names of chemicals, drugs, and also she’d learned an immense amount about pharmacology during those years.  And then at some point she moved.  She moved to Colorado and became a sheep farmer.  Ran a sheep farm for a decade or so.  But while she was living in Peoria, in the Peoria area, she began to get involved in some of the pollution issues that were affecting the streams, that were affecting her sheep and her sheep farm and she got involved.  She finally decided that to be an effective spokesperson, defending the water quality and her farm, she had to have some letters after her name that meant something in that world.  So she went back to graduate school.  Ultimately earning a Ph.D.  She left the sheep farm, went to Washington, worked in Washington for over a decade.  It’s an amazing story.  She got her Ph.D. at the age of 59.  Changed the world after that.

One of the key pieces of the science that’s emerged as people have explored the ability of contaminates to affect gene expression, because some contaminants are amazingly capable to alter gene expression at extremely low levels, levels that Toxicologists not only didn’t think were relevant 15 years ago, they couldn’t measure 15 years ago.  Take for example the case of Atrazine which is the herbicide in widest use in the United States today.  It’s used on corn fields, among others, to kill plants that are competing with corn.  Work by an Endocrinologist at the University of California Berkeley named Tyrone Hayes has shown that this compound, Atrazine, herbicide, can alter the development of tadpoles at less than a part per billion which is an astoundingly low level.