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Old September 14th, 2019, 11:47 AM
'Efrem G Mallach' via Dixonary
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Default Re: [Dixonary] Results Round 3013 Prisencolinensinainciusol

The history of science is replete with things that were thought to be benign but were later found to cause serious problems over time.

- Lewis Carroll's mad hatter was not a random turn of phrase. Exposure to mercury in making felt for hats causes a neurological disease, erethism, also called "mad hatter's disease" or "mad hatter's syndrome."

- Marie Curie died of anemia caused by exposure to radium. Despite that, it was used to make glow-in-the-dark watches well into the last half of the 20th century. The workers who applied it to watch dials would wet their brushes in their mouths, leading to radium necrosis of the jaw..

- Many of us are old enough to remember when three out of four doctors recommended Chesterfield cigarettes.

- Any number of plant and animal species were introduced to new regions to control pests, and turned out to be worse pests.

- And what will we find out, a few decades from now, about genetically modified foods?

The unifying thread to many of these examples is that not only did something cause harm, but the mechanism through which it caused harm was not known to the science of the day. ("The day" is not always long ago.) Thus, a scientist who was asked if something could be harmful could honestly reply "No, it can't," because it could not cause harm through any known mechanism. Therefore, anyone who says something can't be harmful (e.g., "GMOs can't hurt you") is essentially saying "we know all there is to know about all possible mechanisms through which something can harm us." I don't think any reputable scientist would agree with that statement in so many words, yet many of them say things that imply it.

Back in the 1990s, when the university at which I then taught didn't have enough classroom space in the building where we usually held our classes, some were scheduled for a building that housed the university's nuclear physics research reactor. To their credit, though only after some pushback, they let faculty refuse classroom assignments there - despite assurances that the level of radiation in the building was completely safe. I did. (I still fly to Australia and New Zealand, though. Getting there by ship from North America takes too long. Fortunately, the chances of my fathering any more children are small.)

Caveat user.

Efrem

> On Sep 14, 2019, at 12:18 PM, Guerri Stevens <guerri (AT) guerristevens (DOT) com> wrote:
>
> We hire people to do some of our yard work, but I still enjoy puttering around. I wonder about people whose job or business is landscaping and other yard work, and who use chemicals of some kind. And some of these dangers don't come to light right away.
>
> On 9/12/2019 9:47 PM, Tony Abell wrote:
>> My definition was a real one for heptachlor. There have been a lot of
>> pesticides that turned out to be dangerous to humans or other untargeted
>> animals. Personally, I'm not convinced yet that glyphosate is one of them, at
>> least when used occasionally by homeowners.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------
>> On 2019-09-12 at 15:16 Guerri Stevens wrote:
>>
>>> the pesticide definition: is it really Roundup by any chance. I used it
>>> for many years, and was horrified to learn that it was dangerous.

>
>
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