Meeting Abstract
All physiology and behavior is controlled or modified by hormones and other chemical bioregulators. Environmental endocrinologists study natural abiotic factors as well as biotic factors that operate through the neuroendocrine system to regulate development, growth, reproduction, and senescence. Investigative techniques used by environmental endocrinologists have shifted from organism level to gene action. Awareness of destructive effects of human activities on air and water quality led to the Clean Air and Clean Water acts and formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s. Things got better for the environment. However, biologists went back to our studies with the assumption that government was now safeguarding the environment. That changed in the mid-1990s with identification of widespread endocrine disruption linked to pharmaceuticals, pesticides, cosmetics, plastics and a host of industrial and agricultural chemicals. Research in the past 25 years has increasingly focused on anthropogenic chemicals that disrupt normal endocrine functions by mimicking or blocking bioregulator actions. These disrupting chemicals are found in every ecosystem on Earth at concentrations known to disrupt endocrine function in laboratory experiments. Some of these effects are reversible; others are not. The resulting endocrine disruption in vertebrate and invertebrate populations means that ecosystems being altered and that every biological investigation of natural populations is affected. We must communicate how biological systems operate, effects of endocrine disruption on these systems, implications for human health, and how best to diminish our destructive impacts on nature. And we need to communicate this to the general public who are now and will be in the future most profoundly affected.
