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EMERGING POLLUTANTS, AND COMMUNICATING THE SCIENCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY AND MASS SPECTROMETRY: PHARMACEUTICALS IN THE ENVIRONMENT
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Impact/Purpose:
Objectives of ORD Involvement
o Provide the scientific basis for whether deleterious environmental or human health effects are possible, and for informed decisions on how any risks should be addressed.
o Foster further research by academe and other government organizations.
o Educate the public on the potential impact that their individual actions can have, both on the environment and on the health of others.
o Assume the primary leadership role in nurturing this broad research area.
o Catalyze research in academe, industry, and government (efforts to date have resulted in language for a DW STAR RFA and in proposals to the Sea Grant Program).
o Give teachers a new tool for environmental science classes (useful for elementary, high school, college, and graduate levels).
A critical review article that was published in FY00 in NIEHS's Environmental Health Perspectives (EFP) is used in various graduate-level curriculums, and is serving as the core around which a University of Maryland Chemistry seminar series is being planned. Have received thank you's from teachers who claim that the topic has rejuvenated their teaching of environmental science.
o Give students (from grade- through college-graduate schools) new insights and perspectives with regard to the many aspects of environmental pollution.
o Give the public a new perspective on environmental pollution and teach them, that as individuals, they can control the quality of their environment * &The Imperative of the Individual8. Very powerful tool to teach pollution prevention.Foster a dialog/debate amongst the science community to ascertain what aspect (if any) we need to be concerned about.
Description:
This paper weaves a rnulti-dimensioned perspective of mass spectrometry as a career against the backdrop of mass spectrometry's key role in the past and future of environmental chemistry. Along the way, some insights are offered for better focusing the spotlight on the discipline of mass spectrometry. A Foundation for Environmental Science-Mass Spectrometry Historically fundamental to our understanding of environmental processes and chemical pollution is mass spectrometry. This branch of analytical chemistry is the workhorse which supplies much of the definitive data to environmental scientists and engineers for identifying the molecular compositions, and ultimately the structures, of chemicals. This is not to ignore the complementary and critical roles played by the adjunct practices of sample enrichment (e.g., to lower method detection limits via any of various means of selective extraction) and analyte separation (e.g., to lessen contaminant interferences via the myriad forms of chromatography and electrophoresis). While the power of mass spectrometry has long been highly visible to the practicing environmental chemist, it borders on continued obscurity to the lay public and most non-chemists. Even though mass spectrometry has played a long, historic and Largely invisible role in establishing or undergirding our existing knowledge about environmental processes and pollution, what recognition it does enjoy is usually relegated to that of a tool. It is usually the relevance or significance of the knowledge acquired from the application of the tool that has ultimate meaning to the public and science at large, not how the knowledge was acquired. Communicating Science - Mass Spectrometry and the Risk- Paradigm Protecting human and ecological health from chemical hazards is rooted in assessing and managing/controlling chemical risks, a process requiring data from many aspects of the risk Paradigm. Comprising this Paradigm are a series of inter-related steps or activities, such as identifying sources, establishing environmental occurrence, elucidating fate and transport, verifying exposure or effects (eg., bio-markers), and developing remediation/control technologies. Mass spectrometry plays a critical, direct role in all of them, except the actual step of assessing risk (Figure 1). Mass spectrometry is essential to obtaining data required for establishing environmental source/origin, occurrence (identities concentrations), fate and transport including that for all associated transformation products), exposure (including measurement of biomarkers), effects (including receptor interactions and metabolites).