Eating Pollution for Science
Government regulators who determine safe levels of pesticides, pollutants and other chemicals in crops and drinking water often have to make tough decisions with few reputable scientific studies to guide them. Perhaps that’s why officials at the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment said they were open to considering the results of a study being funded by aerospace giant Lockheed Martin on perchlorate, a rocket fuel component found in water wells in San Bernardino County.
Unfortunately, there is good reason to doubt the independence and scientific usefulness of the Lockheed study, in which human volunteers are being paid $1,000 each to ingest levels of perchlorate 83 times higher than found in the contaminated wells.
Lockheed Martin says it is trying to promote science and human health, but the study is designed in ways that could downplay perchlorate’s dangers. A former Lockheed plant is the likely cause of the county’s contaminated wells.
Traditionally, safety standards are developed after experiments that expose animals to increasing levels of a chemical.
Scientists conducting tests in which volunteers ingest environmental contaminants have compared those tests to clinical trials on the safety of drugs. That comparison is ethically flawed, however, because consuming a pollutant confers no medical benefit.
State regulators should be wary of dubious research like the Lockheed study, but a comprehensive solution won’t be possible until federal regulators tighten the currently lax guidelines used by the “institutional review boards.” These panels are supposed to evaluate medical research involving humans--deciding whether the benefits of a study to society outweigh the risks to an individual, for example, and monitoring whether volunteers fully understand how an experiment could harm their health.
A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that with medical research increasingly financed by companies interested in the outcome, the quality of research oversight has declined. The Lockheed study may be just the latest sign of a larger problem.
