Agreed. And claims regarding "not as bad" by a BP-affiliated researcher (and in a peer-reviewed journal, like Time magazine) should be read very critically, indeed.
> > Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:55:48 -1000 > From: David Duffy <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Good news from the Gulf? > > I think the scientific community IS willing to > consider that things may not be as bad as they > seem in the Gulf spill. It is just that it is > premature to do so and the article you posted > wasn't very good, as you yourself admit, it > "paints an incomplete and misleading picture". We > don't need to invoke conspiracy theories or guilt > by association, we just need to invoke critical > thinking. If the article had announced the Gulf > was dead, I suspect it would have received a chilly reception here. > > David Duffy One possible model to examine, much closer to home, was the effect on Atlantic tomcod (Microgadus tomcod) of Con Edison's long-term dumping of PCBs in the Hudson River. Due to the lethality of PCB metabolites, non-metabolizing tomcod were subject to selection, with the result that up to 95% of all tomcod develop liver carcinoma (but live long enough to reproduce) (Wirgin, 1991). > ------------------------------ > > Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:24:58 -0700 > From: Jane Shevtsov <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Good news from the Gulf? not so fast... > > To expand on this point, if you were to drink methanol (wood alcohol), > your body would metabolize it to formaldehyde and then formic acid. > It's the formic acid that would blind or kill you. (This happened a > lot during Prohibition.) > > Jane Shevtsov > > On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 12:22 PM, David M. Lawrence <[email protected]> wrote: >> "Metabolize" is not the same as saying their bodies break down the chemicals >> with no negative effects. All is says is their bodies process the chemicals >> -- but the act of processing the chemicals or their breakdown products may >> very well have harmful effects either right away or at some point in the >> future. >> >> I would ask Peterson to explain precisely what he means here. >> >> Dave ----- Michael Friedman, Ph.D. City University of New York Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics American Museum of Natural History 79th Street and Central Park West New York, NY 10024 Office: 212-313-8721 Cell: 718-812-4246
