Our Stolen Future
1996 book by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers
Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story is a 1996 book by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers. The book chronicles the development of the endocrine disruptor hypothesis by Colborn. Though written for the popular press in narrative form, the book contains a substantial amount of scientific evidence. A foreword from then Vice President Al Gore increased the book's visibility. It ultimately influenced government policy through congressional hearings and helped foster the development of a research and regulation initiative within the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The authors also started a website which continues to monitor and report on endocrine disruptor scientific research.
Thousands of scientific articles have since been published on endocrine disruption, demonstrating the availability of grant money for research on the hypothesis raised by Our Stolen Future. For example, a symposium at the 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting explored the contribution of endocrine disruption to obesity and metabolic disorder. As is often the case, there is strong animal evidence but few epidemiological tests of predictions based on the animal experiments.[1]
A 2006 analysis of Center for Disease Control (CDC) data found an extraordinary increase in risk to type II diabetes as a function of exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs), in particular synthetic organic chemicals such as organohalogens.[2]
See also
- Silent Spring
References
- ^ http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/New/recentimportant.htm
- ^ Lee, D.-H.; Lee, I.-K.; Song, K.; Steffes, M.; Toscano, W.; Baker, B. A.; Jacobs, D. R. (2006). "A Strong Dose-Response Relation Between Serum Concentrations of Persistent Organic Pollutants and Diabetes: Results from the National Health and Examination Survey 1999-2002". Diabetes Care. 29 (7): 1638–1644. doi:10.2337/dc06-0543. PMID 16801591. S2CID 25146011.
Further reading
- Colborn, Theo; Dianne Dumanoski; and John Peterson Myers. Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story. New York : Dutton, 1996. 306 p. ISBN 0-452-27414-1
- Krimsky, Sheldon. Hormonal Chaos: The Scientific and Social Origins of the Environmental Endocrine Hypothesis. Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 256 pp. ISBN 0-8018-6279-5
External links
Some of the most important papers that support the opinions of the book's authors can be found here.
- Official website
- EPA Endocrine Disruptors Research Initiative
- Our Stolen Future - Revisited 15 Years Later (A talk by one of the authors looking at the science of endocrine disruptors since the book was published)
