The Phoenix of modern toxicology.

Abstract

Although the study of poisons was an aspect of many ancient cultures, including the Egyptians (snake venoms, cardiac glycosides) (Oehme et al., 1980), the Chinese (opium alkaloids) (Terry and Pellens, 1928), the Incas (coca and strychnos alkaloids), and the Greeks (hemlock) (Kingsbury, 1980), their knowledge of toxicology was descriptive and empirical. Toxicology as we know it today—with its understanding of chemical mechanisms, detoxication, the biological-chemical warfare of coevolution, and the concept of selective toxicity in the design of medicines, pesticides, and food additives (Albert, 1985)—is a fundamental new science that is revolutionizing medicine and greatly improving society by its multifaceted impacts. Battle trauma. My own debut with toxicology came in the early 1940s when, as a medical student, I became perplexed with two major problems, namely, (1) why exposure to benzene caused chemical workers to develop scorbutic symptoms, aplastic anaemia, and finally malignancy, and (2) why war casualties died not of any subsequent infection, but of liver and kidney failure. Fifty years later these problems have only partly been resolved, but their study has revealed a common mechanism of toxicity which now appears to be basic to many toxic processes, namely, the generation of radicals, or, to be more precise, reactive oxygen species (ROS) (Dormandy, 1989; Halliwell, 1993). Because of the Second World War, the second of these problems became the more imperative, especially as it increased to result in major epidemics of peptic ulceration and respiratory distress among servicemen, which have since been related to battle trauma and ROS toxicity. In Europe, North Africa, and the war zones of the Pacific, the pattern of pathol-