The Toxins That Affected Your
Great-Grandparents Could Be In Your Genes
Biologist Michael Skinner has
enraged the chemical community and shocked his peers with his breakthrough
research
Michael Skinner’s biggest discovery began, as often happens
in science stories like this one, with a brilliant failure. Back in 2005, when
he was still a traditional developmental biologist and the accolades and
attacks were still in the future, a distraught research fellow went to his
office to apologize for taking an experiment one step too far. In his
laboratories at Washington State University, she and Skinner had exposed
pregnant rats to an endocrine disruptor—a chemical known to interfere with
fetal development—in the hope of disturbing (and thereby gaining more insight
into) the process by which an unborn fetus becomes either male or female. But
the chemical they used, an agricultural fungicide called vinclozolin, had not
affected sexual differentiation after all. The scientists did find lower sperm
counts and decreased fertility when the male offspring reached adulthood, but
that was no surprise. The study seemed like a bust.
By accident, though, Skinner’s colleague had bred the grandchildren
of those exposed rats, creating a fourth generation, or the great-grandchildren
of the original subjects. “It’s OK,” Skinner told her. “You might as well
analyze them.” If nothing else, he thought, the exercise might take her mind
off her mistake. So she went ahead and studied the rats’ testes under a
microscope.
READ MORE: Smithsonian Magazine - Toxins
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