David Friedberg

And piclorum became a very widely used herbicide

in our environment.

It's used to manage weeds in rangeland and pasture land where cattle graze.

It's used to control weeds near roads and near railroads on industrial sites to clear weeds away from highways and utility corridors.

And the problem with piclorum, one of the things that's been known about it is it's very persistent.

It doesn't biodegrade very well.

Piclorum sticks around for well over a year.

It stays in the water.

It moves into groundwater.

And it's persistently in the environment after it's been used for some period of time.

I went back and looked at the EPA data on this chemical.

The last time there was an EPA safety study done was in 1995.

And so this was before we had this capacity to do epigenomic studies like what was just done to elucidate that even though a chemical might not be causing cancer immediately, and you can't apply it to a cell and see it trigger a cancer, the long-term use or exposure to certain chemicals in our environment causes a change in the epigenome, which means that these genes are being turned on and off.

And when certain genes are turned on or off in the wrong way,

it can trigger cells in the tissue to start to malfunction and go haywire and ultimately lead to cancer.

And I think that this paper shows a pretty strong effect of piglorum in driving colon cancer in young people.

It will very likely lead and it should lead to an EPA review on whether this should be legally allowed

but it should also lead to a new mechanism by which we assess chemistry that we're using in our food supply, in our environment, in our industrial applications, because we can now look at all of this sort of epigenomic data to try and figure out what are these chemicals doing to us before we see them cause the problem.

So I thought this was like an amazing paper done by this team.

They did a lot of work to try and make sure that the statistics were sound in the studies that they did.