Hari Iyer

And it seemed like it was a very important question, not just from a scientific side, but one that the residents of New Jersey are very concerned about.

Yeah, so I think that the evidence right now has demonstrated a lot of these biomarkers.

We talked about liver enzymes and kidney function and lipid levels and cholesterol levels are another area.

But demonstrating...

these cancer pathways is incredibly difficult from a design perspective because you have to follow people for many, many years, and you have to get a really strong understanding of what their exposure was, not when you're talking to them today, but 10 years in the past.

And so our lab is conducting a few studies right now, trying to reconstruct those historical PFAS levels by using some of the data that we presented in this study and developing predictive models, predicting the PFAS levels

15, 20 years ago in different parts of New Jersey.

What we can do then is we can link those predictions to people's homes and where they may have moved over the course of their lives to be able to get a better measure of what that exposure may have been at a time when that cancer may have been developing.

Yeah, it's a really important point.

And with PFAS, I think it's also important when you think about this and put this in the historical context, when these chemicals were first used, they had a lot of really desirable properties.

It's great to be able to fight fires.

These plastic linings on the food that sort of kept them preserved were important things at the time.

I think what the story of PFAS and asbestos and some of these chemicals has shown is that there's likely a balance that can be found in doing some evaluation of chemicals when they first come on the market where we don't fully understand what those long-term health outcomes are.

But finding that balance, I think, is something that the PFAS story shows that we may have skewed too far on the side of technological progress.

We'll worry about the problems later.