On the Trail of Mutagens at MIT

On the Trail of Mutations A at MIT "Basically, the way this center operates is that it starts with human disease and works backwards to a dear and probable cause," says Director William Thilly describing MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS). "If the problem stems from a genetic mutation, then we try to figure out what caused that mutation-exogenous chemicals, endogenous chemicals, or a replication error." Although much public policy is now based on the premise that the mutations occurring in people are caused by environmental chemicals, nobody has yet proven that hypothesis, Thilly maintains. "The hypothesis is widely believed but has barely been tested, mainly because there's little or no technology available to test it." The center, a consortium of faculty members with backgrounds in food chemistry, combustion engineering, water resources, analytical chemistry, and toxicology, has set out to determine whether environmental chemicals cause mutations and, if so, to link specific chemicals to specific mutations and to correlate those mutations, in turn, with particular diseases. CEHS researchers have had to develop an array of new tools to trace chemicals and their byproducts from the source of contamination through the environment and into the human body. "You've got to find a means of getting inside people and seeing what's going on, firsthand, because extrapolations from animal studies or cell culture experiments are scientifically dubious," Thilly stresses. "New methods of analytical chemistry can tell us whether or not certain chemicals are making their way into the body. " The long-term goal, according to Thilly, I