e d i to ri a l
Happy 100th Birthday! A
little quiz is in order for those of us in the U.S. Over the past 100 years, which government agency has been the most responsible for protecting public health? Which government agency’s regulations have promoted the most advances in analytical chemistry? The answer to both questions is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which will celebrate 100 years this June. In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt signed the Food and Drugs Act, which founded the agency. I recommend the website www.fda.gov/centennial/default.htm for an entertaining and informative description of events leading up to the creation of the Bureau of Chemistry within the Department of Agriculture; it subsequently became the FDA within the Department of Health and Human Services. In this historical story, there have been many heroes concerned with protecting the U.S. public from unhealthy—yes, even lethal—foodstuffs and medicines. A prominent hero is Harvey W. Wiley, an Indiana native and professor at Purdue until 1882, when he moved to Washington, D.C., to become Chief Chemist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There, he pursued a passion for opposing the adulteration of human foods with untested (and, to the consumer, unknown) ingredients—preservatives, fillers, taste enhancers, rot concealers— the list of what was used then is quite amazing! Modern refrigeration did not exist, and all kinds of additives were used to control bad taste and the smell of decomposing foods. Wiley supervised a semiscientific experiment on young human volunteers, who (on his premises) ate diets laced with or free from various popular food preservatives, many of which are now recognized as quite toxic. This was popularly called the Poison Squad, and those members who consumed the diet with preservatives fell ill with much higher frequency. The scientific explanation for these results—which today is obvious, but then was not—is that many chemical substances can cause harm when consumed in substantial doses. The news was welcome in farming communities, where people’s livelihoods depended on fresh and clean produce. Wiley campaigned vigorously for a federal law to protect the public from harmful additives. As with many major changes in public law, Congress resisted putting the public ahead of economic interests until an event provoked a public outrage. In this case, it was unhy-
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gienic practices at midwestern meat-packing companies that were publicized in the documentary novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the second hero of this story. At first, President Roosevelt did not believe that the book depicted real events, but after he conducted a secret inquiry, he learned of their veracity. His spies witnessed, for example, that an animal carcass that had fallen into a latrine was pulled out and put back, unwashed, onto the processing line. Roosevelt is our third hero; he twisted arms to pass the legislation to create the new regulatory body. The 1906 law is not the complete story—a number of additional law-making stages followed. For example, in 1938 drug companies became required to show that their products were not dangerous, and in 1962 a rational system of drug testing was laid out. These later events were the real catalysts of new analytical chemistry, because quantitative and structurally specific chemical measurements are at the heart of scientific regulatory implementation and of the drug manufacturers’ adherence to the rules. Chromatography, extraction chemistry, spectrophotometry, and fluorescence analysis prospered; the list of analytical areas whose development has accompanied the evolution of regulations to protect the public’s health goes on and on. Over the sweep of history, analytical chemistry as a discipline has been enormously influenced by the birth of the FDA; conversely, today our field stands as the agency’s scientific foundation. That’s what Wiley evidently envisioned when he complained in 1902 that the variety of assay techniques for individual drugs had a deleterious impact on consistent analyses. The field, he argued, needed some institution to promote consistent methodologies for drug assays and standardization. The FDA, hand in hand over the years with responsible drug companies, has attained that in our society. I confess to some cynicism about lawyers and take a little pleasure in pointing out that the father of the FDA, and of part of our discipline’s vigor, was a chemist.
© 2006 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
