MAY 2006 VOLUME 19, NUMBER 5 © Copyright 2006 by the American Chemical Society
Editorial The Future of Toxicology These are exciting times in the field of toxicology. Advances in analytical chemistry enable investigators to identify and quantify toxic agents and their metabolites at ever lower concentrations, sometimes into the zeptomole range. Synthetic chemistry continues to make enormous strides so that complex, biologically active molecules can be made faster and in greater numbers. Structural biology provides high-resolution images of ligand-protein, protein-protein, and DNA-protein complexes that are visions of the molecular basis of biological function. Transcriptional and proteomic profiling enable investigators to integrate global cellular responses to chemical and biological stress, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget was recently doubled to increase the number of funded investigators and to constitute new initiatives to promote multi-investigator and multidisciplinary programs of research. Toxicology is inherently multidisciplinary, so its practitioners should be perfectly positioned to reap the benefits of the new funding environment. So, if things are so good, why do toxicologists feel so badly? The field of toxicology faces major challenges and something of an identity crisis. The application of toxicology to risk assessment is imperfect as well as contentious so the practical benefits of the discipline are underappreciated. A case in point is the steadily declining death rate from many cancers, which is mainly due to reduced exposure to carcinogens (e.g., cigarette smoke) rather than advances in therapy. Such low-tech preventive strategies are based on an understanding of the toxicological potential of the exposure; yet, our society does not seem to understand the role of toxicologists in developing this understanding. In fact, neither do other scientists. The restructuring of the NIH peer review process completely eliminated toxicology study sections, thereby removing a sense of context from the review of toxicology grants. The field of toxicology is perceived as mature and does not seem to have adapted to the new opportunities and challenges with which it is faced. Some of these problems are more perceived than real, and as the Editor of Chemical Research in Toxicology, I have the privilege of seeing the exciting new science being pursued in the field of toxicology, although not always by individuals who call themselves toxicologists. Our Editorial Advisory Board decided at its meeting last year that CRT should lead a discussion of the issues facing toxicology in order to energize the community to action. We commissioned a series of perspectives, entitled “The Future of Toxicology”, from leading scientists in different areas of chemical toxicology. One perspective will appear in each issue of the journal over the next year. The first, by my colleague, Dan Liebler, appears in this issue. Each of the perspectives will be open access to all readers and comments can be made through a link on our website. We hope this will engage the community and broaden the opinions we get on particular topics. We would love to hear from you, so please go to http://pubs.acs.org/journals/crtoec/index.html to get Dan’s article and to tell us what you think. Lawrence J. Marnett Editor-in-Chief TX0600797 10.1021/tx0600797 CCC: $33.50 © 2006 American Chemical Society Published on Web 05/15/2006
