However, in one of the many labs of Academic Health Center 1, Dr. Barry Rosen, associate dean of basic research and graduate programs, quietly studies the effects of arsenic and various other metals on organisms and the steps they take to detoxify themselves.
Rosen, also a professor of cellular biology and pharmacology, has been conducting research on the effects arsenic for over 30 years but hasn’t grown tired of his work.
“I still love it as much, if not more than when I first started,” said Rosen to Student Media.
His research has allowed him to travel to many places including China with his team of scientists that are spread out throughout the country and in some parts of the world.
Rosen’s interest in researching the effects of arsenic is rather simple as he notes the prevalence of arsenic in our environment and in some cases our drinking water makes it an interesting point of research for scientists.
An example Rosen states are the countries of Bangladesh and India, which have over 125 million people combined, that are exposed to arsenic in their drinking water. The people who are being exposed to these drinking waters don’t die from a direct result of arsenic poisoning. To die of arsenic poisoning one must be exposed to massive amounts of arsenic. However, arsenic is a carcinogen and which means long term exposure can cause cancer.
Some forms of cancer the people of Bangladesh and India have, as a result of arsenic exposure, include skin and kidney cancer.
But don’t breathe a sigh of relief thinking we are safe in the US. There are places in America where water supplies contamination of arsenic surpasses the Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum allowable limit.
“This is a serious problem all over the world not just India and Bangladesh even in the United
States it’s a problem,” Rosen said.
According to the EPA some of the sources of arsenic in drinking water are natural deposits, and runoff from glass and electronics production wastes.
Sometimes though, the answer lies in most hardware stores. There are many lawn care products that carry arsenic and other herbicides and when it rains the arsenic washes off into lakes and rivers. In some cases arsenic and the other herbicides are then washed into the sewers by rain, where they end up in the ocean and contaminate fish and other marine life as well as the water.
To counteract this problem, Rosen’s lab has proposed creating genetically modified rice to
discriminate against metalloids such as arsenic. In a nutshell what this means is that altering the genetic composition of rice to not allow it to store arsenic can make it better for consumption.
Rosen decided on genetically modifying rice because rice feeds three billion people in Asia, about half of the total population of the world.
However, arsenic in rice is also a problem in the US. In places like Louisiana and Texas, where rice is grown, most of those fields were cotton fields and arsenic was used as a defoliant to allow them to grow the next crop.
Rosen points out that even though cotton is no longer grown there, the arsenic that remains still contaminates the rice.
There is really no way around this problem as Rosen notes whole foods won’t help much. Arsenic is already everywhere and can even be found in seafood.
Rosen proposes the only way to truly get rid of arsenic in our foods supply is by using bioremediation, when living organisms are being used to clean up the environment.
Arsenic does has useful purposes, however. Rosen pointed out arsenic has been used for medicinal purposes for over 1,000 years. To illustrate this fact Rosen cited one particular individual, Paul Ehrlic, who won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for using arsenic as a component for a medication that would cure Syphilis.
Some chemotherapeutic drugs that are used for the treatment of leukemia such as Trisenox are made using arsenic trioxide. Despite arsenic being bad for people’s health it also helps combat several diseases. However, long term exposure to any of these medicines can still cause some form of cancer sometime down the road.
Rosen’s research highlights how human actions have worsened the environment.
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