Are our bodies full of microplastics or not? There’s a way to resolve this debate, and scientists must hurry |
Are we being injured and killed by ubiquitous, teeny-tiny shards of toxic plastic? Or aren’t we? For many months, the Guardian has reported a series of worrying scientific results that our bodies are full of jagged microplastic particles that could be giving us everything from heart attacks to reproductive problems.
But on Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that a significant number of scientists think many of these studies showed no such thing. Or maybe they did. The methods are new and riddled with problems, so we can’t always reliably tell.
If you, like me, have spent the past few decades watching battle after battle over environmental pollutants – from DDT to cigarette smoke, to ozone destroyers to greenhouse gases – it will all look familiar. New problems present new challenges, and science takes a while to work them out. But eventually, it does. Science’s unique and greatest strength is that it is self-correcting. The current battle among researchers of microplastics is the first salvo in that process.
Here is how the disputes arose. Similar to the earlier cases just mentioned, as a new environmental nasty emerged, a community of specialists developed delicate, precise techniques to track the nasties and measure their impact, beyond any reasonable dispute. Scientists are, with good reason, persnickety about exact measurements and experimental controls. The analytical specialists who chase sometimes tiny quantities of pollutants and pinpoint their effects are arguably the most persnickety of the lot.
But as microplastics got more attention, along came a bunch of researchers who often weren’t........