These headlines may entice readers, but the scientific questions surrounding endocrine disruption are just beginning to be answered. The human body requires hormones to drive basic metabolic functions. Several organs produce hormones in the body-adrenal, hypothalamus and pituitary glands, ovaries and testes.
Hormones are important for mental function, reproduction and other physiologic processes.
In the laboratory, scientists have been examining the effects that environmental chemicals have on human hormones in relation to health. Much of the research has been conducted only in test tubes, with little research focused on the effects on animals or humans. Thus, many scientific theories have been extrapolated to describe potential human problems. The questions about endocrine disruption are clouded by the fact that many of the findings that have appeared in news headlines have not been able to be reproduced by the same researchers or by researchers in other laboratories. One example of this lack of scientific reproducibility was a study conducted by Tulane University scientists and reported in the June 1996 issue of Science.