PFAS substances – water and soil contaminants that will stay in the environment forever and their use is steadily growing. Endocrine disruptors that interfere with the human as well as the animal hormone system, causing various diseases including diabetes, obesity, and male infertility. Also, the by now extreme pollution of the planet by plastics and electronic waste. According to Martin Scheringer, professor of environmental chemistry, scientists are alerting politicians to these dire threats yet their warnings go unheeded.
Collaboration between science and politics is too limited and fragmented, which causes extensive damage to human health as well as the environment, says Martin Scheringer of Recetox, a research centre at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University in Brno. He co-wrote an article for the February issue of Science, in which he and his fellow scientists call for the establishment of a global intergovernmental science-policy panel to provide information on the possibilities of reducing the levels of harmful chemicals.
Scientists estimate that in 2017, the exposure to a mere fraction of over 100,000 commonly used chemicals was a contributing factor in over 1.3 million premature deaths.
Read the complete interview HERE
Jan Velecký is a researcher at the RECETOX center. In the interview, he explains what protein engineering is about, why it is important to study protein solubility, and how machine learning can be crucial for human knowledge.
