Anthropogenic Ghosts on the Coast

While no longer national news, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is still impacting the ecological health of the Gulf of Mexico and the livelihoods of the communities that rely upon the gulf’s aquatic life, as Robert “Joe” Griffitt of the University of Southern Mississippi reveals. Dr. Griffitt and co-hosts Anne Chappelle and David Faulkner discuss how ecotoxicology is both an applied and a basic science, as well as how scientific discovery is not always a linear process.

About the Guest
Robert “Joe” Griffitt, PhD, is a Professor at and Director of the University of Southern Mississippi School of Ocean Science and Engineering. 

Ecotoxicology, toxicogenomics, and bioinformatics are the focus of Dr. Griffitt’s research. Specifically, his lab investigates the impacts of metallic nanoparticles in aquatic and marine ecosystems and the effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the northern Gulf of Mexico. In both cases, his lab uses a combination of molecular and whole-animal endpoints to try to assess toxicological impacts at both cellular and organism levels. 

Dr. Griffitt earned a BS in marine biology from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and an MS in marine science and a PhD in environmental science from the University of South Carolina. He completed his postdoctoral research at the University of Florida. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the Episode
• 1:36 A Path to Ecotoxicology
• 6:59 The Messy, Non-linear Side of Science
• 9:26 Connecting Science to People and Communities
• 12:17 The Lingering Effects of Deepwater Horizon
• 14:32 Regulatory Guidelines versus Real-World Conditions
• 16:53 On Industry-Funded Research
• 19:54 Future Work and the Impact of COVID on Research
• 22:32 The Importance of Balancing Your Career with Your Partner's
• 24:23 If You Weren't a Scientist...
• 25:04 Next Time on Adverse Reactions

Transcript

[00:00:00] Adverse Reactions “Decompose” Theme Music

[00:00:05] David Faulkner: Hello, and welcome to Adverse Reactions Season 2. My name is David Faulkner, and this is my co-host,

[00:00:11] Anne Chappelle: Anne Chappelle. 

[00:00:12] David Faulkner: As much fun as the first season of Adverse Reactions was, I think Season 2 is better.

[00:00:17] David Faulkner: Secretive.

[00:00:18] Anne Chappelle: Exactly.

[00:00:19] David Faulkner: The toxicology that happens when you’re not looking,

[00:00:22] Anne Chappelle: or toxicology that you forgot about.

[00:00:24] David Faulkner: It’s still important, and we’re here to talk about it. Welcome to Season 2 of Adverse Reactions:

[00:00:28] Anne Chappelle: “Hidden Toxicology.” 

[00:00:31] Adverse Reactions “Decompose” Theme Music

[00:00:38] Anne Chappelle: Anthropogenic ghosts on the coast.

[00:00:42] Joe Griffitt: One of the primary reasons why I was attracted to ecotoxicology in the first place, as opposed to more traditional biomedical toxicology, is it is at that intersection between basic and applied science. And I get to play in both fields when I want to. And that was really important me.

[00:00:58] David Faulkner: Or, Joe Griffitt and the legacy of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

[00:01:02] Joe Griffitt: All those animals are dealing with all of those different factors simultaneously. And none of them are going to be the same today as they were tomorrow. So, teasing out the effect of those other environmental variables is a tremendously complex task because it never stays the same. It never stays still. 

[00:01:17] Adverse Reactions “Decompose” Theme Music

[00:01:21] Anne Chappelle: Hi, this is Anne Chapelle, and I am very happy to welcome, along with my co-host, David Faulkner, 

[00:01:28] David Faulkner: Hello.

[00:01:28] Anne Chappelle: Joe Griffitt. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your research, and something that my mom could understand? 

[00:01:36] Joe Griffitt: I’m a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, and I’m the Director of our School of Ocean Science and Engineering, which is a really broad unit. And I am the lone toxicologist in the school and in the university and large parts of the area, which makes for a bit of a lonely existence at times. But fortunately, now in the 21st century, I have all these really cool digital aids that let me talk to my colleagues all over the country, all over the world. So, it’s not too bad. 

[00:02:03] David Faulkner: How did you end up the lone toxicologist down there?

[00:02:06] Joe Griffitt: I’m from North Carolina originally, way up in the mountains of North Carolina, about as far from the ocean that you can get. And for whatever reason, decided as a kid that I wanted to be a marine biologist. Most people who want to do marine biology, you want to go swim with dolphins and things like that. I was never really into dolphins. I always liked invertebrates, and I still think that invertebrates are inherently cooler than vertebrates in any way, shape, or form. 

And when I was thinking about college, the University of North Carolina Wilmington had really, still has, a very well-regarded marine biology program. I’ve never been one who has been particularly swayed by a larger name or by prestige or something like that. I’m always, for better or for worse, going in a direction that I felt suited me at a particular time. And UNC Wilmington absolutely did. That was the singular transformative moment of my career. I was incredibly fortunate to be placed into an active research lab.

My first week on campus as a work-study student, I was placed in Dr. Martin Posey’s ecology lab. That was it. That was the ballgame. That was where I realized that science and what you learn in class and how you actually do things tie together in a way that you don’t get just from lectures, you don’t get just from an academic lab, but actually helping grad students, helping the PI go out and design these experiments, watching how they bounce around ideas in the lab to come up with the research ideas that we’re talking about, how are we going to analyze things? Absolutely transformative experience. And it’s one that I’ve tried to pay back as often as could.

And when I was in my master’s program, I ended up getting introduced to, basically, molecular toxicology and using biomolecular tools to answer some of these things. And that’s really the heart of those questions. You know, you have a “why?” It comes down to how the genes and proteins interact, how do they move things around? And so that really resonated with me, but that was a really steep learning curve because I still had never taken a molecular biology class in my entire life. I had to learn it all as I went. 

So, I finished up my master’s degree and I immediately transitioned to my PhD to another lab South Carolina, Tom Chandler, and he was doing environmental ecotoxicology. And I wanted to do that, but I wanted to do molecular work. I wanted to, again, look at gene interactions, change with exposure to different contaminants. I spent about three and a half years there trying figure out how transcriptomics work in a non-model species, grass shrimp. And this was 2005-ish, and at the time there were absolutely no tools available for doing really good whole genome sequencing of non-model organisms. And so, I ended up adapting a technique called SAGE: Serial Analysis of Gene Expression. So, this it was a tool that was developed for cancer therapeutics. It worked pretty well. I was, honestly, really proud of work that I did and I defended and moved to a postdoc, and I swear to god, I six months later, it was when the first pyrosequencer was released for use. And I realized that everything that I had just strained over for the previous three years was utterly, completely obsolete at this moment, because all the skills I had learned were utterly useless. Nobody was ever again going to use those because now you can just sequence the entire transcriptome at a time and be done with it.

[00:05:04] David Faulkner: Man. 

[00:05:05] Joe Griffitt: That was a tad disheartening, but it was also really exciting because the postdoc that I accepted was at the University of Florida Center for Environmental and Human Toxicology. And there I was, again, incredibly fortunate. I worked with Dave Barber and Nancy Denzlow on a grant looking at an inter particulate metal toxicity. They also were one of the first academic universities to have access to a 454 sequencer. I was able to go there and really just immerse myself in a lot of the techniques that I hadn’t had access to in South Carolina, including microarrays and 454 sequencing and things like that. And working with Dave and Nancy on this topic was wonderful. It was a really well-funded lab. It was really innovative group. Lots of people around me thinking about similar questions and similar ideas—still the most intellectually fertile time of my career. 

When I was offered this job, I had other offers from other academic universities, governmental organizations, and some private companies as well. And I remember talking to my wife about this because my wife is a scientist. We just had two-year-old daughter. So, I talked about it for a long time with Kim. I said, “Look, this is what I should do. Should I take this job with the FDA in Washington, DC?” And Kim looked at me and said, “You’re not going to do that. You’ve wanted to be a faculty member for as long as I’ve known you; this a chance to do that. We’re going to go there, you’re going to take this job, and we’re going to be successful at it.” So, I give a lot of credit to my wife for putting up with having to move all over the country a couple of times to follow my career. We ended up here, and it has been an absolutely wonderful experience. I mean, I tell people, when I try to recruit faculty to come here now, it’s a much better place than you think it is. It’s legitimately a wonderful place to live. It’s a wonderful place to raise a family. There are all sorts of really interesting scientific questions to answer in the Gulf of Mexico or beyond. 

And I spent the first two years following up on the nano-metal toxicity work that I had done as a postdoc. And then in 2010, something rather notable happened about 90 miles south of my lab when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened, and I spent the next decade of my life, basically, working on that question and trying figure what the effects of that were.

[00:06:59] Anne Chappelle: What I love about your story is that spark of passion and excitement that could tell you had when you talked about being involved as an undergraduate in a research lab and seeing how it worked and being included in that. I know for me, that’s one of the reasons why I became interested in science. I saw the practicality of it: that it’s not just these lofty goals, these lofty experiments, and these ivory towers—that you really can, if you’re interested, especially at a maybe smaller university, be able to get in and noodle around and see where your passion lies.

[00:07:35] Joe Griffitt: I think the most important part of that is understanding that science as a discipline, as a career, as a job, is inherently messy. You know, one of the things I tell my grads is, when you read a paper, you’re seeing the finished product, right? You’re seeing it all presented in a very clear and linear and logical fashion. That is never, ever how science happens. And seeing that there’s an inherent messiness in it, a lot of backtracking, you know, a lot of “Wait, what does mean? Why did we get this result?” And we have to repeat the experiment. We go back and try to explain what we’re seeing. That science, that’s the inherent ideals behind we’re trying to do, because we’re trying to understand things that we don’t understand. We’re trying to figure out things we don’t understand, and that encourages a certain degree of uncertainty.

[00:08:16] David Faulkner: Yeah, I really feel like that’s been a big learning experience for all of us. Most people aren’t scientists, and they don’t understand that this is how science works, is that we just don’t know things and we’re going to be wrong about a lot of stuff, and as we figure things out, we can have a lot more comfort in saying, “Yeah, this is prudent thing to do. This makes sense.” But the process to get to that is never linear.

[00:08:40] Joe Griffitt: Yeah. The closest thing I’ve had to deal with was trying to talk to people who are fishermen, who are affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in their livelihood, in their jobs, in their ability to provide for their families, and trying to talk to them and get them to understand what the likely impacts of this to them on a personal level was a tremendous responsibility that I felt very keenly, because on the one hand, it’s easy to write a paper and say, oil, hydrocarbon exposure induces this particular pathway, under hypoxic conditions induces these pathways, leading to this degree of mortality yada, yada. But when you’re trying to talk to somebody that says, “Is it safe to eat the fish or the shrimp that my family relies on to feed their kids?” That’s a whole other type of issue and understanding that there’s the abstruse scientific understanding that they want to have, there’s also another level of what does it mean for people’s lives?

[00:09:25] David Faulkner: You bring up something really interesting and really important, is this experience of talking with people whose livelihood is affected by your research. My sense is, having spent a lot of time around academicians, is that’s somewhat rare to actually go to the communities that, essentially, you’re studying. I spent two years in public health school. One of the most interesting experiences that I had was when we went to a meeting in Detroit. It was essentially a town hall for people to just say to us, “This is what we want you to study. This is what is important to us.” And that was transformative for me to have that experience to say, “Oh, this isn’t theory; this affects people’s lives.” How do you balance more maybe granular academic interests with this greater question of the public and what needs to be done?

[00:10:18] Joe Griffitt: Well, honestly, that’s one of the primary reasons why I was attracted to ecotoxicology in the first place, as opposed to more traditional biomedical toxicology, is it is at the intersection between basic and applied science. And I get to play in both fields when I want to. And that was really important me. I mean, I can think about nano-particulate metal effects on zebrafish gills, or I can think about how oil and toxics interact with molecular pathways of Cyprinodon, or something that. I can look at how grass shrimp respond or blue crabs. And we can tie that into how affects people. 

One of the more rewarding projects that I’ve been funded to do was looking at oysters in the Mississippi Sound. And we actually worked with the Vietnamese fishermen. They’re a relatively tight-knit community. They don’t have a ton of trust with one of the regulatory agencies. As a matter of fact, there’s often a degree of animosity between this community and the regulatory agencies. And when they’re hearing things like, “Oh, the oysters are safe to eat; there’s no contamination three years after the spill,” they have no reason trust this agency. There’s been generations’ worth of distrust built up. And so, one of the projects that I had was to basically show them how we get that data. And we would go out on their boats, go out to the reefs that they had picked and said that they thought were contaminated and ones they thought weren’t, take samples, and bring the oysters back into my lab, and they would help us take the tissue out, homogenize it, send it off to a chem lab for analysis. And then we got the results back and we’d sit down with them. They would bring a bunch of their fisherman colleagues into a big the room. And I put together a quick PowerPoint presentation and say, “Look, these are the actual data that we’ve got.” And I don’t think that they got necessarily the answers they were expecting or looking for, but I do they have a higher degree of trust in that data because their colleagues were there at every step of the way. And that was a really interesting and useful experience, even though it wasn’t one that’s ever going to lead to a publication in ToxSci or anything like that, but also, I suspect, had much more impact people’s lives than those publications in ToxSci do.

[00:12:17] Anne Chappelle: Do think that people are surprised when you say, “Yeah, you know, a lot of my research involves Deepwater Horizon or is influenced by Deepwater Horizon”? Do you think people are like, “Well, didn’t we clean that up?” Once you see the oil cleaned up, oh, pat yourself on the back, we did a great job. Yay, environment. And then, Joe Griffitt comes along and is like, “Oh, no. Not quite yet.” 

[00:12:39] Joe Griffitt: That may be the attitude in the rest of the country, but I can promise you, people who live down here, that’s still very, very much on their mind. People are still concerned about it and still think about it. It may be superseded other events, and we’ve had Bonnet Carré Spillway openings that dramatically impact communities. We obviously have hurricanes come through and things like that, but no, you still have people that are still cognizant of the possible and potential long-term effects of oil and other contaminants in the Gulf of Mexico.

[00:13:06] David Faulkner: Where are we now?

[00:13:07] Joe Griffitt: It’s almost impossible to say definitively what the effects of the oil spill were because it’s entirely dependent on what context you’re talking about. If you’re talking about the benthic organisms or mid-water column organisms or plankton or invertebrates or vertebrates or dolphin or whatever. All those things are going to have different responses to that question. And it’s not like they’re ever going to revert back to an undisturbed stability prior to the oil spill. There’s no such thing as an undisturbed stability prior status. The Gulf of Mexico has been continuously impacted by hydrocarbon release for forever, basically. Even before there were active extraction operations, there are natural oil seeps that are always in hydrocarbons under the water. So, this is a state of affairs. It’s not a matter of figuring out how to differ from pre-2010; it’s a matter of figuring out what the state of the different populations in the ecosystem is in 2021, and how will that be different in 2022, as opposed to 2019? Because none of these things are stable. They all change as a function of space and time and the different contaminant events just modulate like that in different and unknowable ways. 

All those animals are dealing with all of those different factors simultaneously. And none of them are going to be the same today as they were tomorrow. So, teasing out the effect of those other environmental variables is a tremendously complex task because it never stays the same. It never stays still. That also means why it’s fun to try to figure these things out because you can never truly solve it. It’s just trying to get a better, closer answer. 

[00:14:32] Anne Chappelle: So, I’ve lived my life in the chemical world and looking at, we’ve got to register this chemical in Europe. Or we need to understand what happened when it gets into water. Blah blah blah. OECD method. What I found is that sometimes those regulatory OECD guideline studies don’t necessarily really help you understand what would happen in the real world. But it’s so difficult to get an OECD method approved. How do you bring together some of these issues where you’re doing maybe really great research understanding what’s happening in the real world with real samples, versus some of these regulatory requirements and the testing they’re in where maybe if you would have done some of this stuff beforehand, you might understand a little better?

[00:15:20] Joe Griffitt: It’s a difficult one, right? Because as you point out, the idealized test settings that are required by different regulatory agencies may have, often do have, limited relevance to what is actually going to occur in an environment. And of course, the reason for doing these particular tests that are prescribed by EPA or whoever is at least presumptively to try to protect the environment that they’re in. And so, a lot of these were first developed in the 1970s, and all these regulations were passed, and ecotoxicology, this was first starting to be formed, and we were starting to figure out how we’re going to start doing all of these things. That’s why we did things like LOEX and NOEX and things like that that we all know the limitations with those. But there isn’t a great answer for how you translate these sort of idealized test settings to a complex environment. 

The environment, no matter what you’re talking about, is always more complex than a lab setting. That being said, I do think there’s a lot of value in trying to use lab settings to get at what the baseline effects of a particular contaminant are, and then you can start trying to figure out how that’s modified in the complex environment that the ecosystem may be in. But you can’t do that from ground zero; you have to have some baseline to start from. And that’s where I think the utility of those idealized tests is.

But again, it’s two separate issues. I mean, on the one hand, they’re not the same. If you’re trying to really understand what the effect is, that’s one thing; if you’re trying to get a chemical passed through regulation, you can put it on the market. That’s an entirely separate type of issue. They may have some things in similar, but the goals are entirely distinct. 

[00:16:51] David Faulkner: Yeah, that’s really good point. 

[00:16:52] Anne Chappelle: So, Deepwater Horizon. That was a BP company, right? So, does BP fund some of your research and/or can you talk about the role of industry funding basic research and the perception, potentially, of bias?

[00:17:10] Joe Griffitt: So, BP funded some of our research entirely indirectly. I was funded through a number of different mechanisms: through NSF, through the federal and state level, National Resource Damage Assessment process, and through what we call GoMRI, the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. And GoMRI was set up by bunch of money that BP handed to them. Initially, I think it was $500 million was the total amount, that you have 10 years to spend this. So, I was funded pretty continuously through GoMRI for about 10 years through the various grants.

So, technically BP was funding this, but the organization GoMRI was sort of being, as far as I know, entirely independent. Certainly, I never had any feedback or input from any BP scientists outside of some of them coming up to my students’ posters or whatever it was, to talks, inviting feedback, which was entirely appropriate and fair, but certainly nothing on the experimental design or analysis or interpretation side.

Now, what role they may or may not have played in deciding what proposals got funded, I have no idea, but knowing the people that were on the research board for GoMRI, I have a very difficult time seeing them allowing any sort of interference. 

[00:18:15] Anne Chappelle: I’m always interested in the perception of quote unquote industry funded research. And my experience has been very much the same. I think that there should be more public-private partnerships where possible to be able to ask some of these questions because not everybody has the money or the expertise.

[00:18:34] Joe Griffitt: I think there really should be. I don’t know how much actually happens. I will say that in the idealized, perhaps naïve setting, the way you protect against that perception of bias is by being very, very clear in what your experimental design was, what your results are, and how you’ve analyzed and interpreted them. If you’re very clear about that, it literally doesn’t matter who funded you or what input they had, if you can justify what you did, why you did it, and why you say what you say. Obviously, I’m not naïve enough to think in situations like this, interference doesn’t come into play, from time to time, particularly when you’re in an environment where the lives and careers are so dependent getting funding, that is a worrisome factor, of confounding competing interests.

I think that many companies would very well served to have independent research done on their products if only to avoid legacy contamination issues. I mean, if 20 years down the road we find out that chemical X that we thought was safe and you were perfectly legal releasing into the environment under the current regulations actually causes, you know, cancer in babies or something, and you want to avoid the potential for having those legacy contamination events and cleanup costs, it’s much cheaper to pay somebody to come in and run a series of tests early on to identify potential issues. I do wish that more industry people would do that outside of their internal people.

[00:19:54] David Faulkner: What sort of things do you see on the horizon for you? 

[00:19:58] Joe Griffitt: I don’t know the answer to that, to be honest. I’ve been asked to take a more and more administrative role here at Southern Miss and it’s a job that I’m really enthusiastic about, one that I can make a larger difference in people’s lives than I could back in my lab. That being said, I’m not giving that up; I still have a lab, we are still doing active research and got papers coming out all the time. But where I go from here, I honestly don’t know. I don’t think any of us know where we’re going to end up in the post-COVID environment, what that means for what universities look like 10 or 15 years down the road. What the interaction between funded research and universities looks like. I suspect that’s going to change pretty dramatically over the next 10 or 15 years. So, I don’t have the vaguest idea what I want to be when I grew up, other than the fact the Yankees are persistent in not calling me to play center field for them.

[00:20:43] Anne Chappelle: I feel that the challenges of COVID in terms of changing the way, the fundamental way, that researchers interact with each other—by going to a meeting, standing around a poster, and talking it through, or going a talk where you are completely engaged and not distracted by your phone or your kid coming in the door—we have to evolve using some tools, some professional networking tools or whatever, to be able to thrive in this because I think that we took a step back for a while with research.

[00:21:13] Joe Griffitt: I will say that’s the one thing that I had most difficulty with in my career is building networks. I am, by nature, a high-functioning introvert. I don’t particularly go out of my way, lots of times, to talk to various people. I don’t have any issue doing it, I’ll call anybody up, but it’s not something that comes naturally to me. And I do worry that we are setting up a set of criteria for people where the only ones that can thrive in science are the ones that have the ability, the naturally outgoing nature, to build those networks. And that doesn’t necessarily map to the people that are best at doing science. 

I think this was going to be the most transformative experience for most people’s careers they’re ever going to see, and it’s not going to go away when the pandemic does. I mean, my university has a COVID impact statement of flow for tenure and promotion. And that’s great, but the impacts on tenure and promotion ain’t going to be felt in 2019 and 2020; they’re going to be felt in 2023, ’24, ’25, years down road. And I hope if nothing else that we use this as an example to figure out a better way to evaluate people and a better way to help people get work-life balance in what they’re doing, because there is this culture that valorizes long hours in the lab and things like that. Yeah, sometimes it’s necessary when you’re running an experiment; most of the time, it’s not. There’s a lot of assumptions about how science has to work that I think are dramatically wrong. And hopefully we can use this as an example to figure out better ways to do a lot of different things.

[00:22:32] Anne Chappelle: I really liked hearing you talk about your partner, your wife, and making these decisions about moving and taking a new job. Personally, I’ve always been in the Philadelphia area with my family within a two-hour radius, and having that network and support of my family and friends and such, I haven’t ever really moved, the way David has, across the country to do a new position, but that’s something that I think sometimes we forget about, that it is more than just a job and what do you want to do. It’s the other things along with it: Will your spouse have a position and something that they can do? Is there a good education system for my kids? Creating that community and that family, they realize that increases your success as a researcher, when you’re able to have a good place to have your kids.

[00:23:18] Joe Griffitt: Speaking for my particular set of circumstances, my wife finding something that worked for her as well as for me was hugely important to me. And we were very fortunate the situation working out the way that it did. But I’ve always said that in the long run, she probably would have been better tenure-track faculty member than I was. But she wanted, for whatever reason, to follow my career. And I have a lot of guilt about that. To be honest, she’s given up some very good careers to follow mine, but she’s ended up in a really good one, and not to make this about her because can’t speak for her, but she spent the last, five or six years working in a medical genetics lab, designing tests to figure out if people’s infants or fetuses have heritable genetic diseases. And I, not going to lie, there are times when we come home and talk about work and I think, what you’re doing has a hell of a lot more impact on people’s lives than what I do. And I’m honestly kind of jealous. 

[00:24:07] Anne Chappelle: Well, then, that always means for really good conversations around the kitchen table.

[00:24:11] Joe Griffitt: Oh, yeah. She’ll say, “Well, I’m trying to design a set that covers this particular exome span. I wasn’t able to find it under these conditions, so I had to do X, Y, or Z. And I’m thinking, “Yeah, I had another faculty meeting I had to run, so.”

[00:24:23] David Faulkner: Yeah. So, we have a few questions that we try to ask everybody. So, what would you be doing if you weren’t doing what you are doing now?

[00:24:30] Joe Griffitt: Center fielder for the Yankees.

[00:24:32] David Faulkner: Well, obviously.

[00:24:33] Joe Griffitt: Honestly, I don’t know. I, people have asked me, if you has to do this, do your career over again, would you still do this? And I would answer no, but that’s not because I dislike what I do, because like I said, I’m inherently interested in lots of things. I’d want to experience something different. Man, I can’t answer that, either. This is what I’ve wanted to do for my entire life.

[00:25:54] David Faulkner: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. This was really great.

[00:24:57] Joe Griffitt: Of course. Thanks for having me.

[00:24:58] Adverse Reactions “Decompose” Theme Music

[00:25:04] Anne Chappelle: On the next episode of Adverse Reactions:

[00:25:08] David Faulkner: Sweatin’ it out. Exercise versus toxic exposures. Or, Luma Melo makes us walk.

[00:25:14] Anne Chappelle: How exercise affects things like cancer and liver disease.

[00:25:18] Luma Melo: Gene expression and just metabolism in general between the female and male in mice—just in general, so without the exercise, without intervention, without diet, if you just analyze the livers from a female and a male mouse—is completely different. So and then also exercise affects the genders differently.

[00:25:34] Adverse Reactions “Decompose” Theme Music

[00:25:40] Anne Chappelle: Thank you, all, for joining us for this episode of Adverse Reactions, presented by the Society of Toxicology.

[00:25:46] David Faulkner: And thank you to Dave Leve at Ma3stro Studios. 

[00:25:49] Anne Chappelle: That’s Ma3stro with a three, not an E.

[00:25:52] David Faulkner: Who created and produced all the music for Adverse Reactions, including the theme song, “Decompose.”

[00:25:58] Anne Chappelle: The viewpoints and information presented in Adverse Reactions represent those of the participating individuals. Although the Society of Toxicology holds the copyright to this production, it has,

[00:26:09] David Faulkner: definitely,

[00:26:10] Anne Chappelle: not vetted or reviewed the information presented herein,

[00:26:14] David Faulkner: nor does presenting and distributing this podcast represent any proposal or endorsement of any position by the Society.

[00:26:20] Anne Chappelle: You can find out more information about the show at AdverseReactionsPodcast.com,

[00:26:26] David Faulkner: and more information about the Society of Toxicology on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

[00:26:32] Anne Chappelle: I’m Anne Chappelle.

[00:26:33] David Faulkner: And I’m David Faulkner. 

[00:26:35] Anne Chappelle: This podcast was approved by Anne’s mom.

[00:26:38] Adverse Reactions “Decompose” Theme Music

[00:26:42] End of Episode