Some people remember their horrible experiences with the school chemistry of years gone by – they shudder even at the thought of Chemistry. Despite this Chemistry underpins almost everything we do; medicines and how they work, ingenious industrial process and everyday products, environmental impact and sustainability and even the chemistry of the cells that comprise our bodies, transmit our nerve impulses, generate the energy to drive us and organise the thought processes in our brains.
In his lecture Ian will dip into all of these aspects of Chemistry as he takes a trip through the human body’s response to the cornucopia of chemistry it is exposed to every second of every day; even our response to this daily onslaught of chemicals is pure chemistry. This is the science of Toxicology, and, believe it or not, out of our understanding of how and why some chemicals are toxic have emerged some of the most useful medicines of our time…
Ian Shaw is author of Is it safe to eat (Springer 2005), Food Safety – the Science of Keeping Food Safe (Wiley-Blackwell, due late 2011) and Principles of Environmental Toxicology (Taylor & Francis, 1995) and editor of Endocrine-disrupting Chemicals in Food (CRC, 2010), and was awarded the NZ Association of Scientists Science Communicator’s Award 2009.
This event is sponsored by the Canterbury Branch of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry.
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