History
While basic research in toxicology began in multiple countries in the 1800s, it was not until around the 1930s that the use of acute toxicity testing, especially on fish, was established. Over the next two decades, the effects of chemicals and wastes on non-human species became more of a public issue and the era of the pickle-far bioassays began as efforts increased to standardize toxicity testing techniques. The passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1947 marked the first comprehensive legislation for the control of water pollution and was followed by the Federal Water Pollution Control Act in 1956. In 1962, public and governmental interests were renewed, in large part due to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and thee years later the Water Quality Act was passed which directed states to develop water quality standards. Public awareness, as well as scientific and governmental concern, continued to grow throughout the 1970s and by the end of the decade research had expanded to include hazard evaluation and risk analysis. In the subsequent decades, aquatic toxicology has continued to expand and internationalize so that there is now a strong application of toxicity testing for environmental protection.
Read more about this topic: Aquatic Toxicology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)