Claude Bernard Quotes
Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.
This scientific quotation is politically important because it defines the difficult problem of setting acceptable and safe environmental and work standards for air or water quality and contact with potentially toxic substances. As this quotation illustrates, everything is toxic if given in large enough doses. Table salt can kill a human if enough if ingested. Tiny amounts of even a poison will do no harm. What makes setting of standards still more complicated is that human beings differ in the amount of a substance it would take to produce a toxic reaction. Allergies are the best example, but the variability of sensitivity always exists.
Claude Bernard, 1813-1878, French physiologist, Pathologie expérimentale, 1872
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1st Earl of Beaconsfield. In the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt shocked the major business interests when he proposed regulating food and other government quality assurance of the private marketplace. Many Americans saw this as an overdue reform. One of the reasons was that Prime Minister Disraeli had advocated government regulation a quarter of a century earlier with statements like this quotation.
Manava Dharma Shastra. This text is a part of the Hindu Holy Texts. Hindus believe that Manu was a prophet whose text is revealed or inspired. This is one of the earlier prescriptions to maintain public health.
Issuing a statement over the health threat of dioxin in 1983:
Many pollution control standards are created by specifying a maxilum allowable proportion of a toxic substance in any waste. So what many polluters do is to dilute their toxic waste with enough water to lower the pollution proportion to meet the standard and then dump the waste into the ground where it runs into the streams, rivers, bays and aquifers. This is “pollution by dilution”. When this is done, the same amount of toxic material is dumped and nothing is improved.
The major reason for not yet harvesting waste is the labor, caital, and energy costs of recycling relative to the value of the resource is too high. Technology improvements and greater shortages continuously change the equation in favor of harvesting more and more resources.
The Congressman was never known to be a literati. A “toxic” by definition is harmful. Later. DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. Historian I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science". Among many other accomplishments, he was one of the first to suggest the use of a blinded experiment to ensure the objectivity of scientific observations. He originated the term milieu intérieur, and the associated concept of homeostasis (the latter term being coined by Walter Cannon).
