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Correspondence

Nature 417, 117 (9 May 2002) | doi:10.1038/417117a

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Basic or applied, it's the interaction that counts

Peter B. Farmer1

  1. Biocentre, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK

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Toxicology must not be driven by politics: it's science that should drive decision-making.

While we sympathize with some of the views expressed by Marcello Lotti and Pierluigi Nicotera in their Concepts essay "A risky business" (Nature 416, 481; 2002), the authors fail to acknowledge the wider role of toxicology in society. Toxicology is much more than the purely mechanistic studies they propose, and should not be incorporated into "the mainstream of fundamental biomedical research".