From Fundamental Biology to Toxicology by Way of an Accident

When I was young and pictured my future, it wasn't a path that could be determined a priori. The world was full of interesting things. Obtaining the qualifications to become a professor and a researcher was the easy part. The rest relied on being in the right place at the right moment and having the intuition to feel the importance of events we were witnessing. This is how I met my mentors and how my scientific partner and I came upon the paradox that caused us to propose the principle of biological inertia. This is also how we discovered that estrogens leached from plasticware were ruining our experiments, and thus we became "toxicologists by accident." Indeed, we were never formally trained in pharmacology or toxicology; however, our discovery that the estrogen nonylphenol leached from plastics made us pioneers of the new field of endocrine disruptors that encompasses endocrinology and toxicology.