Toxicology at the TUM is mainly associated with the Faculty of Medicine at the Klinikum rechts der Isar (MRI). The Department of Clinical Toxicology has been founded in 1963. Max von Clarmann, the head, focused his activities on the treatment of intoxications and the development of analytical methods and established a poison information center. His successors, Thomas Zielker and Florian Eyer, further developed this department...

Oswald Schmiedeberg was born in one of the former Baltic provinces of Russia. He studied medicine in Dorpat (Tartu) and joined the Institute of Pharmacology of Rudolf Buchheim in Dorpat. After promotion (1866) and habilitation (1868), he succeeded Buchheim as director of the institute. During this time, he further developed the experimental methods leading to the improvement of pharmacological knowledge introduced by Buchheim....

The 1958 Delaney amendment to the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetics Act prohibited food additives causing cancer in animals by appropriate tests. Regulators responded by adopting chronic lifetime cancer tests in rodents, soon challenged as inappropriate, for they led to very inconsistent results depending on the subjective choice of animals, test design and conduct, and interpretive assumptions. Presently, decades of discussions...

The EU chemicals strategy for sustainability (CSS) asserts that both human health and the environment are presently threatened and that further regulation is necessary. In a recent Guest Editorial, members of the German competent authority for risk assessment, the BfR, raised concerns about the scientific justification for this strategy. The complexity and interdependence of the networks of regulation of chemical substances ha...

Theoretically, both synthetic endocrine disrupting chemicals (S-EDCs) and natural (exogenous and endogenous) endocrine disrupting chemicals (N-EDCs) can interact with endocrine receptors and disturb hormonal balance. However, compared to endogenous hormones, S-EDCs are only weak partial agonists with receptor affinities several orders of magnitude lower. Thus, to elicit observable effects, S-EDCs require considerably higher co...