Colleen Lanier-Christensen

It has been proven that certain chemicals pervasive in consumer goods, such as the BPA endocrine-disrupting chemical, have negative health effects. However, most regulatory agencies continue to say they are safe, including the US Food and Drug Administration. For Colleen Lanier-Christensen, a PhD candidate in history of science, a significant reason for this discrepancy is a set of regulations called Good Laboratory Practice Standards. First developed in the United States in the ‘70s and internationalized in the ‘80s, they enable regulators to govern how private laboratories conduct safety testing. 

“Regulators’ overreliance on these rules excludes a significant number of academic toxicology research from being used or consulted,” says Lanier-Christensen. Her work illuminates the history of the bureaucratic and standardization practices that have unintentionally created two different types of scientific practices in toxicology: research and regulation. 

“There is a lot of scholarship about the safety of specific products or chemicals, but less on the state of practices used in decision-making across chemical regulatory agencies,” Lanier-Christensen explains. “When regulators don’t consult academics, whole areas of health hazards are not taken into consideration, and responsibility about knowing about chemicals in products devolves to consumers instead.”

For Lanier-Christensen, the stakes of her work aren’t just about the safety of one chemical, but the evidentiary standards used in decision-making. In the current debate about laboratory practices and test guidelines, regulation is either seen as ensuring good science, or hindering it. “My work intervenes somewhere in the middle,” she says. “We’ve gained critical insights from chemical- and institution-specific studies, but we also need to look at the standards, practices, and tools used across different agencies and jurisdictions. Instead, by looking at the history of regulations, we not only see their original intention and positive impacts, but also any unintended consequences.”