Workshop: What does it mean for chemicals to be endocrine disruptors?

What does it mean for chemicals to be endocrine disruptors?

Anthropogenic effects on the living are widely described as ``disruptions''. For example, climate change disrupts ecosystem interactions by random changes in seasonal activity periods, leading to bird hatching before their prey or pollinators starting their activity before plant flowering.
Despite these uses and the importance of the subject, the notion of disruption has not been conceptualized and theorized in biology. In general, we hypothesize that history brings about specific situations that have a biological meaning because of this specificity, and disruptions destroy the specificity of such situations and the corresponding contribution to an organization.
Then, a proper concept of disruption needs to articulate (i) the analysis of a system or organization at a given time and (ii) the historical origin of this organization.

A critical domain where the use of the notion of disruption has been discussed is physiology and developmental biology. Since the Wingspread conference in 1991, endocrine disruptors are an active field of research and concern for public health. This workshop aims to discuss the notion of disruption in the context of endocrine disruptors. In this domain, historicity has multiple components: the historicity of evolution and development, and also the history leading to the technological lineages of the molecules that are endocrine disruptors.

Schedule

• Wednesday 20 May 2020, 14:30 - 18:30.
  Maël Montévil, Ana Soto, Carlos Sonnenschein

• Thursday 21 May 2020, 14 -18.
  Maël Montévil, Barbara Demeneix, Jean-Baptiste Fini