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It was a bold plan, and even the person who conceived of it gave it slim odds of getting off the ground: government and academic scientists, sharing samples and data from the same cohorts of rats dosed with bisphenol A, would try to reach an overall conclusion on whether the ubiquitous food-packaging chemical has deleterious effects on health.
“The way I thought about it initially was, why would anybody want to do this?” says Jerry Heindel, who was then a health sciences administrator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and has since retired. He thought a regulatory agency would be unlikely to take the risk that their previous conclusions—namely, bisphenol A (BPA) is safe for human at typical exposures—would be proven wrong by such a project. But as he saw it, there was a need for partnership. The US Food and Drug Administration ...
