Career Opportunities For Toxicologists On The Rise, With Demand For Their Expertise Rapidly Growing

Demand For Their Expertise Rapidly Growing Environmental awareness is a major factor in creating job openings in all employment markets for these specialists AUTHOR :MARCIA CLEMMITT, pp. 1, 9, 22 Young scientists emerging from graduate training programs in toxicology are having an easier time than most other science graduates in today's grueling job market, say toxicologists at universities throughout the United States. "Most--virtually all--[graduate students] have jobs six months before they graduate," says Bruce Fowler, director of the program in toxicology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, referring to students in his program, which currently has an enrollment of 30. "When you go to a conference, it's disconcerting to sit around tables with your graduate students and have people trying to hire them out from under you. But it's certainly nice for them." Toxicology training program directors across the country report similar results for their students. Located primarily in university medical schools and schools of public health, most toxicology graduate programs offer Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in toxicology, with some offering master of public health degrees and a handful awarding bachelor of science degrees with a toxicology major. Toxicology studies call for an unusual amount of multidisciplinary expertise compared with other scientific fields, since they deal with the interface of biological systems and chemicals brought from outside those systems. Toxicology departments in all employment sectors have traditionally hired scientists from many disciplines, including pharmacology, physiology, biochemistry, medicinal chemistry, structural chemistry, and molecular and cellular biology. About 3,200 scientists belong to the Washington, D.C.-based Society of Toxicology. Besides university jobs and research positions in medical institutions such as cancer centers, toxicologists are widely employed by federal, state and local public health agencies; regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration; crime laboratories; defense agencies facing widespread cleanup of hazardous waste; and even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Private-sector employers include environmental engineering and consulting firms and virtually all segments of the manufacturing industry. According to many scientists, two factors are causing the abundance of wide-ranging opportunities for young toxicologists: the maturation of molecular biology tools for studying interactions between chemicals and human cells; and the growing public interest in the subtle, chronic toxic effects of chemicals in the environment. "The job market still seems good," says Walt Piper, who joined the toxicology program in the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor in 1988 as its director. Michigan's program has 52 students, 28 of whom are doctoral candidates. Piper says there is a variety of opportunities for both master's and doctoral grads. Of his program's Ph.D. graduates, he says, "We haven't had anybody who's had less than three to five job offers." Toxicologists in academia mainly teach graduate and medical students and pursue basic and clinical research on such questions as what role environmental chemical exposure plays in carcinogenesis, what structural elements of a chemical make it toxic, and how to develop an antidote to common poisons. Industry toxicologists generally work in product development, designing studies that will test for different levels and modes of toxic exposure. Government toxicologists also test chemicals for safety, but most of their work involves determining what scientific tests best establish safe exposure levels for a chemical or class of chemicals and evaluating data submitted by industry labs. According to academic toxicologists, a growing number of companies are actively competing for the same students whom universities would traditionally seek for research and teaching positions. "We're finding our students very much in demand. Industry is increasingly willing to look at students doing basic research into [molecular] mechanisms [by which chemicals interact with cells]," says Bernard Goldstein, chairman of the department of environmental and community medicine, whose toxicology graduate program is sponsored jointly by Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey's Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Newark. Charles Reinhardt, director of E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Co.'s Haskell Laboratory for Toxicology and Industrial Medicine in Wilmington, Del., speaks for many toxicology chiefs when he says, "What we really look for are very good basic scientists-- biochemists, molecular or cell biologists. They don't have to be called toxicologists or come from such a program." Meanwhile, many universities with degree-granting toxicology programs say they have initiated or significantly restructured those programs during the past decade to turn out just such scientists. "A good student for us must be an able chemist, a good biologist, and able to write," says Maryland's Fowler, echoing the comments of several other toxicology program directors around the U.S. Scientists note, however, that once hired, a large percentage of toxicologists in government and industry spend some or all of their time working as staff toxicologists rather than bench scientists. A staff toxicologist's duties may include devising chemical safety research programs that span many related disciplines, managing those programs, and evaluating data from many studies in order to develop action plans for product development or regulatory action. Another duty of many staff toxicologists is risk assessment, evaluating the risk of a chemical's toxicity or studying such questions as what scientific uncertainties arise when toxicity data are extrapolated from animal studies and how levels of risk compare quantitatively among similar chemicals. Staff toxicologists are "generalists in a world of specialists," says Rashmi Nair, manager of corporate toxicology for the St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. One of several toxicology laboratories at Monsanto, Nair's group employs eight Ph.D.-level toxicologists. According to Nair and others, staff toxicologist is a job scientists must grow into gradually. "A staff toxicologist coming in right out of a postdoc would be deciding what kind of studies [of a particular chemical] should be done," Nair says. "But even a highly trained young scientist will need help in deciding what to do with the data. It takes three or four years of looking at a lot of data to start doing risk assessment on a chemical." Staff toxicologists in government regulatory agencies must develop a similarly broad scope of knowledge and balanced judgment, says Robert Scheuplein, director of the office of special research skills in FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in Washington, D.C. One of many toxicology groups in federal regulatory agencies, Scheuplein's division has about a dozen Ph.D. scientists. "They have to give up the kind of freewheeling speculation you can do in a published paper and pay scrupulous attention to backing everything up, remembering that every conclusion they state has legal weight," he says. Despite the fact that many government and industry jobs require scientists to leave the research bench, such jobs currently attract a large proportion of toxicology program graduates, program directors say. That leaves some academic toxicologists wondering whether the next decade will see the ranks of university teachers and basic and clinical researchers in toxicology nearly depleted. "There are a fair amount of academic jobs [available] in toxicology, but I fear that we may not get a good supply [of toxicologists] in academia [to fill them]," says Michigan's Piper, "Many students say, `Why do it when I can make a good living in industry? ' " Arthur Hume, a professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, says only about a quarter of his program's grads have been taking academic positions in recent years. "They don't want to get into the situation they see us in--struggling for grant money," he says. "It may mean some talented people [will never be] doing the important and useful basic and clinical research." Toxicologists predict their field will continue to be a strong source of science jobs primarily because, of the 70,000 commercial chemicals currently in use, only several hundred have been thoroughly toxicity-tested. Furthermore, toxicologists point out, interest in chemical toxicity has progressed rapidly from concern over the acute, often life-threatening effects of high-dose chemical exposures to worries about the far subtler chronic effects of long-term, low- dose exposures. According to some scientists, these new issues not only raise new questions future toxicologists will have to solve, but also point to uncertainties in much of the science's accepted wisdom. In carcinogens, for example, "a lot of paradigms for- merly proposed are not standing the test of time." says George Milo, director of the center for molecular and environmental health at Ohio State University in Columbus. Traditional safety assessments using animal models have resulted in "a lot of overinterpretation and oversimplification of what goes on inside the human cell" when it interacts with chemicals, Milo says. Scientists say those new questions surely mean job opportunities for a new breed of young toxicologists with expertise in molecular biology; mathematical modeling of environmental and biological systems; risk assessment; and toxicology subspecialties, such as repro- ductive, developmental, and environmental toxicology and neurotoxicology. According to many toxicologists, this also represents the coming of age of their discipline. Says Michigan's Piper, "Today's toxicology research problems reach to the fringes of our understanding of the molecular biology of the gene." Marcia Clemmitt is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

Career Opportunities For Toxicologists On The Rise, With Demand For Their Expertise Rapidly Growing

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