Carson's book The Silent Spring.
The publication of Spring makes people fully realize the extensiveness of environmental pollution and the seriousness of the harm of environmental pollutants to people and the ecological environment. During this period, medical and biologists began to do a lot of research on the harm of pesticides, heavy metals and other environmental pollutants to human health and wildlife. 1966, National Institute of Health (National
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Division of Environmental Health.
Science) and Independent Colleges (NIEHS). The Department of Environmental Toxicology was established at the University of California, Davis, 1968. Therefore, environmental toxicology, as an independent discipline, came into being in the 1960s. From the early research content and origin of environmental toxicology, we can see that from the day it came into being, environmental toxicology tied the impact of environmental pollution on human health with the impact on wildlife and ecological environment, and both of them were regarded as the research scope of this discipline. It can be said that eco-toxicology has been brought into its own field since the beginning of environmental toxicology, which makes the emergence and development of these two disciplines have the same historical origin, leading to the fact that some people still classify the research papers and achievements of eco-toxicology into the category of environmental toxicology, and vice versa.
Although Truhaut (Truhaut)
R) The term ecotoxicology and its connotation were put forward in 1969, and the International Society for Environmental Safety (ISEES) was established in September of 1975. The academic journal Ecotoxicology was published in 1977.
Environmental safety (eco-toxicology and environmental safety) holds that eco-toxicology is a science to study the damage, destruction and even extinction of toxic substances to the ecosystem, not only to study the possible impact of environmental pollutants on non-mammalian organisms, but also to study the impact on mammals including humans. Some people also distinguish between these two disciplines, saying that ecotoxicology studies biological (including human) groups, while environmental toxicology studies human individuals. Some scholars believe that the definitions of these two terms are tending to be consistent and merged into one [9- 10].
Since 2000, the teaching and scientific research of environmental toxicology and ecotoxicology in China have developed very rapidly. Three monographs [5-6, 1 1] have been published successively, including Ecotoxicology, Introduction to Ecotoxicology and Principles and Methods of Ecotoxicology. At the same time, the Steering Committee of Environmental Science and Engineering Teaching of the Ministry of Education suggested offering eco-toxicology courses for undergraduates majoring in ecology. Subsequently, in 2005, the Ministry of Education approved Meng of Shanxi University to compile Ecological Toxicology as a national planning textbook for the 11th Five-Year Plan of general higher education. This book was published by Higher Education Press in 2009, and became the first university textbook of ecotoxicology in China [12]. The new situation of discipline development forces us to study and re-examine the definition, research scope, teaching purpose and content of these two disciplines [4, 12- 13]. Through years of teaching practice and further research on the concepts of these two disciplines, we believe that the difference between these two disciplines cannot be distinguished according to whether the number of research objects is "individuals" or "groups", because the epidemiological investigation of environmental toxicology and the ecological or biological investigation of ecotoxicology are all aimed at groups; Eco-toxicology is as important to the individual study of rare animals as environmental toxicology is to the individual study of human beings. autecology
Ecology is a science that studies the relationship between organisms and the environment, especially the adaptation law of organisms to the environment. Related to this, individual ecotoxicology will also stand out. In addition, although the survival of human beings is far less dependent on the ecological environment than that of wild animals, human health is inseparable from the ecological environment in which they live, and environmental toxicology has always included the harm of the transformation of pollutants such as biological enrichment in the ecosystem to human health. More importantly, individuals live in groups, and groups are composed of individuals, which are dialectical unity. Poisons also harm groups or ecosystems through direct damage to individuals [4, 12- 13]. So the biggest difference between the two is the qualitative difference, not the quantitative difference. Environmental toxicology focuses on the harm of environmental pollutants to human health, while ecological toxicology focuses on the impact of pollutants on non-human organisms. However, because human beings and non-human beings live in the same open ecosystem or biosphere at the same time, it is essential to exchange material and energy between them, so the research fields of these two disciplines sometimes inevitably overlap. Therefore, we define the two disciplines as follows: environmental toxicology is a science that studies the damage effects and laws of environmental pollutants on human body, human beings and related organisms; eco-toxicology is a science that studies the damage effects and laws of physical, chemical and biological factors, especially environmental pollutants on non-human organisms and their ecosystems; environmental eco-toxicology is a science that studies the damage effects and laws of environmental pollutants on non-human organisms and their ecosystems [4,12-/kloc- The ecosystem in these concepts can be as small as a pond or as large as a landscape, hemisphere and biosphere. It must be pointed out that no matter how perfect human self-protection is, it is impossible for him not to exchange materials with other members of the ecosystem, and it is impossible for him not to be bound by the ecological environment. Therefore, environmental toxicology sometimes discusses the relationship between human health hazards and ecotoxicology, such as biotransformation and enrichment of pollutants; At the same time, eco-toxicology should also study the impact of ecosystem destruction on human health when necessary. In this case, the research contents of the two disciplines may be difficult to distinguish. That is to say, these two disciplines have their own research cores or centers, but sometimes they overlap with each other, that is, the research tasks and contents are "clear in the center and vague in the edge" [13]. Therefore, the understanding of the above definitions of environmental toxicology and ecotoxicology should avoid absoluteness. In fact, the vast majority of environmental toxicology research is carried out by people engaged in medical environmental hygiene, while eco-toxicology research is basically carried out by people engaged in environmental science, ecology and biology. Their research teams are completely different. In scientific research practice, few eco-toxicologists have studied the toxic effects and mechanisms of environmental pollutants on human health, and few environmental toxicologists have studied the harm of pollutants to the ecosystem. All these analyses show that in the practice of research work, these two different toxicology disciplines generally do not overlap in research content and research objectives.
Because of the fuzziness of the concepts of environmental toxicology and ecotoxicology, we often see some research papers and some literature retrieval publications, and often classify the environmental toxicology research papers with non-human model experimental organisms as the research object under the ecotoxicology catalogue by mistake; Similarly, it is common to classify the research papers of ecotoxicology into the category of environmental toxicology by mistake. Therefore, the author puts forward that scientific research projects, scientific research work, papers and achievements can be judged from at least the following seven aspects whether they belong to the field of environmental toxicology or ecotoxicology: (1) whether the objects of observation and research are human or non-human organisms; (two) its research goal is to study the effects of toxic and harmful factors in the environment on human health, or to study the toxic effects on individuals and groups of animals, plants and microorganisms; (3) Whether the main direct harm objects of the environmental toxic and harmful factors studied are human bodies or people or non-human organisms; (4) Whether the observed or studied organism is a laboratory model organism or a wild organism (including temporarily cultivated in the laboratory); (5) Whether the experimental animals it observes or studies are mammals such as mice, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs and monkeys, or non-mammals such as fish, shrimp, shellfish and fleas; (6) The experimental organisms observed or studied are commonly used laboratory model organisms in environmental toxicology, such as Tradescantia, Vicia faba (root tip), Arabidopsis thaliana, Salmonella typhimurium TA98, TA 100 and other standard strains. Or laboratory model organisms commonly used in ecotoxicology, such as Eisenia foetida, Daphnia magna, grass carp, herring, silver carp and bighead carp. (7) The results obtained by using nonhuman model organisms are mainly used to extrapolate to people to discuss the harmful effects of environmental pollutants on human health, or directly discuss the harmful effects of environmental pollutants on nonhuman organisms [13].
At present, some researchers have some vague concepts about ecotoxicology and pollution ecology. In this regard, we propose that pollution ecology is a science that discusses the ecological harm and its laws caused by the interaction between environmental pollutants and ecosystems from the perspective of ecology, using ecological theories and methods; Eco-toxicology is a science from the perspective of environmental toxicology, using the theory and method of environmental toxicology to explore the ecological harm caused by the interaction between environmental pollutants and ecosystems and its laws. This may be an important reason why the authors of books such as Pollution Ecology are mostly ecologists, while the authors of books such as Ecological Toxicology are mostly environmental toxicologists.