Microplastics: How Worried Should You Be?

Hi. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus And I'm here with senior producer Rose Rimmler. Hello. Hi, Wendy. You have a story to tell me. Yes. We're gonna start off with a bit of a mystery story today. I heard it from professor Patricia Hunt. So it's like we were on the trail of something we thought was gonna be really big, and then we tripped and fell into something that was huge. Oh. I'm in. It all started back in the late nineties. Pat was running a lab where she was researching egg cells, which one thing you gotta know about Pat is that she loves egg cells. Loves them. You know how some people are into, like, very niche things? Yes. To other people, they seem niche to you. They seem extremely important. So for me, it would be gelatinous marine invertebrates. Yes. You do love jellyfish. For Pat, it's the egg cell the moment it's released and is, like, ready to meet a sperm. Well, it's it's beautiful for one thing. And it's absolutely fascinating because the more we study it, the more complex we realize the whole process is. So to help her understand this complex process, she had mice in her lab. She had healthy mice. But one day, she took some of their eggs and looked at them under a microscope, and she saw that something weird was going on with their chromosomes. They should just line up like, you know, horses ready to start a horse race. And what we saw was they were splattered all over the place like they were completely disorganized horses. You don't want disorganized horses No. Hanging around in your eggs. You don't. And it was especially weird because these mice had had totally normal eggs before. Literally one week, we ran the experiment. It was fine. The next week, blammo. Okay. Something's going on. This has gotta be something that's crept in to my animal facility. So we started looking. There was a bunch of construction going on in the hospital. You know, maybe somebody's spraying for insects or something. Maybe somebody switched something. She checked the air coming into the animal facility. That was fine. Nobody had changed the food the mice were eating. It was just like this total head scratcher. Yeah. And so I talked to the woman who was running the place a lot about this. She knew what was going on. She knew why we were upset. And one day, I walked in and I said, Cheryl, you know, what's going on with these cages? They look horrible now. She goes, I know. I don't know. The cages. The cages the mice were in. They were basically these plastic tubs, kinda like a where you might keep your hamster, you know? And they also were drinking out of plastic water bottles. And all of that stuff was looking really weird. The plastic was getting cloudy and starting to crack. …