Environmental Health

I've been wanting to write about this for some time now. I used to go to schools and give lectures about how pollution affects our state of health. I have had the honor to work with the Howard Hughes program at my academic institution, in which I did research in Green Chemistry. I worked with the Neem tree leaf in which I tested its insecticide properties. It was a challenging research project since it was completely created, planned and executed by my team of student scientist. We where all entering our second year of Biology studies so we where "fresh" out of our General Biology courses. To our luck we had a third year Chemistry student who mainly worked in telling us what was dangerous and what wasn't. After a month of long and painful experimentation our results where inconclusive... we weren't to sad considering we proved you can use non toxic methods of plant extractions an have an "effect" of the given product. Our research was inconclusive due to many variables, the main one being TIME.

Why did we do this? Well simple, because we can! Most natural products are converted to biohazard waste when mixed with heavy solvents, who can easily damage ecological systems if mixed with the environment. As global warming keeps showing us its ugly head, scientist are being forced to find newer ways to address agronomical, biomedical and geological problems.

Instead of blogging for an hour about the Waste-Human connection, I rather show you a very self explanatory video of this connection. I used to show this video in my presentations, which if needed i'm glad to give again. My presentation focused on Environmental Contaminants and how to avoid them utilizing Natural Products.

We don't just use our environment, we borrow it from our children.

Enjoy!