From: RegBlog | Penn Program on Regulation
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administers the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, which requires the registration of pesticides before marketing in interstate or foreign commerce. The current toxicity testing for pesticides depends heavily on assessing animals’ reactions to chemicals––a technique that can be easily criticized as costly, slow, and inhumane. At the most basic level, current toxicity testing methods limit the number of chemicals the EPA can test, even though it faces strong pressures to test more than 80,000 chemicals. But further, it limits the number of toxicity pathways one can test, the levels of biological organizations one can examine, the range of exposure conditions one can consider, and the life stages, genders, and species one can cover.
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The EPA’s reliance on computational toxicology underscores how agency decisions may increasingly implicate not only human choices about research methods, but architectural choices in the development of algorithms and neural networks to analyze data in new ways.
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