As the tide of chemical born of the Industrial Age has arisen to engulf our environment, a drastic change has come about in the nature of the most serious public health problems. Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera, and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment---a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved. The new environmental health problems are multiple—created by radiation in all its forms, born of the never-ending stream of chemicals of which pesticides are a part, chemicals now pervading the world in which we live, acting upon us directly and indirectly, separately and collectively. Their presence casts a shadow that is no less ominous because it is simply impossible to predict the effects of lifetime exposure to chemical and physical agents that are not part of the biological experience of man. “We all live under the haunting fear that something may corrupt the environment to the point where man joins the dinosaurs as an obsolete form of life,” says Dr. David Price of the United States Public Health Service. And what makes these thoughts all the more disturbing is the knowledge that our fate could perhaps be sealed twenty or more years before the development of symptoms.