“…human beings contain hundreds of thousands of genes and although mutation in any
particular one is exceedingly rare, the vast numbers of genes within an individual ensures
that most of us carry one or two mutant genes and that we are all, in effect, mutants .”
Testimony of Dr. Gary Flamm, National Institutes of Environmental Health, USA, at a US
Senate Hearing on “Chemicals and the Future of Man”, April, 1971.
In the late 1960s a small group of geneticists, including Charlotte Auerbach, Alexander
Hollaender, Fritz Sobels, and Takashi Sugimura, representing countries around the globe,
began voicing their fears that mutagenic agents might pose serious, and potentially global,
threats. As a result, they argued, untold millions of people throughout the world could face
genetic assault from what scientists had begun calling “environmental mutagens.”