2025-04-08
14 分钟My name is Nina Agrawal and I cover health for the times.
There's a group of scientists at the University of New Mexico who are studying microplastics inside of human tissue.
They've developed a method that has allowed them to find what they suspect are much,
much smaller microscopic plastic particles than other scientists have described.
They studied the brains from deceased people who had died in 2016 and 2024 and what they found is
that the amount of these plastics increased by nearly 50% over eight years.
That's a lot.
And the researchers suspect that the microplastics they found could be quite old dating back 30 or 40 years.
In March, I traveled to Albuquerque to meet these scientists, Matthew Campin and Marcus Garcia.
Dr. Campin and Dr. Garcia explained to me how they came to that figure of a 50% increase.
They were able to look at these plastic particles under a very high-powered microscope once they took them out of tissue.
And what they saw was pretty startling.
It was really, really small in the hundreds of nanometer range.
Plastic shards and flakes.
And the way Dr. Campin thinks about it is
that it really shifts our understanding of what we're seeing in the human body.
Something akin to the way Roslyn Franklin's picture of DNA changed our understanding of DNA.
One thing Dr. Campin told me is, you know, he's a toxicologist by training.
And he originally got into this work because he helped his son do a science project about looking for plastics in water.
I think they started with just like dunking fleece sweatshirts in water buckets.