Guest Editorial: Norton Nelson’s Legacy: The Science of Environmental Health

The field of environmental health science is now a recognized and respected branch of science in American and worldwide academia. One of the pioneers who had a major role in the establishment of environmental health as a true scientific discipline was Norton Nelson, the founder and first chair of the Department and the Institute of Environmental Medicine at New York University (NYU), which now bears his name. Among his many accomplishments, he played a leading role in the formulation of legislation that created the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) (Lippmann 2001). We would like to remind readers of some of the basic principles that Nelson and other pioneers of the new discipline invoked in order to establish environmental health science as an important discipline and to overcome barriers to acceptance of the field as a true science by those in other disciplines. By early in the second half of the twentieth century, it was apparent that the issues raised by the effects of the chemical and physical environment on human health could not be addressed by a single branch of scientific research. Instead, such issues transcend the variety of quite disparate and nonoverlapping fields, each with separate and diverse methodologies, conceptual frameworks, and scientific cultures. as molecular biology and exposure science. The multidisciplinary nature of the issues and methodologies involved in environmental health science leads to the question of how the field and the scientists working in it can be defined. When Nelson began to organize his department at NYU, there was no clear answer to this question. Especially after the peaking of interest in ecology and the environment that followed the first Earth Day in 1970, some colleges and universities, established " environmental studies " as an academic theme. The approach in many such programs was to combine ecology with social and political aspects of air and water pollution, as well as a sprinkling of toxicology, industrial hygiene, and statistics. Nelson's approach was different. While acknowledging that environmental health science by its nature must be an interdisciplinary field, he insisted that the practitioners of research and teaching in his department first, be highly trained in a basic science (e.g., biology, engineering), and then, as a second layer of training and expertise, acquire some significant degree of knowledge of other areas included in the realm of environmental health sciences. Nelson's mission was to assemble—first within his own institute …