Environmental Endocrine Disrupters 2008 Gordon Research Conference

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant) The sixth Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Environmental Endocrine Disruptors (EED) will be held June 8-13, 2008, in Waterville Valley Resort, New Hampshire. It was designed to achieve two goals. First, this conference will mark the 10th anniversary of the first GRC on EED, an event that has markedly influenced the growth of this field of research. One example: between 1998 and 2006 the annual number of Medline citations for the key words "endocrine disruption/disruptors" has grown by twenty-fold. To maintain this pace of growth, the 2008 conference seeks to highlight the important advances over that period and to help shape the next decade of research. Second, the conference aims to highlight the most recent science through discussions of new candidate EEDs, newly discovered and proposed mechanisms of action, new endpoints under investigation as targets of EEDs, and new methods for evaluating health and ecological risks attributable to EED exposure. The list of speakers includes leading scientists from the US, Japan and Europe, as well as young scientists who have recently reported exciting findings. Endocrine disruptors are now thought to influence the development of not only male and female reproductive systems, but also to be involved in the development and adult functions of numerous organ systems (including metabolic, immune and thyroid, bone, and brain), as well as playing a role in the onset and progression of several types of cancers. Governments of the United States, Japan and the European Union have enacted laws regulating endocrine disrupters (most recently REACH) and in the U.S., amendments were passed to the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Food Quality Protection Act mandating the testing of chemicals found in water and food for endocrine-disrupting activity. Public interest in endocrine disruptors has grown at the same pace as the science. The GRC represents a unique venue for promoting research and the exchange of information and viewpoints in this critical area of environmental health. The proposed conference adheres to the guiding principle of the GRC that the presentations are to be of new, unpublished work and that the discussions are to be open and unhampered. There is a tradition of freely sharing ideas in an "off the record" atmosphere, without the constraining publication of conference proceedings. This underlying philosophy is critical because the proposed topics are positioned at the cutting edge of current science. The proposed conference embodies a subject area with interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary dimensions, and will convene a diverse group of international scientists whose studies and interests range from effects in and exposures of human populations, to ecological effects and exposures in wildlife. These interests extend to basic research in animal models and novel in vitro systems. In addition to the NIEHS, this conference is of potential interest to the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), both of which have agreed to be named as secondary on this application.