Public release date: 24-May-2008

Since the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, awareness of how environmental toxicants can impact fertility has increased. In an article on p. 1091 of this issue, Steinberg and colleagues provide evidence that adverse reproductive effects of toxicants may extend not only to the children of exposed individuals, but also to the next generation. They treated pregnant rats with a mixture of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and found that reproductive markers were disrupted not only in the female offspring of these rats, but also in the “grand offspring,” which are derived from oocytes present in fetuses of the treated females. Changes in the second generation included blunting of preovulatory LH release, reduced progesterone concentrations and reduced uterine weights. The use of low doses of PCBs in this study increases the potential relevance of these findings to reproductive health.