The replacement of Druckrey’s model of dose-time-response by the much more flexible concept of ‘acceptable daily intake’

In the 1950s the commission on food coloring of the German Research Society (DFG), headed by the biochemist Adolf Butenandt and the pharmacologist Hermann Druckrey, represented a policy of preventive risk management in regard to food additives. It was thereby recapitulating a discourse on “food poisoning” and a critique on an inner nexus being constructed by our civilization between foreign substances and carcinogenesis. Such a connection had already been expressed in the early 1930s. Discourses on purity and contamination were translated into mathematical models (the dose-time-response) and legislative measures (new German food law in 1958). With the organisation EUROTOX and within the scope of JECFA, Druckrey tried to implement this pharmacology of cancer on a global scale. At the end of the 1950s these purist and preventive risk policies were forced back by the primacy of economics. With the replacement of Druckrey’s model of dose-time-response by the much more flexible concept of ‘acceptable daily intake,’ industry- and trade-friendly policy of calculable risk prevailed over the policy of preventive risk management.
Source:
PD Dr. Heiko Stoff. “Zur Kritik der Chemisierung und Technisierung der Umwelt. Risiko- und Präventionspolitik von Lebensmittelzusatzstoffen in den 1950er Jahren”
TG Technikgeschichte, Seite 229 – 250

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