Is genetic make up related to how people are affected by poisons?
ROBIN: Health and disease are complex. If a disease is going to occur, it is the result of interactions between a whole lot of different factors in any one individual, including factors that make them more susceptible to the exposures or make them less susceptible to the exposures. We know that from cigarette smoking. Somebody can smoke a cigarette for forty years and other than having smelly breath, doesn’t really seem to have any adverse effects and the next person smokes a cigarette for a year and gets lung cancer. One person was much more susceptible to the cigarettes than the other. All kinds of things can cause people to have greater susceptibility or less susceptibility, including a lot of things within our genetic makeup. People can vary about how much gets into the body. Once the compounds are in the body, people vary about how well they can get it out of the body. If the chemical causes a toxic effect in the body, people vary by how well they are able to repair that toxic eff
