The Lab Racing to Find Out What Microplastics Are Doing to Our Bodies - The New York Times

Inside a New Mexico lab, researchers estimate there is five bottle caps worth of plastic in human brains. Now they are trying to find out its effects. By Nina Agrawal Nina Agrawal shadowed University of New Mexico researchers as they extracted microplastics from tissue and analyzed them. In a basement laboratory at the University of New Mexico, Marcus Garcia rummaged through a bin full of plastic waste. He picked past bottles, chunks of fishing net, a toothbrush, a cup with a Pokemon character and a G.I. Joe. “Yes!” he exclaimed, holding up a discarded pipette tip. “Found it.” Dr. Garcia, a postdoctoral fellow in pharmaceutical sciences, discovered the pipette tip last summer with colleagues on a remote Hawaii beach. It was miraculously intact though it had most likely been degraded for years by sun, ozone and the ocean. How poignant, he thought. It was an object he and thousands of other scientists used every day. And there it was, washed up on a beach along with hundreds of pounds of

Inside a New Mexico lab, researchers estimate there is five bottle caps worth of plastic in human brains. Now they are trying to find out its effects. By Nina Agrawal Nina Agrawal shadowed University of New Mexico researchers as they extracted microplastics from tissue and analyzed them. In a basement laboratory at the University of New Mexico, Marcus Garcia rummaged through a bin full of plastic waste. He picked past bottles, chunks of fishing net, a toothbrush, a cup with a Pokemon character and a G.I. Joe. “Yes!” he exclaimed, holding up a discarded pipette tip. “Found it.” Dr. Garcia, a po