Toxicology: What Everyone Should Know - Tapa blanda

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Aalt Bast studied chemistry at the Free University in Amsterdam, where he graduated in 1978. His PhD study (on biotransformation enzymes) at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam (Faculty of Medicine) and at the University of Utrecht (Faculty of Pharmacy) was finished in 1981. Subsequently he became Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Utrecht. He was appointed Associate Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Department of Pharmacochemistry at the Free University in Amsterdam in 1985, and became professor in Molecular Pharmacology in 1988. In 1998 he started to work as professor of Human Toxicology at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences of the Maastricht University.

His main field of interest is the role of redox processes in drug toxicity and pathologies of the lung, the cardiovascular system and the liver. Moreover, the possibilities for therapeutic intervention with antioxidants (from food or as drugs) are explored. He is registered as an experimental pharmacologist and as a toxicologist. He (co-)authored over 500 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and many articles in nutrition and medical magazines. He is a frequently invited international speaker advocating a greater role for science and realistic risk analyses in public opinion and policy decisions. He was president of the Dutch Toxicological Society and member of the National Health Council.

He is on the editorial board of several pharmacological and toxicological journals. He has been the promotor of 50 PhDs.

Back in the Netherlands in 1995, chemistry was traded in for a job in which science, policymaking, and societal issues were at the centre of his interests. Nowadays, that work has expanded into the fields that are discussed, among others, in this book: natural food chemicals, food- and chemical safety and toxicology, the understanding of risk analyses, and risk policymaking. In his second PhD titled Utopia and Gospel - Unearthing the Good News in Precautionary Culture, which he successfully defended on the 11th of February 2015, he imbued particular technical risk topics into an overarching framework of sociological, philosophical and theological dimensions as to understand and explain the development and growth of precautionary culture.

Apart from his work at University College Roosevelt, he has his own (small) research company in which independent scientific research for third party contractors is carried out. Since 2011, he is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, department of Public Health, Environmental Health Sciences.

For the past twenty years, both authors have been academic fellow travellers and good friends.