Can we prevent being poisoned by our own waste? | Chain Reaction by ACS #podcast #chemistrypodcast

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]The question is can we prevent ourselves from becoming poisoned by our own waste products? Most of us have been in a biology lab at some point in our careers where we've been given a a little bottle with some media and we should put a little organism in it and we should see what happened and there's lots of nutrients in that media. Starts out, grows very very slowly, we call that the lag phase and then it goes into exponential phase. It gets, you know, grows very quickly. Then it begins to run out of resources and it begins to stabilize, the stationary phase and in the end it dies and it dies because it becomes poisoned by its own waste products. And if you think about humans we're also in a closed system and we've had our lag phase, we've had our exponential phase, demographers agree we're going into a stationary phase. The question is can we prevent ourselves from becoming poisoned by our own waste products?