毒理学工作者正在努力探讨新的方法来检测食品添加剂、残留物及类似物质的安全性。这些新方法建立在分子生物学基础上、涉及分子探针和用人类细胞或组织制作模型的技术,使科学家们能够了解产生毒作用的过程、明确原因和影响。而现行的方法用近致死剂量毒物做动物实验,除了相关外,往往难于得到其它结果。 Toxicologists are working hard to explore new ways to test the safety of food additives, residues and similar substances. These new approaches, based on molecular biology, involve molecular probes and techniques for making models with human cells or tissues, enabling scientists to understand the processes that produce toxic effects and to identify the causes and effects. The current approach to animal experiments with near-lethal doses of poisons often makes it difficult to obtain other results, except in correlation.