By Patrice Sutton
For Dr. Jennifer Adibi, a good day in the laboratory is one where her trophoblasts are thriving. The cells, which are the first to differentiate from a fertilized egg (they later develop into the placenta) require as much care, feeding and nurturing as a slew of laboratory animals.
As every mother knows, parenting involves unceasing communication between parent and child. What few realize is that the conversation begins long before birth as the placenta supplies a developing fetus with oxygen, food, and up-to-the minute news of the environment outside the womb.
So when something goes wrong with placental development, that conversation can go awry, and influence health across the lifespan. This potential is what Dr. Jennifer Adibi is trying to decode in her laboratory: if phthalates – a group of industrial chemicals used to make plastics more squishy and flexible – change the hormonal development of infants in utero.
Adibi’s path to trophoblast housekeeping began in Russia – as a young post graduate there in the early 1990s, she met scientists studying the impacts that years of chemical and weapons manufacturing along the Volga, Europe’s longest river, had left on the people who lived along it. Until that point, Adibi, a Russian studies major, thought her life’s work would be translating Russian. Instead she went to Columbia and Harvard to study the relationship between humans and the chemicals around them.