Developments of disease hypotheses and conceptions of disease as philosophic entities have shown bursts of great advance. One just concluded includes emergence of bacteriology and virology culminating in Koch’s Postulates, which in the twentieth century were primary bases for disease study and colored all approaches to medicine.With recent extraordinary advances in technology, medicine faces great new obligations demanding fresh approaches and untrammeled thinking for solution of problems posed. It is clear that any approach to diseases and disabilities induced by exposures to environmental pollutants must take multiple etiology into account. For example, contributing to causation of lung malignancies one must list usual dusts, radioactivity, smog, auto exhausts, cigarette smoke and genetic composition. Consideration of plural factors in genesis of environmentally associated disease leads to the hypothesis of the incremental insult, a complex and difficult conception in which must be included provision for multiple causative agents, each contributing but a fraction toward total etiology^ Computers developed to their present refinement provide necessary tools for whatever complexity required to spawn and fructify hypotheses of inter-relating associations of incremental insults leading to pathology.
Twentieth-century changes in the genetic composition of Swedish field pea metapopulations
