The author's career has been devoted to the development, safety evaluation and regulation of pharmaceutical and food products. He is a Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology and has been President of the Regulatory and Safety Evaluation Specialty Section of the Society of Toxicology, President of the Association of Government Toxicologists, and president of other national and regional professional societies involved with product safety testing. He has been Director of the Office of Testing and Research at the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and Director of the Washington Office of the National Center for Toxicological Research, Rockville, MD; Director of the Toxicology and Metabolism Laboratory of SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute), in Menlo Park, CA, and Director of Food Safety Research at the U.S. De-partment of Agriculture Western Regional Research Laboratory, Albany, CA. He was an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, an Adjunct Faculty member at the University of San Francisco and has been a guest lecturer in toxicology training programs at these universities and at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Rockville and College Park, MD. He holds a Ph.D. in Toxicology from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Union College, and completed post-doctoral training at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco. He has published more than 200 articles and chapters in scientific journals and books, has served on numerous national and international professional com-mittees in the field of product safety, and has been a frequent invited speaker at national and international scientific meetings.