[hansvm]

To be fair, if you poke a cell with sugars, amino acids, vitamin C, and all sorts of other essential nutrients you'll also see signs of oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, carcinogenicity, and altered metabolism. In some ways it's the counterpart of "bullets cure cancer in a petri dish."

Plastics are still probably bad (with a prior that most synthetic chemicals we're exposed to are known to be toxic and not "proven" to be so and actually banned for 20-100 years), but a cellular study showing that plastics damage those cells isn't very convincing on its own.

Your linked study is a little broader, but it mostly summarizes studies with grandiose ideas or those summarizing those sorts of "poke a cell and find it doesn't like being poked" experiments I initially derided.

[g15jv2dp]

Do you think the people who performed the studies didn't think of that?

[RandomCitizen12]

Do you think that everyone who ever released a "bullets cure cancer in a petri dish" study didn't think of that?

Whether or not they did, it's still a necessary part of the discussion.

[xkcd-sucks]

They probably did think of that, and they did it too: Science as it is practiced in the real world. This sort of stuff is related to our whining about replication crises, careerism, etc.

But it can have its utility too, it's just more "defense from morons" instead "advancing the field". Or more neutrally filling in very predictable gaps in knowledge, like if you got something really unexpected but this stuff is all bog standard unhappy cells