Risk assessment has become the dominant paradigm for managing environmental issues since its introduction by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the mid 1970’s. Today, more than 25 state and tribal agencies have developed and implemented risk-based decision-making programs in an effort to standardize and streamline the regulatory process.

It is an opportune time to consider what we have learned over the past 30 years and how the risk assessment process has evolved during this period. This presentation will discuss such issues as the health risks posed by complex mixtures, how we extrapolate from Mickey to Walt and how our increasing understanding of the human genome and of disease processes like cancer will affect the strategies we use to characterize and assess a contaminated site.

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