The promise of molecular epidemiology for quantitative risk assessment.

In the long run, molecular epidemiological techniques can provide important insights for understanding a wide variety of important issues in current risk assessment and are applicable across a broad spectrum of adverse effects in addition to carcinogenesis. Unfortunately, current risk assessment practices make very little use of the kind of detailed mechanistic information that molecular epidemiology can provide. Eventually, there is reason to hope that the availability of mechanistic insights provided in part by molecular epidemiology can produce some of the "essential tension" required to reform paradigms for the formulation of quantitative risk assessment models in general.