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FILE 034 · VOL V · You Already Ate It
There Is a Spoonful of Plastic in Your Brain Right Now
Some things you can never unknow. Choose carefully what you test.
Based on: Microplastics in the Human Brain
Intake record
| Recovered from | Environmental testing laboratory, Albuquerque; personal sample log of a staff chemist |
|---|---|
| Contents | Spectrometry results (four samples), a projection chart, a baby bottle (glass) |
| Finder | O. Pike, analytical chemist |
| Status | The chemist resigned in November. He now works as a carpenter. |
Recovered file
In 1950, the entire world produced about two million tons of plastic. By 2015, it was making more than three hundred and eighty million tons a year. [1] Most of it never goes away. It breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, down to particles finer than a human hair, and then finer still, until it is small enough to travel through the air, through water, through skin, and through the walls of blood vessels.
In 2021, researchers found microplastics in human placentas, on both the mother's side and the baby's. [2] The same year, a study found that the stool of infants contained about ten times as much of one common plastic as the stool of adults, likely from bottles and toys. [3] In 2024, a team in New Mexico found microplastics in every one of twenty-three human testicles they examined. [4] That same year, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine followed patients who had plastic particles in the fatty plaque of their neck arteries. Over the next three years, they were about four and a half times more likely to have a heart attack, a stroke, or to die, than patients whose plaque had none. [5]
And in February 2025, scientists published measurements from human brains. The amount of plastic they found would, if gathered together, weigh about as much as a plastic spoon. The concentration had risen by about half between 2016 and 2024. The brains of people with dementia contained three to five times more. [6]
Owen Pike ran the instrument that made measurements like these. He was a chemist at an environmental testing lab, and for six years, his job had been to grind up samples, burn them in a small furnace, and feed the vapor into a machine that identified every kind of plastic inside. Fish. Soil. Bottled water. Tissue from donated bodies. Every sample had it. Every single one. He had stopped being surprised years ago.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
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