THE JOHN B. PIERCE LAB

The John B. Pierce Laboratory is a nonprofit, independent research institute that is formally affiliated with Yale University. Founded in 1933 and housed in its own 3-story Georgian-style building directly across the street from the School of Medicine, the Pierce Laboratory affords a unique environment for interaction and collaboration among scientists within the Laboratory and in the surrounding Yale community. The Laboratory has a long and distinguished history as a leading center for the stu... dy of physiological regulatory systems such as those that maintain body temperature, respiration, body fluids, and metabolism within healthy limits. The need to understand how these homeostatic mechanisms work is no less important now than it was at the time the Laboratory was founded, when inadequate heating, ventilation, and sanitation still loomed as serious environmental challenges to human health and comfort. Although advances in engineering and technology have greatly reduced the severity of those challenges, other aspects of the built environment that were intended to improve the quality of life have paradoxically created new stressors that impact public health in adverse ways. This is because the physiological systems that evolved to maintain homeostasis in the natural environment must now function under very different conditions in the built environment. For example, in the natural environment physical endurance, keen senses of taste and smell, and strong motivational states of hunger and thirst evolved to meet the necessity of finding and consuming adequate quantities of food and water. In today’s built environment, a sedentary lifestyle and an abundance of processed foods and beverages engineered to take maximum advantage of our sensory and motivational systems combine to distort the function of these systems and cause dysregulation. Indeed, physical inactivity and over-eating are major contributors to some of today’s most serious public health problems, including obesity, type II diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.More