The biological, chemical, and pharmacological study that deals with the effects of chemicals on living organisms is called toxicology. Toxicology studies chemical, biological, and physical agents that are harmful to biological systems, and shows what the extent of damage they do to biological organisms. There are many factors that come into figuring out what the influence of chemical toxicity is, including how it is exposed, the type of species it is, the species' gender, as well as its age and the environment it's in.

Toxicology's origins stem back to the ancient Roman times, specifically at the time of emperor Nero. Dioscorides, who was a Greek physician, was a member of the court for Nero. He would make the first attempt to properly write down the toxic and therapeutic effects of plants. Toxicology wouldn't evolve much until sometime around the 9^th century, when Ibn Washiyya wrote a book titled Book on Poisons.

The father of modern toxicology is Mathieu Orfila. Toxicology would be developed and based around his 1813 writing Traité des poisons. This covered many of the toxic and harmful chemicals, mostly found in plants, to humans. Jean Stas would become the first person to discover nicotine as a poison. This was done by isolating plant poisons in human tissue. This work was made famous in allowing Belgian Count Hippolyte Visart de Bocarmé to be found guilty of murdering his brother in law with nicotine.

While Orfila is considered the father of modern toxicology, the father of toxicology is Theophrastus Phillipus Auroleus Bombastus von Hohenheim, also known as Paracelsus. He created the classic toxicology mantra or saying which goes "All things are poisonous and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not poisonous".

The main goal of toxicology is to figure out how a substance effects an organism negatively. There are two ways negative effects are dependent on. One is the routes of exposure (how it was taken, oral, inhalation, or dermal) and the second is dose (length of time exposed and how potent the dose is). In order to study dose, substances are tested with both acute (one time taking it at an intense level) and chronic (taking over a set period of time consistently).

There are usually many different types of experiments conducted in or to accurately determine whether a substance can cause cancer and whether it can cause other forms of toxicity. These tests can be done in vivo (the whole organism), in vitro (testing cells and/or tissue), or in silico (computer simulation).

These tests are usually done on non-human animals, as testing on humans is deemed inhumane. Animal tests are seen to be the closest way to test how the toxin would affect humans. However, since the 1950s there has been a campaign to end the testing on animals. Computational toxicology is one of the strongest alternate methods to testing, as it harms nothing and no one.

Toxicology helps us understand our environment and the many different substances we encounter. Toxicology is a very safe field right now, as it is constantly needed in using substances to help humanity, and help us steer clear of the harmful ones. It is an important and fundamental to life science in general, as it helps preserve life.

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