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A German bunker full of blood and urine has the best record of how chemicals contaminate us
Some 400,000 specimens from German citizens, collected over four decades and stored in an old military bunker, trace the rise—and sometimes the fall—of chemical pollutants in an industrial country.
At the German Environmental Specimen Bank, Dominik Lermen stands among cryo-storage tanks that hold thousands of vials of blood and urine. A scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Lerman leads the team that collects samples every year from students and stores them here on behalf of the German Environment Agency.
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