ABSTRACT
The organic pollutants discussed in this book are examples of xenobiotics. A xenobiotic is de–ned here as a compound that is foreign to an organism-it does not play a role in the organism’s normal biochemistry. By this de–nition, a chemical that is normal to one organism may be foreign to another. Thus xenobiotics may be naturally occurring as well as man-made (anthropogenic) and must have existed early in the evolutionary history of this planet.
