ABSTRACT
Methanol is commonly used in industry for organic synthetic procedures or as a solvent. As a result, it is accessible to the general public in a variety of products such as antifreeze, fuels, duplicating machine fluids, and in gasoline as a fuel extender. The toxicity of methanol in humans has been appreciated since the early part of the twentieth century. One of the obstacles that has retarded the understanding of the mechanism by which methanol produces its toxicity in humans has been the difficulty in extranolating results obtained from experiments with certain common laboratory animals to humans. Although the differences between the effects of methanol in humans and in laboratory animals were known prior to 1955, there had been few investigations of the toxicity of methanol in the nonhuman primate. A great deal more work is needed in order to understand which step of the many enzymatic reactions in the folate biochemical pathway regulates the regeneration of tetrahydrofolate in monkeys.
