PAW readers may not know that the Nihart et al. Nature Medicine paper about a year ago which made all the headlines about microplastics in the brain was followed up by a November 2025 “matters arising” response by an international group led by Fazel Monikh which very politely called BS on the methodology. In a nutshell the authors used pyrolysis gas chromatography and mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS), which is notoriously finicky when applied to complex organic materials with significant amounts of long-chain fatty acids (like the brain) whose pyrolysis products can mimic polyethylene. I have no expertise in Py-GC-MS, but I spent a career in scientific instruments and watched as marketing pressure steered product development toward greater ease of use, which meant users did not need a deep specialized understanding of the technique to get results. I could tell some very funny horror stories about some of the questions we got from our users with odd results, but will refrain out respect for the guilty. Let’s just say extraordinary claims demand extraordinarily accurate evidence, and you can probably stop worrying now about having a head full of microplastic.
PAW readers may not know that the Nihart et al. Nature Medicine paper about a year ago which made all the headlines about microplastics in the brain was followed up by a November 2025 “matters arising” response by an international group led by Fazel Monikh which very politely called BS on the methodology. In a nutshell the authors used pyrolysis gas chromatography and mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS), which is notoriously finicky when applied to complex organic materials with significant amounts of long-chain fatty acids (like the brain) whose pyrolysis products can mimic polyethylene. I have no expertise in Py-GC-MS, but I spent a career in scientific instruments and watched as marketing pressure steered product development toward greater ease of use, which meant users did not need a deep specialized understanding of the technique to get results. I could tell some very funny horror stories about some of the questions we got from our users with odd results, but will refrain out respect for the guilty. Let’s just say extraordinary claims demand extraordinarily accurate evidence, and you can probably stop worrying now about having a head full of microplastic.