The fields of
pharmacokinetics and toxicokinetics have made great progress since the
introduc-tion of the term pharmacokinetics by Professor F. H. Dost in 1953. To
cite tangible evidence of the growing interest in both disciplines, it would be
sufficient just to consider the application of their principles in decision
making by the regulatory agencies; the abundance of books, journals, and
articles with the word pharmacokinetics or toxicokinetics; and the permeation
of the fields in all related basic and applied disciplines. In large measure,
this progress parallels the remarkable growth of computing technology.
Combining
pharmacokinetics and toxicokinetics in one book stemmed from the most basic
prin-ciple of science and pedagogy and the one most applicable to them, the
Aristotle principle of non-contradiction, which is the second of the following
three principles of “thought” or “logic”:
• The
principle of identity
• The
principle of noncontradiction
• The
principle of excluded middle
The principle of identity can simply be stated as A is
equally the same as A and cannot be both A and not A at the same time and in
the same sense, or “whatever is, is.” Stated differently, kinetics is kinetics
and cannot be non-kinetics at the same time and in the same sense.
The principle of noncontradiction can be verbalized
plainly as A cannot be both B and non-B at the same time and in the same sense,
that is, “nothing can both be and not be.”
If one assumes that pharmacokinetics is different from toxicokinetics,
or vice versa, then kinetics is the principle of only one and not the other.
The third principle is the principle of excluded middle,
which means that a statement is either true or false and there is no middle
ground between true and false; otherwise stated, the “principles of
pharmacokinetics are the same as toxicokinetics” is either true or false and
there is no position in-between. This book is written on the assertion that the
principles of pharmacokinetics are the same as those of toxicokinetics and the
congruence of the two fields is conclusive.
Therefore, the purpose of this book is to provide
systematic overlapping principles of pharma-cokinetics and toxicokinetics. It
covers a wide range of concepts basic to both fields and the math-ematics of
modeling and interconnectivity of the topics. The emphasis is on the
understanding of concepts and the governing principles of kinetics, and thus
isolated details, theoretical and complex mathematics of stochastic modeling
and neural networks, and computer-generated curves of pub-lished experimental
data have been avoided.
The publisher deserves the author’s gratitude for their
untiring efforts toward the goal of produc-ing a book of maximal utility to
scientists, researchers, educators, and students.
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