From agricultural chemistry to toxicology: the AOAC and the politics of validation

Abstract This paper examines how practices of validation linked epistemic authority to administrative power, transforming procedures of science into instruments of governance. In the 1880s, US government chemists founded the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (AOAC) to resolve conflicting fertilizer analyses and secure public authority over commercial chemistry. Through multi-laboratory studies, the AOAC adopted methods that were judged to produce uniform results – a process later known as ‘validation’. In doing so, the AOAC transformed methodological agreement into a foundation for national regulation and helped define analytical chemistry as a trusted instrument of governance. Nearly a century later, in the 1970s, the AOAC attempted to apply similar principles to toxicity testing but failed: most toxicologists resisted standardization, and methodological uniformity did not yield uniform results. Where the AOAC faltered, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) succeeded, convening scientists and regulators across the industrialized world to establish standard methods for evaluating chemical risk. While the AOAC’s original validation system defended public authority against industrial interests, the OECD’s framework reinforced industry centrality by restricting regulatory legitimacy to ‘validated’ studies. Together these cases reveal how validation translated consensus into authority and aligned scientific reliability with political and economic order.