Edward Calabrese honored by McMaster University as a pioneer in the field of hormesis
Dr. Edward J. Calabrese is a professor of toxicology in the department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published more than 750 scholarly papers and 10 books. Here is a blurb from his bio page at the university.
Over the past 20 years Professor Calabrese has redirected his research to understanding the nature of the dose response in the low dose zone and underlying adaptive explanatory mechanisms. Of particular note is that this research has led to important discoveries which indicate that the most fundamental dose response in toxicology and pharmacology is the hormetic-biphasic dose response relationship. These observations are leading to a major transformation in improving drug discovery, development, and in the efficiency of the clinical trial, as well as the scientific foundations for risk assessment and environmental regulation for radiation and chemicals. –
See more at: http://www.umass.edu/sphhs/person/faculty/edward-j-calabrese#sthash.C6pWDD4u.dpuf
McMaster University recently recognized Dr. Calabrese for his work and asked him to give an inspirational talk at their November 22, 2013 Convocation. McMaster published a video of the entire convocation and graciously granted Atomic Insights permission to clip and publish Dr. Calabrese’s recognition ceremony and talk.
Update (added January 8, 2014)
Transcript of the above video:
Dr. Patrick Deane, President, Vice Chancellor, McMaster University
Edward Calabrese pioneered the field of hormesis which recognizes that harm from chemicals or radioactive substances does not increase linearly with the dosage. Instead, Dr. Calabrese has proved that doses can be identified which are beneficial. He has worked with great energy and scientific rigor to illustrate the importance of hormesis in regulations processes and approaches related to fields such as toxicology, pharmacology and radiation.
The work produced by Dr. Calabrese and his colleagues has sparked vigorous scientific debate and, famously, a special section in the journal Science. Working with longtime collaborator Linda Baldwin, Dr. Calabrese has also created a database of more than 21,000 papers related to the field.
Dr. Calabrese is a professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences. And during his nearly four decades there he has served the university as the graduate program director for the Environmental Health Sciences Department, as Division Chair for the Environmental Health Sciences Division and as the Director of the Northeast Regional Environmental Health Center, a position that he has held since 1985.
Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Dr. Calabrese was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of Illinois, Environmental Research Director for the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, an adjunct professor with Southwest Residents College at the University of Massachusetts and an assistant professor with North Adams State College.
Dr. Calabrese has published extensively on hormesis and factors affecting susceptibility to pollutants and is the author or co-author of more than 750 papers in scholarly journals as well as 26 books including Principles of Animal Extrapolation, Nutrition and Environmental Health, Ecogentics, Multiple Chemical Interaction and Air Toxics and Risk Assessment. He is the co-editor of Hormesis, a Revolution in Biology, Toxicology and Medicine.
He has also served as the editor in chief of a number of respected scholarly journals including Dose-Response, Non-Linearity in Biology, Toxicology in Medicine, and Human and Ecological Risk Assessment. His editorial board service includes the journals Inhalation Toxicology, Soil and Sediment Contamination an International Journal, Human and Experimental Toxicology, Environmental Toxicology and Safety, and Biomedical and Environmental Sciences.
Dr. Calabrese has been a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and NATO Countries Safe Drinking Water Committees and served on the board of Scientific Councilor for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registries (ATSDR). He is also Chairman of the Advisory Committee for BELLE the Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures and he is Director of the Northeast Regional Environmental Public Health Center at the University of Massachusetts.
He was awarded the 2009 Marie Curie Prize from the International Dose Response Society for the body of his work on hormesis and he was the recipient of the International Society for Cell Communications and Signaling Springer Award in 2010. In 2012, the International CCN Society named Dr. Calabrese an honorary member.
Johnson Lavarge, For Edward Calabrese’s decades of scientific study scholarly leadership and advocacy in the field of dose response and for his contributions to the transformation of drug discovery, drug development, risk assessment and environmental regulations, I ask that you confer upon Dr. Calabrese the degree of doctor of science honoris causa.
Dr. Edward Calabrese:
I’m greatly honored and humbled to accept the honorary doctoral degree from your university. It’s an honor that one never truly thinks about because it’s far beyond one’s normal reach. I’m here today because I’m helping to lead a revolution in the biological and biomedical sciences. It’s called the dose response revolution.
It’s my belief that the scientific and medical communities got the dose response concept wrong many years ago concerning how drugs, chemicals and radiation act in the low dose zone. It’s the zone in which most of us live most of our lives.
Throughout much of the twentieth century the belief was that the dose response was linear for agents causing cancer and a threshold for everything else. My research has seriously challenged these two views.
When one challenges the scientific and medical leadership on one of their basic scientific principles you better be on solid foundation or you many find yourself delivering pizzas to students at night rather than correcting their papers. While I am not here to proclaim that I have convinced the entire scientific and medical communities to my perspective, I can say that I am still correcting student papers at night while eating the pizza rather than doing the delivering.
My story is how do you discover and prove that these scientific and medial leaders made a profound error on a basic principle that has gravely affected our health and the economy.
Well, for me, it was really entirely serendipitous, much like the discovery of the potato chip or that Rogain can grow hair. My insights first came as an undergraduate student taking a plant physiology course of all things. In one experiment we were to demonstrate the standard dose response for synthetic plant growth retardant. However, instead of inhibiting the plant growth it stimulated it.
The professor asked if anyone was interested in following up on this anomalous finding. As it turns out, I was the only one. We figured out that the reason that the normal experiment did not work was that the wrong dose was used. An error that I made, essentially, in making up the stock solution, resulted in only 1/10th of the dose being administered to the plant and not following the actual instructions of the professor.
When I did the experiment over and did it essentially the way that he wanted it done in the first place and adding in the way that we actually did, making a larger experiment, we got exactly what he thought we would get at the high dose of inhibition, but at the low dose we saw the stimulation once again.
My professor inspired me to repeat this experiment in progressively stronger studies, in fact about 11 times, driving me a bit crazy. At which point we became convinced that the findings were very reliably reproducible. He then directed me to additional work, really another two dozen experiments that were closely related to the hypothesis, but attempting to prove with rather indirect ways but complimentary ways the accuracy of the conclusions that we had drawn. When all was said and done, I knew that I had discovered that a threshold or linear response was not operating, in this case, but a biphasic one, something I later learned was called hormesis.
We published this research in a British botanical journal, I graduated. Later obtained my PhD, became a professor and started professional life, almost forgetting this intense period of my first research experience.
Nearly two decades later, the issue of hormesis and biphasic dose responses became highly visible and provocative. With the scientific and regulatory powers proclaiming that it wrong, could not be reproduced, was very trivial at best and was a ploy to undercut environmental regulatory standards. My long, nearly forgotten undergraduate research experience emerged, telling me that I knew something that others didn’t, that such biphasic dose responses could be real and reproducible. I just didn’t know how general they were, what their dose response characteristics were, and what their basic mechanisms were, nor how broadly significant their reality could be.
The past twenty years have led me down this path, a path that reconnected me to my undergraduate days. I had taken a long marginalized biological concept, one that had never made it into the textbooks, one that was never the subject of a conference a symposium, a seminar or even a classroom lecture and breathed scientific life into it.
We are in the process of changing how the scientific, medical and regulatory communities think and act on this topic. Such changes in thinking are happening quickly and at multiple levels within society. We are now seeing numerous medical procedures that have incorporated this concept to save, improve and extend lives. It is also affecting how the general public acts as well as we see in new dietary recommendations such at intermittent fasting or the rapid adoption of the 5/2 diet based on this concept.
All in all the road has not been an easy one, as many colleagues and others in the scientific community thought that those challenging the standard protocols of linearity and threshold while proposing the hormetic alternative had somehow lost their scientific path. My message to you is that big things always start small, like a giant oak from a tiny acorn of from a professor’s observation that his peppermint plants were acting in an odd fashion.
So be curious, Try to figure out the exception to the rule. You may find something very important and transforming. However, exploring the exceptions rather than the rule can also be dangerous to your job health. So it helps to be correct if you go down that lonely path.
For in retrospect, I am now very grateful to my old and now diseased professor who made me replicate my experiments so many times and in so many different ways so that we could have very high confidence in our conclusion. It took me nearly a professional life to appreciate his wisdom and demanding scientific standards as it undoubtedly preserved my professional life and brought me to McMaster University today. Thank you very much.
End Update.
Additional Reading
After watching Dr. Calabrese’s talk and considering his stories about the repeatability of his results in a wide range of studies, please read this op-ed from Henry Miller titled The Trouble With ‘Scientific’ Research Today: A Lot That is Published is Junk.
Before Bob gets here, I would like to ask him a question.
Bob, can you categorize the risk of various levels of chronic exposure to radiation for us? I would like the comparison to be with other common environmental carcinogens, like gasoline.
.1 mSv cancers per 100,000 people in 25 years
.5 mSv cancers per 100,000 people in 25 years
1 mSv cancers per 100,000 people in 25 years
10 mSv cancers per 100,000 people in 25 years
100 mSv cancers per 100,000 people in 25 years
500 mSv cancers per 100,000 people in 25 years
It would be helpful to have these numbers so that we can know the actual risk we take when an incident like Fukushima takes place. Since you have pointed out that even the least radiation can cause a break in DNA leading to a cancer, I am sure that you have these numbers at your fingertips and can help us quantify the hazard.
Have a great day!
To re-phrase Hargraves’ argument in terms which the average person would understand better, how many deaths would you expect from people consuming:
(a) one asprin,
(b) ten aspirins,
(c) 100 asprins,
(d) 1000 aspirins?
The question is incoherent. Over what period of time? Someone with arthritis could easily consume 1000 aspirins or more per year, and be in far better health than without it. Your “expected death rate” from that group would be negative even at a dose rate of multiple thousands of aspririns per year.
@ Engineer-Poet
Good point, I can see where my question did not include the proper time element.
Can you help me reform a coherent question? My aim is to get Bob Applebaum to tell us what the danger from chronic low level radiation – at the levels found near Fukushima are as compared to other common carcinogens. Some practical rule of thumb… 🙂
You’ll never get Applebaum to do that, as he would cut his own throat.
I’d like to see Bob (and Bas Gresnigt for that matter) explain how the following recent and blindingly clear research results could possible exist. Do they believe this research is a fraud? Or do they believe they are frauds themselves? I expect neither of them will answer these questions.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/prolonged-radiation-exposure-0515.html
@Joris : What this study finds is that the effects are too small to measure with the equipment used, not that they don’t exist.
I find studies that test the biological consequence of the irradiation more convincing and while they don’t massively contradict this result, some find that there can be effects at dose lower than 1Gy/y.
The trouble is that, with apparently very comparable setups, results can be just quite contradictory :
– http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9693258 “Effect of a continuous gamma irradiation at a very low dose on the life span of mice”
– http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3042?journalCode=rare “No Lengthening of Life Span in Mice Continuously Exposed to Gamma Rays at Very Low Dose Rates”
– http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17388697 “Cause of death and neoplasia in mice continuously exposed to very low dose rates of gamma rays”
– http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19267556 “Dose-rate effectiveness for unstable-type chromosome aberrations detected in mice after continuous irradiation with low-dose-rate gamma rays”
– http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4540789?uid=3738016&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103199487723 “Effect of Continuous Irradiation with a Very Low Dose of Gamma Rays on Life Span and the Immune System in SJL Mice Prone to B-Cell Lymphoma”
– http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/33/1/61/article “Dose-rate effects and dose and dose-rate effectiveness factor on frequencies of chromosome aberrations in splenic lymphocytes from mice continuously exposed to low-dose-rate gamma-radiation”
I’ll try to comment about all those studies when I have more time, the Tanaka S. 2009 one was the one I intended to include first, but then found about the others.
The Tanaka S. 2009 study finds a weight increase in female rats at a 400mSv/y dose which is suspicious. Other studies yes even found a hormetic effect sometimes.
Thanks jmdesp for all the links. I read the articles.
From just these articles, I would guess that 1 mSv per day / 400 MSv per year is nothing to worry about. The slight number of lost days of mouse-life recorded in one of the experiments looks roughly similar to the slight loss of days of human life in my country due to air pollution. Since I’m not actually much impressed by the health effects of fine particulate air pollution in my country (even though I would prefer it wasn’t there of course) I would have no reason to be especially impressed by the health effects of 400 mSv/year, when assuming the health effects are roughly similar in seriousness.
So if some kind of fantastically unlikely nuclear accident would happen and I’m told I am going to risk getting up to 400 mSv per year then I doubt I’d go through the trouble of evacuating. You think that would be unwise?
@Joris : No, I don’t think it’d be unwise but if we want this to be the message then we need to educate people about relative risks.
If relative risks were better understood, there would be no need to try to refute the LNT hypothesis, because what it predicts is small enough we don’t need to care about it compared to many other risk we take without worrying about them.
But if the issue is so muddled that it’s impossible to get people to understand how low the actual risk is, then we need to unconditionally disprove LNT at low dose, which the MIT study doesn’t do perfectly in my opinion.
I think this MIT study would reinforced by running it on a longer period, and using cesium, so that LNT defenders would have no straw left to grasp when trying to claim this doesn’t disprove LNT.
Also, consider that Bas here is constantly trying to disprove LNT, he sees that even if their understanding of relative risk is very limited, most people still realize LNT doesn’t predict very horrible things.
One reason also why I’m very careful about claims that doses near 1Gy/year would still be safe is the Kramatorsk incident.
If the most exposed location had 18Gy/year, then the average actually received dose was significantly lower than that, and people have literally been dropping dead like flies from leukemia in that incident. Maybe everybody received more than 1Gy/y, but still we need to go to a significant lower dose to have a good security margin again.
However after further studying the Kramatorsk documents with the help of Google translate, I now wonder how much people actually received. It seems there was a kid’s bed just below the radiation source, which helps explain the mortality rate. But the document still aren’t clear, only 4 of the reported 6 dead are clearly identified and they are 2 deceased adults which were probably not sleeping at the most irradiated spot.
I like the way you have formatted the question currently, EP. Comparing radiation dose to the ingestion of an OTC drug like this is very approachable to the average person. And then not initially including a time frame brings in the necessity for the ingestion amount to be in terms of a rate.
Which Bob?
Your question deals only with radiation dose, not radiation dose rate. This was the mistake made by Nobel laureate Muller and all the LNT progeny thereof. Calabrese’s work in hormesis accounts for adaptive response that occurs with low levels of radiation, seen at low dose rates. For example, an single dose of 100 mSv has a 1% chance of causing cancer in a lifetime, according to BEIR VII, and that’s probably correct for a single dose. But a dose of 100 mSv spread out over one year, at a dose rate of 100 mSv/year, would cause no cancer.
Bob Applebaum.
It is pretty obvious that he has Google alerts set for Ed Calabrese, Myron Pollycove, Ted Rockwell, and a few other names. I would expect he’ll comment here prior to 1:00 pm Eastern.
Rod should set up an Atomic Insights Applebaum-post pool. The person whose guess comes closest to his time of posting wins the pot! Guaranteed to happen whenever LNT is challenged by science, even more so if actual hormesis is bandied about!!!
This post could take a while to show up on his radar; not enough LNT talk.
Pushing 4 PM and nothing so far. Either (a) you’re right, (b) we’re lucky… or (c) he remembers the last time he came here.
d) He read the comments here and has decided not to meet our expectations. Which is fine. A day without RA is like a day without that smell you get when you step in dog poop and break open the turd.
Oh, RA being Robert Applebaum, not Rod Adams, of course. Sheesh.
@Jeff
Thanks for the clarification. I was worried.
The Hormesis effect is what I think needs to be focused on. There are now a few long term, large sample group studies that show benefits to overall health, not detriments. The nuclear radiation fear factor has been the main ‘weapon’ of the anti-nuclear side, I think we need to turn the tables. I havent found a source yet that brings all such reports under a single source, if I can’t find one, I’ll start organising one.
And a brief news item:
Newly invented shielding for stopping neutrons cold
“The ability of a system built using these technologies to block radiation, particularly neutrons, has applications in the storage of nuclear waste, in building compact nuclear reactors and in shielding radiation sources used in medical applications.”
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-newly-shielding-neutrons-cold.html
GaryN,
I like it. Using Boron mixed in the materials to improve the absorption rate of neutrons is a stroke of genius. Their patent should pay off! From the statement that hydrogen is the element needed for thermalizing the neutrons it seems that ammonia would be an excellent compound as well. But their designs that enable standard construction techniques are brilliant.
Thanks for the link!
No one should be able to patent borated, hydrogen-rich shielding material. It’s been used for many decades.
Yes, but its structural load-bearing ability leaves much to be desired.
You could always try boron nitride.
Not only that, specialty materials are over-rated, when you can get 20 tons of hydrogenous Serpentine stone for $200. I say it that way because it is so cheap they only sell it by the truck load. That is about 1/2 cent per pound. They use it to make road and sidewalk foundations. Peach Bottom put it in concrete, as did one of the sodium reactor. They actually used straight crushed serpentine in one of the plugs that needed high temperature. Concrete is limited to less than about 500F, whereas straight crushed serpentine can take up to 900F. Serpentine sheet is used all the time in buildings for inside and outside floors, walls, and countertops, although the sheet is much more expensive than crushed serpentine. You do have to avoid mines with the fibrous type (<10%) of serpentine. Third world countries use serpentine as cooking surfaces/pans placed directly on the fire. The high heat capacity makes it like a cast iron skillet, but better. The serpentine has impurities like iron in it that absorb the neutrons AND they help in the high neutron energy range where hydrogen and boron are terrible. Pure hydrogen and boron are a terrible shield without higher Z materials to knock down the higher energies.
Dr. Calabrese apparently has a massive database of research articles. 40.000 (?) of them. I expect that database would contain everything you need. Likely Calabrese or one of his students has already made the product you are interested in?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2013/12/06/czech-project-shows-why-nuclear-power-is-fading-away/
Need more fact and logic anti-FUD air support here, guys. This is on Forbes — millions read this stuff and effects nuclear policy.
I can’t get the comments to come up on that one, despite permitting a heap of sites in NoScript.
EP, try this direct link, works for me using Firefox & W7: http://www.forbes.com/ajax/comment/general/1/?contentUri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fmichaelkanellos%2F2013%2F12%2F06%2Fczech-project-shows-why-nuclear-power-is-fading-away%2F
How typical, the main gripe by anti-nukes on the film “Pandora’s Promise” is its “lack of balance” and here is a link to an anti-nuke site that revels in their own lack of balance.
Sorry, pressed the wrong “reply” button! My comment above was directed at the post below and there is no delete function I can find.
Here’s one for Gwyneth!
http://nuclear-news.net/2013/12/12/refuting-gwyneth-cravens-of-the-flop-film-pandoras-promise/#comments
“Flop film”, eh?
From @RobertStoneFilms yesterday:
“After being available for just 36 hours #PandorasPromise is the #4 top doc on iTunes in US. Help take us to #1! http://t.co/sXVMMwaQO1“
It doesn’t enthusiastically confirm all their prejudices. OF COURSE it’s a flop!
Like enenews.com, the site owner has just jumped on the nuclear/radiation fear bandwagon to try and earn some money. No contact information, company profile, it’s just another fear-mongering site, but people seem to like being scared. I’m surprised there isn’t a “Nuclear Inquirer” available at your local supermarket checkout stand.
“Disclaimer
http://nuclear-news.net/ does not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any information’s, content contained on, distributed through, or linked, downloaded or accessed from any of the services contained on this website.”
Just my own belief, but I’d say there is some money coming into such sites as these from “off the books” sources, but I have no proof. I’d have thought that organisations such as The Post Carbon Coalition, who do have some anonymous “beneficiaries” with deep pockets, would at least have something positive to say about nuclear energy, but no.
Fron their Q&A section:
“Then what about nuclear? Couldn’t modular/thorium/breeder reactors power the world for centuries?”
“Too expensive and too risky. A detailed report in a recent issue of The Economist magazine—not known for any knee-jerk anti-nuclear stance—called nuclear power “the dream that failed,” and concluded that its role in the foreseeable world energy picture will never be more than marginal. The ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Japan has led that country to abandon nuclear power, and Germany is following suit. Even though China appears to be doubling down on its nuclear bets, from a global perspective the industry is essentially moribund.”
I was receiving their news letter for a while, a few years ago now, until it became apparent they are really a population reduction movement. The word Nefarious comes to mind.
I don’t know what the answer is to getting the truth out there about Nuclear when there is so much money trying to kill it off, but I’ve been trying to do my bit on the Internet for what it’s worth.
OOOOPPSS, pressed the wrong reply button above! Was supposed to be here.
How typical, the main gripe by anti-nukes on the film “Pandora’s Promise” is its “lack of balance” and here is a link to an anti-nuke site that revels in their own lack of balance.
Japan has one of the lowest cancer rates in the world. They also love their hot springs. No, there couldn’t be a connection, or could there?
Secrets of Misasa Onsen “Therapeutic Hot Springs”: good to bathe in, drink, and inhale
http://spa-misasa.jp/eng/radium/index.html
Sorry to be so late to the conversation, but here’s an article about Icaria, Greece:
http://voices.yahoo.com/icaria-recognized-as-blue-zone-has-worlds-largest-3249555.html
And one about its radiological distinction:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/the-secret-to-longevity-wine-and-radioactivity/
Yep — Icaria is a high-background-radiation location that has an anomalously large number of nonagenarians.
And recall that Germans love hot springs. Of course, not every German is a nuke-phobic Green, but there’s plenty of overlap in the categories.
A combination of factors on that Island perhaps Dogmug, lack of stress is important for sure, but radiation hormesis does seem to be gaining some interest again. I doubt you will ever be able to buy one of these again though.
Zimmer Radon Generator
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/zimmeremanator.htm
In North America you can not buy anything even slightly radioactive without setting off alarm bells it seems, the only way I could find to buy even tiny amounts legally would be in thoriated welding rods. Maybe I can locate some ‘hot’ granite counter tops somewhere though.
I thought about using some of that material as a substrate for my box-spring support. Broken pieces would certainly be cheap enough.