Abstract
Greetings!
This is a “good news, bad news” note to all of you.
Bad news first. On July 18, 2017, Dr Herbert Needleman died. Dr Needleman was a long-time faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh and was the pediatrician and psychiatrist who devoted much of his professional career in fighting the debilitating neurotoxicity of lead in children. In fact, in the 1970s, Dr Needleman labeled lead poisoning in children a “national disaster.” 1 Dr Needleman was instrumental in identifying sources of lead exposure and in 1979 published a landmark paper showing that the lead concentration in children’s baby teeth correlated inversely with IQ. 2 Dr Needleman was also instrumental in showing that even low levels of lead exposure could be detrimental to students’ performance in the classroom. Dr Needleman’s research was credited with accelerating the elimination of lead from gasoline, with the ban on lead pipes, and with stricter enforcement of lead paint abatement and disclosure regulations. 1
Another passing that only came to my attention recently was that of Dr Robert I. Krieger, on July 26, 2016. Dr Krieger was a founding member of the University of California (UC), Davis, Department of Environmental Toxicology, but spent most of his career as a cooperative extension toxicologist at UC Riverside. Much of Dr Krieger’s work was on biomarkers of exposure and health impacts of pesticide exposures in agricultural workers. As a former cooperative extension toxicologist myself (at North Carolina State University), I can identify with the pressures of combining research, teaching, and cooperative extension responsibilities. Dr Krieger clearly mastered them all, winning the Society of Toxicology Education Award in 1986 and publishing over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts. Dr Krieger was a member of American College of Toxicology (ACT) and also an editorial board member for International Journal of Toxicology when I first took over as editor-in-chief. I valued his service as an editorial board member and looked up to him as a role model for cooperative extension specialists.
On a far happier note, the ACT Publications Committee has selected the recipient of the ACT President’s Award for the Best Paper published in International Journal of Toxicology. The winning paper is entitled “Toxicologic Pathology Analysis for Translational Neuroscience: Improving Human Risk Assessment Using Optimized Animal Data,” by Alok K. Sharma, James P. Morrison, Deepa B. Rao, Ingrid D. Pardo, Robert H. Garman, and Brad Bolon. The citation for the paper is Int J Toxicol. 2016;35(4):410-419. This paper was based on a continuing education (CE) course presented at the ACT 2015 Annual Meeting; this course was originally a CE course at a Society for Toxicologic Pathologists annual meeting that was re-presented at the 2015 ACT Annual Meeting. Thanks to our “sister society” for originally developing such an outstanding course, leading to the publication of this outstanding paper!
Speaking of the ACT annual meeting—it’s only weeks away and I hope to see many of you there. I’ll spend quite a bit of time at the ACT and SAGE booths, so please stop by if you’d like to discuss a potential publication for International Journal of Toxicology (perhaps a manuscript based on an ACT Annual Meeting CE course or symposium, or an original article). If you are presenting a poster at the ACT Annual Meeting, please consider developing that poster into a paper for publication in International Journal of Toxicology, as well.
Finally, be sure to check out the Cosmetic Ingredient Review's (CIR) supplemental issue that accompanies the present regular issue of International Journal of Toxicology. I suspect that many of our readers will learn a lot about CIR's history and processes and gain a better appreciation of CIRs articles.