IN the fall of 1986 my colleague, Dick Beeman, sat in my office at Kansas State University and told me a fascinating story. He worked at what was then called the U. S. Grain Marketing Research Laboratory, a U. S. Department of Agriculture facility about a mile from campus. He was trained as an insect toxicologist, but to aid in his research he had become a self-taught geneticist using the red f...

Toxicology for coroners is an important minority service whose quality is central to the validity and integrity of the death certification system. Multidisciplinary case conferences are routine practice in the major medical specialties. In conventional practice for the coroners' courts, the dissecting pathologist is often relied upon to interpret toxicological data usually without specialist tr...

Suicide attempt via sodium pentobarbital is uncommon. A 48-year-old woman with a history of depression and prior suicide attempt was found unresponsive by her veterinarian spouse near a syringe containing pink solution. Upon EMS' arrival, the patient was experiencing apnea, hypoxemia, and miotic pupils; her blood glucose level measured 73 mg/dL. She was bradycardic and administered atropine wit...

A major stimulus to study cell proliferation, particularly in rodent carcinogenicity assays and human tumors, has been the belief that the quantification of this fundamental biological process will provide the toxicologist and pathologist with objective data allowing a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in the toxicity and/or carcinogenicity of certain compounds as well as guiding ...

Human and animal toxicology has had a profound impact on our historical and current understanding of air pollution health effects. Early animal toxicological studies of air pollution had distinctively military or workplace themes. With the discovery that ambient air pollution episodes led to excess illness and death, there became an emergence of toxicological studies that focused on industrial ...

Safety testing of potential drugs has been and will continue to be a challenging task for the toxicologist in the pharmaceutical industry. We present two examples for the use of target-specific cell models to detect and assess species-specific toxicity. In the first example, adrenal models based on primary cells as well as a permanent human adrenal cell line were used. Both cell systems enabled...

In 1854 John Snow was responsible for a major advance in environmental health science when he demonstrated that cholera epidemics were waterborne rather than airborne. By mapping the disease outbreak he identified a specific London water source, the Broad Street pump, as its proximate cause. Removal of the pump handle was temporally related to the end of the epidemic. For his very careful mappi...

The isoquinoline alkaloid Glaucine was described as an ingredient of legal highs and gained the interest of clinical and forensic toxicologist. So far, only few data on its pharmacokinetic properties was investigated. The aims of the present studies were to elucidate the metabolic fate of glaucine in vivo (rat) by GC-MS and LC-HR-MS techniques, to confirm the human main phase I metabolites in v...

An important role of the clinical toxicology laboratory is to provide continuous diagnostic testing for patients with altered mental status and for other medical indications. To meet these needs, we have developed a new Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) platform that facilitates routine screening and automated reporting of 212 drugs by laboratory technologists around the clock withou...

For over a century clinicians and pathologists have debated the role of alcohol in the pathogenesis of cirrhosis. Only in the last decade, however, has general agreement been reached on certain principles underlying the complex inter-relationships between alcohol ingestion, food intake, and alterations in the structure of the liver. Unfortunately, this has led to the erroneous impression in som...