Editor's note: This article on the Environmental Health Sciences Center of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is the seventh in a series that appears intermittently in NIEHS News.
During the New York City building boom of the 1960s, midtown shoppers and office workers often joked about the "snow" that sometimes fell from a clear blue sky. The surreal-looking blizzards were, in fact, fluffy clusters of asbestos fibers, escaping from construction sites where the insulating material was being sprayed on steel beams in the skyscrapers under construction.
In the heart of the city. The Mount Sinai Environmental Health Sciences Center is located near Central Park in the heart of the community it serves.
At the same time, at Mount Sinai Hospital on upper Fifth Avenue, a pulmonologist named Irving J. Selikoff knew that asbestos was nothing to laugh about and was determined to keep it out of the lungs of Americans.
In those days, hardly anyone, least of all the workers who handled asbestos or were exposed to it indirectly, saw any threat from the nearly invisible needle-shaped fibers, some less than 1 micron in diameter. Physicians considered the material inert, harmless to humans, and, because of its fireproof properties, a lifesaving boon to mankind.
But in his New Jersey clinical practice Selikoff had discovered in 1954 that an astonishingly high percentage of men who worked with asbestos developed mesothelioma, an otherwise rare cancer of the soft tissues around the lungs. And it appeared that even among smokers, a disproportionately high percentage of lung cancer patients had been occupationally exposed to asbestos.
In 1962, Selikoff began a long collaboration with E. Cuyler Hammond, the American Cancer Society's director of statistics and epidemiology. With the co-operation of the International Association of Heat, Frost Insulators, and Asbestos Workers, as well as manufacturers of asbestos-containing products, the Mount Sinai team conducted some of the earliest and most influential studies of environmental carcinogenesis. The first of these studies was published in 1964 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. From the laboratory, the clinic, and the computer center, the Mount Sinai team went to the workplaces and even the homes of workers, where they found an elevated risk of lung cancer even for the wives who washed their husbands' asbestos-dusted work clothes.
In 1961, the Mount Sinai Hospital named Selikoff the first director of its new Environmental Sciences Laboratory, which would later become the basis for the Mount Sinai Environmental Health Sciences Center. From this position, Selikoff argued consistently for threshold standards for asbestos to be established and enforced. It took years for government, business, and the public to take his warnings seriously; not until 1971 did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) put forth the first standards of consequence; even then, the limit of five fibers per milliliter of air was far below the recommendation of the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists. Today, the limit is one-fiftieth of the level set in 1971.
Established Traditions
Mount Sinai began as a rather fashionable urban hospital on the upper east side of Manhattan. Its prime site overlooking Central Park was flanked by elegant apartment buildings and museums, but only a few blocks away the New York Central railroad tracks emerged from underground, and the tone of the area changed dramatically to a middle-class neighborhood of apartment houses and retail stores. After World War II, many residents of the area near Mount Sinai moved to the suburbs, to be replaced by working people from the rural South and Puerto Rico. By 1967, when the hospital's medical school was founded as part of the City University of New York, deteriorating housing stretched from just a block to the east of Fifth Avenue for more than a mile to the East River. Urban problems were taking hold, and increasing numbers of residents crowded into the emergency room.
The changing social and physical environment of its neighborhood prompted Mount Sinai to form the first urban department of community medicine in the United States, which became the home of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory. Selikoff and his colleagues had demonstrated the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to environmental health research. The laboratory now enjoyed the resources of both a major clinical facility and a bustling medical school.
In 1973, The Mount Sinai Environmental Health Sciences Center was formed and received its first center core funding from the NIEHS. As one of the nation's oldest environmental health research units, the center retains its original emphasis on human health and epidemiology in the urban environment and its dedication to investigating associations between environmental factors, particularly toxicants, and human disease. During its first 12 years as an NIEHS core center, Mount Sinai became renowned for delineating the hazards of lead, solvents, vinyl chloride, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs).
New Directions
In 1985, Selikoff stepped down from his administrative duties, and the center's directorship passed to Philip J. Landrigan, a pediatrician with extensive public health experience in Africa and Central America, and many years of service in the U. S. Public Health Service, both at the Centers for Disease Control and at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
While maintaining the momentum of the Selikoff years, Landrigan has devoted the past decade to building the center's strength in analytical environmental epidemiology and in areas of basic science relevant to environmental health. The center has brought in new faculty members in epidemiology, biostatistics, biochemistry, neurobiology, medical genetics, physics, and molecular biology.
In addition, Landrigan forged stronger ties with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, drawing in senior scientists from departments of clinical medicine and basic science to become active members of the center and collaborators in its research. Landrigan continues as an active investigator in his own field, lead toxicology.
In the past three years, the Mount Sinai center has been reorganized and now comprises three research cores devoted to heavy metals, environmental carcinogenesis, and women's environmental health research; three service and support cores of biometry, exposure assessment, and clinical/occupational medicine; a community outreach and education core coordinated by an administration core; and a pilot project program.
Heavy Metals
The multidisciplinary heavy metals core brings together epidemiologists, occupational physicians, physicists, geneticists, and neurotoxicologists from several departments within Mount Sinai. At present, the heavy metals core concentrates exclusively on lead. Its key resource is the X-ray fluorescence (XRF) system, which measures with great precision the amount of lead retained in bone. Andrew C. Todd, a medical physicist who helped develop XRF technology, conducts noninvasive tests with the device.
Philip J. Landrigan. Protecting the community's health is the director's first priority.
|
Landrigan and Todd are the principal investigators of an NIEHS-funded prospective study of the neuroepidemiology of lead, which is following young adults recently hired to work in bridge maintenance and other elements of New York City's infrastructure. De-spite respirators
and other protective gear, these workers will be exposed to lead in paint used on structures built years ago. Researchers hope the long-term study will tell them whether the low levels of lead are harmful.
James G. Wetmur, professor of microbiology and human genetics, is conducting a research project on the role of genetic polymorphism in response to environmental stressors. His work focuses on delta-aminolevulinic acid dehydratase (ALAD), an enzyme which decreases in activity during the early phases of lead poisoning. Some individuals have a variant form of the enzyme, which may increase the risk of adverse health effects if they are exposed to lead. Wetmur's group was the first to find a correlation between the presence of the gene that produces the abnormal enzyme and higher levels of lead in blood and the first to devise a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method of recovering genetic information from small samples of blood.
Landrigan and Todd are also working on prospective epidemiologic studies to determine whether subclinical decreases in neurological function in women can be linked to occupational exposure to lead and whether low-level lead poisoning contributes to attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children.
Environmental Carcinogenesis
Mount Sinai's history of identifying and quantifying cancer-causing factors in the environment and the workplace continues in the environmental carcinogenesis core, directed by William J. Nicholson, a collaborator with Selikoff in many of the original studies of asbestos-related cancers.
With the advent of molecular biology and advanced statistical techniques, this core emphasizes integrating biological markers of exposure, carcinogenic effect, and susceptibility. The agents of interest are environmentally persistent organochlorines, radon, and asbestos.
One area of research in the environmental carcinogenesis core is distinguishing between the carcinogenic effects of the different types of asbestos fibers. Mount Sinai researchers have shown that chrysotile asbestos, touted by producers as safer than other forms, is a potent mesothelial carcinogen, although it is removed from the lung faster than other asbestos fibers. The concentration of chrysotile fibers is 50 or more times greater in mesothelium than in lung tissue, compared with amphibole asbestos fibers. Center scientists are studying genetic changes in mesothelioma with the goal of finding biomarkers that may lead to earlier detection of the malignancy.
Mary Wolff, director of the exposure assessment core, is conducting extensive research on the impact of environmental agents on breast cancer. Wolff has recently joined in a collaborative, congressionally mandated investigation to examine potential environmental factors that may account for the "epidemic" of breast cancer in nearby Long Island, where the incidence of the disease is the among the highest in the nation. Organochlorine pesticides were used in large amounts in Long Island during the 1950s and 1960s. Wolff will direct the analyses of organochlorines in the blood of 400 breast cancer cases and 400 controls. These levels will be correlated with geographic models estimating the participants' past environmental exposures to DDT, PCBs, chlordane, and polyaromatic hydrocarbons.
In a case-control study of breast cancer patients, Wolff studied the serum concentrations of PCBs and DDE, a by-product of DDT, taking diet, reproductive history, and prior breast disease into account, and found that mean levels of both DDE and PCBs were higher among breast cancer cases than among their matched controls. In a related hospital-based case-control study, Wolff is seeking possible mechanisms linking organochlorines to breast cancer, and, with a number of collaborators, is looking at the same links in other populations--the women followed since 1976 in the Nurses' Health Study at the Harvard School of Public Health, a group of North Vietnamese women, and women from different ethnic groups in Cali-fornia enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program. Using the same tools of molecular epidemiology, Wolff also hopes to undertake a study to determine whether these same compounds play a part in the etiology of prostate cancer.
In collaboration with scientists at the American Health Foundation, Ainsley Weston, deputy director of the Mount Sinai center, is examining the effects of PCBs and sediments from New York City waterways on normal human mammary epithelial cells. The project, supported by the Superfund, seeks to delineate the metabolism, activation, and DNA-adduct formation of benzo[a]pyrene and benzene, as well as endogenous estradiol, and to discover how this metabolism may be altered by individual and racial variations in normal human mammary epithelial cells. In a pilot study, Weston is working with Wolff to evaluate whether polymorphisms of cytochrome P450 and glutathione-S-transferase (both major carcinogen-metabolizing enzymes) are related to susceptibility to breast cancer in ethnic minorities.
Women's Environmental Health
The women's environmental health core was established in September 1994 as an extension of a working group that had been formed by Landrigan a year earlier. The working group had studied early pregnancy loss among women office workers by measuring urinary levels of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) as a marker of both ovarian toxicity and early pregnancy and had also studied the roles of DDE and PCBs in premature birth.
Epidemiologist Maureen Hatch was recruited from Columbia University to serve as the core's director. Hatch immediately brought in three new faculty members to extend the division's strength in reproductive epidemiology.
Words into action. Andrew Todd monitors the spectrum as an assistant positions the XRF machine to measure tibial bone lead in a subject.
The unifying theme of this new research program is to study the effect of environmental toxicants on the health of women. Specifically, the core aims to assess the contributions of environmental factors to diseases of special importance to women, including breast and ovarian cancers, and gynecologic and obstetric problems; to trace the effects of female hormones on vulnerability to environmental toxicants, and to determine the effects of in utero exposure to environmental toxicants and maternal hormones on offspring.
The new core's first funded research projects began in April 1995, with support from Superfund. The center's XRF technology will be used to assess the release of lead from bone during pregnancy and lactation and during menopause. A study is also being planned to examine over 1500 blocks of tumor tissue from women diagnosed with breast cancer to look for mutations and overexpression of genes implicated in the disease.
Clinical/Occupational Medicine
The clinical/occupational medicine core provides expertise in assessing populations exposed to environmental toxicants and plays an important role in recruiting subjects. Stephen Levin, medical director of the Irving J. Selikoff Clinical Center, in Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Mount Sinai, is director of this core.
In 1974, the center began a clinic to complement its research program, which for years was New York City's only academically based occupational health clinical center. It developed many educational programs to help workers recognize and reduce their exposures to hazardous substances, such as asbestos education programs for members of the building trades and training for pest control workers in the health effects of pesticides. Research in the Clinical Center led to the recognition of lead exposure from firearms at shooting ranges used for police training and for recreation.
In 1987, at the request of the New York State Legislature, Landrigan and Steven Markowitz, assistant director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center, conducted a study of occupational disease in New York. They reported that occupational illness was the fourth most common cause of death in the state and estimated that the five most common occupational diseases cost over $600 million annually. Recognizing occupational disease as a major public health concern, the legislature created a network of occupational health clinical centers, coordinated by the New York State Department of Health and now funded by a surcharge on workers' compensation premiums.
Today, the Clinical Center sees over 3,000 patients yearly. It is equipped with spirometers and audiometers for screening. More elaborate pulmonary, neurological, and other tests are available through departments at Mount Sinai Hospital. The clinical center has access to a 15-bed in-patient unit within the hospital where clinical investigations can be carried out in depth on individuals exposed occupationally to lead and other agents, at no cost to the patients.
The center performs clinical investigations through the clinical core. An example is an ongoing study by Nicholson to determine whether the risk of cancer in insulation workers, heavily exposed to asbestos for 30 years or more, could be reduced by dietary factors, particularly beta-carotene. Nicholson has related various cancer risks to serum levels of vitamin A and beta-carotene, controlling for asbestos exposure and cigarette smoking, and has found decreasing trends in relative risk for all cancers, particularly lung cancer and gastrointestinal cancer, with increasing beta-carotene levels.
Community Outreach and Education
The community outreach and education core, directed by environmental neuroscientist Luz Claudio, was established in January 1995. Its goal is to educate community residents, workers, health care professionals, and policymakers about environmental health and disease prevention.
By serving as an information resource, the community outreach and education core hopes to foster environmental justice through communication with labor unions and community organizations, to encourage the teaching of occupational and environmental medicine in the medical school and in post-graduate medical curricula, and to draw more members of racial minorities into environmental health science careers.
Although this core is new, most of its activities are well-established at Mount Sinai. Under the Secondary Education Through Health program (SETH), the school of medicine has exposed over 3,000 high school students to opportunities in health careers, provided information on the influence of the environment and the workplace on health, and encouraged students to become knowledgeable health consumers. The SETH program recruits more than 200 students a year through cooperating junior and senior high schools for hands-on research, library research, seminars, instruction, and exposure to working in clinical and research environments. Ninety-five percent of SETH students are accepted by colleges. Three of Mount Sinai's SETH students were winners of the 1994 Westing-house Talent Search. Angela Diaz, a former SETH student, is director of Mount Sinai's Adolescent Health Center and is serng this year as a White House Fellow.
This program's success has led Mount Sinai to develop an environmental education component under a recent NIEHS Superfund basic science research grant. The project will offer a structured summer program for 15 minority students in the 11th and 12th grades and their teachers. The students will work with environmental scientists on projects involving heavy metals and chlorinated hydrocarbons. Students will also attend seminars on the history and philosophy of science and environmental medicine, study the Hudson River's ecology, and prepare presentations for weekly seminars. Researchers from all the cores at the center will serve as mentors to the students and the teachers will be trained in pedagogical methods shown to be effective in arousing students' interest in applying the scientific method to problems in the world around them.
In addition, researchers at the center are recruiting medical students to carry on the tradition of research in environmental health sciences. The center offers a summer research training program during which students work directly with faculty members on a specific research project. Students' time is spent attending seminars, observing patient sessions at the Occupational Health Clinical Center, and visiting work sites where they are introduced to a range of occupational and environmental health concerns. In the first four years of funding 22 students participated in the summer program. In keeping with one of the program's goals, 10 were members of racial and ethnic minority groups.
Training tomorrow's scientists. Deputy Center Director Ainsley Weston works with technician Cindy Mao in the Environmental Molecular Biology Laboratory.
Although scientists at the Mount Sinai Environmental Health Sciences Center have an array of new technologies to address environmental health problems, they also have a strong sense of the mission of the center, supplied by Selikoff, Landrigan, and the other founding research-ers, which is not only to conduct research and train new scientists and physicians, but also to ensure the long-term interests of the community in being free from environmental health hazards.
Scientists, consumer groups, manufacturers, and labor organizations recently debated the criteria for naming a chemical a carcinogen. The debate concerns
The Biennial Report on Carcinogens (
BRC), which lists known carcinogens and substances "reasonably anticipated" to be human carcinogens to which significant numbers of U.S. residents are exposed. In 1978, Congress mandated that the Department of Health and Human Services prepare these reports annually. In 1993, Congress changed the law to make the reports biennial. The seventh report was published in 1994. Now officials at the National Toxicology Program, which prepares the report, are determining if the criteria used to list chemicals need to be revised. One of the key questions is whether the NTP should consider mechanistic data--information on how chemicals work in the body and how cancer develops--when deciding whether or how to list agents in the report.
NTP scientists may now consider mechanistic data when listing chemicals in the BRC, but the criteria do not specifically call for their use, said Norman Drinkwater of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a member of the NTP Board of Scientific Counselors' ad hoc working group for the review.
In the report, chemicals fall into one of two categories. One category includes known carcinogens, meaning that human studies have produced sufficient evidence to indicate that they cause cancer. The second category includes chemicals that human or animal studies suggest are "reasonably anticipated to be carcinogens." Chemicals in the second category may have increased the incidence of malignant tumors in multiple species or strains of animals or at different dosages or routes of administration. The second category also includes chemicals that induced tumors to an unusual degree with regard to site, type, or age at onset. Chemicals are also placed in the second category if human studies find that they appear to cause cancer but confounding factors are present, such as occupation or smoking.
The NTP Board of Scientific Counselors established an ad hoc working group to review the criteria for listing substances in future BRCs. The group met April 24 and 25 in Washington, DC, to hear public comment about the criteria and to prepare recommendations for the full NTP board at a public meeting held June 29-30 at NIEHS.
Members of the ad hoc group favor slightly revising the criteria and including some mechanistic data, according to Drinkwater. However, this probably won't alter the number of chemicals that is listed, he said. Public comment at the meeting was mixed. Some consumer and health groups favored the incorporation of mechanistic data, and some manufacturers were against including the data. Based on working group deliberations, the NTP is expected to recommend a qualified "yes" to some revision of the criteria and inclusion of mechanistic data when the full NTP board meets June 29.
Some members of the public believe that the more data that the NTP considers, the better, and others argue that the more simple the review process, the better, according to ad hoc group member Gerard Egan, director of toxicology at Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. "I think what will happen is [NTP] will decide less is better. . . . The current system hasn't gotten them in trouble in the past," Egan noted. The NTP will "make room for mechanistic data without really changing the criteria used for listing," he predicted. Indeed, prior to the meeting, the NTP Executive Committee's BRC working group submitted a document that supported the prudent use of mechanistic data.
If strong evidence exists that "the mechanism of carcinogenicity in experimental animals does not operate in humans," then an animal carcinogen should not be listed even in the "reasonably anticipated" category, the group stated. But if the mechanism of carcinogenicity has been demonstrated to operate in humans, then the chemical should be listed as a known human carcinogen.
Mechanistic data will help the NTP to better understand dose-response effects, extrapolate animal findings to humans, and understand the "true range of risk" a chemical poses to the general population, said George Lucier, director of the NIEHS Environmental Toxicology Program.
However, Myra Karstadt, director of the Program on Food Safety for the consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest, argued that the BRC fails to provide current information, and using mechanistic data will only make matters worse.
Companies delay the report by demanding "all sorts of re-reviews of what are essentially noncontroversial data," because of their "aversion to having their products identified as carcinogens," Karstadt asserted. "The latest tactic proposed by chemical companies. . . is imposition of mechanistic criteria for listing chemicals. . . . Arguments about significance of results from mechanism studies would be likely to bring the [BRC] publication process to a halt," she stated.
The United Auto Workers opposes changing the criteria for listing chemicals in the BRC, said Franklin E. Mirer, director of UAW's health and safety department and an NTP board member.
James Sherman, senior toxicologist with Monsanto Chemical Company and a representative of the Chlorobenzene Producers Association, noted that the impact of listing a compound in the BRC "is truly great" and must be done only after careful consideration. To perform its scientific role, the NTP "must do more than count tumors in rodents," he wrote in his testimony.
The North American Insulation Manufacturers Association also submitted written testimony that stated "The criteria should be revised to permit consideration of mechanistic data, including those showing that positive animal results are not relevant to humans."
Mechanistic data from experimental animals should not be used to upgrade chemicals to the "known human" category, said Matthew S. Bogdanffy, manager of biochemical toxicology and risk assessment in central research and development for the Dupont Company.
"At the EPA, we use mechanistic data as often as possible to assess the health risks of new and existing chemicals," Stephen C. DeVito of the EPA's Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances, wrote in a letter to the ad hoc working group. He supports incorporating mechanistic data in the listing criteria, because they make toxicology reports more complete and useful, he said in the letter.
Meeting participants recommended additional changes that some ad hoc members argued would prevent the NTP from listing chemicals in a timely fashion. For example, some members recommended expanding the number of categories that the report includes, while others said such a change would complicate the listing process. Members also argued that the NTP should review a broader range of experimental data and decide which are the most relevant to humans instead of focusing on studies with positive findings.
The ad hoc working group did agree that the NTP needs to make clear to members of the public that the document only identifies hazards and is merely the first step of a full risk assessment, which federal, state, and local regulatory agencies perform.
A recent award is evidence of the fact that the NIEHS is dedicated not only to environmental health but to the health of the environment. The institute was honored by the Department of Health and Human Services for having the best and most innovative recycling program of its numerous agencies. The NIEHS, located in Research Triangle Park, is DHHS's 1995 nomination for the White House "Closing the Circle Award" for the best overall solid-waste recycling program at a federal site, facility, or operation.
The NIEHS recycling program has reduced the amount of incinerated waste at the institute over the past 2 years by 32%, while recovering approximately 18,000 pounds of recyclables each month and providing a use for some nonrecyclable paper from the community. The institute actively promotes resource-consciousness through vigorous employee education and information campaigns. The NIEHS also makes use of recycled-formulated products. Orange Recycling Services, a local small business, collects, processes, and markets the recyclable materials.
Kenneth Olden, NIEHS director, praised the Environmental Awareness Advisory Committee at the NIEHS, which oversees the recycling program. "This recognition acknowledges very intensive efforts over several years. The institute is justly proud of the excellent program that the committee has so energetically developed."
"Turn off the television and read," Benjamin Carson, director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, exhorted 300 minority students recently at the NIEHS, recalling the way in which his mother encouraged him to excel. Carson spoke as part of the North Carolina Health Careers Access Program (NC-HCAP) of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Motivating mentor. Benjamin Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institution, receives a standing ovation from students following his talk.
The mission of NC-HCAP is to interest racial and ethnic minority and disadvantaged students in pursuing careers in the health professions and to enhance students' opportunities to gain access to and excel in formal higher education. Carson, a world-renowned physician and surgeon who was raised in a single-parent home and experienced negative peer pressure, urged students to excel academically despite such obstacles.
Marian Johnson-Thompson, director of the Office of Institutional Development at the NIEHS, said, "This is the second seminar of this type that we have hosted to impress upon high school students that pursuing careers in science and medicine isn't the province of some privileged group. Completing school, going on to further education, and taking some of the more difficult courses can mean spending the rest of your life doing work that you love and enjoy. This is an important message for young people to hear."
Kenneth S. Korach, chief of the Receptor Biology Section of the NIEHS, was pictured on the May 1 cover of the journal
Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research. Korach, an NIEHS investigator since 1976, was chosen by the journal's cover editorial board for his work in assessing the impact of environmental estrogens on human disease.
Environmental estrogens, produced as pesticides or as by-products of manufacturing, mimic the hormonal activities of natural estrogens and have been implicated in breast cancer, nonmalignant reproductive tract diseases such as endometriosis, and male birth defects as a result of prenatal exposure. Recent research has also suggested a link between exposure to environmental estrogens and an increase in testicular tumors and decreased sperm counts in both wildlife and humans.
Korach, who received his doctoral degree in endocrinology from the Medical College of Georgia and was a postdoctoral fellow in biological chemistry at Harvard Medical School, has spent almost two decades investigating the basic mechanisms of environmental estrogens. In particular, according to the Cancer Research profile, Korach has "studied the role of the estrogen receptor in mediating hormonal responses in uterine tissue; characterized the estrogen receptor and hormonal responsiveness during early development; described coupling of growth factor and nuclear receptor signaling pathways; investigated estrogen carcinogenesis and toxicity; and created mouse lines using transgenic technologies for evaluating the estrogen receptor in endocrine regulation and hormonal carcinogenesis."
Olden Receives National Departmental Award
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala presented the Secretary's Distinguished Service Award to Kenneth Olden, director of the NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program, "in recognition of innovative and creative redirection of the NIEHS/ NTP programs."
Olden was one of 23 recipients nationwide and 1 of 9 recipients at the National Institutes of Health to receive the award, presented at ceremonies in Washington, DC, on May 9.
Olden was appointed director of NIEHS in June 1991. Under his leadership, a unifying vision of the NIEHS mission was developed through a series of planning retreats and external reviews in which research strengths and opportunities for the institute were identified.
Olden has initiated a dramatic change in direction for the National Toxicology Program, bringing together the NTP Board of Scientific Counselors with 25 experts outside the NIEHS to make recommendations for improving the effectiveness of the program, as well as streamlining its procedures and making them more open. Olden also issued a strategic plan to guide NIEHS activities for the next 5-10 years, encompassing research priorities, goals for disease prevention, and a newly expanded role in effective communication of research data.
In nominating Olden for the award, Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, said: "Dr. Olden has established new programs at NIEHS and phased out or reshaped others where necessary. He has already addressed some of the most critical and sensitive environmental health issues of our time, such as environmental justice and the integration of basic biomedical research into toxicology testing. More than ever, NIEHS is basic research-oriented and at the same time poised to address public health issues through prevention, intervention, and community outreach."
[Table of Contents]
Last Update: May 16, 1997