Winner of he 2009 Marie Curie Prize, Professor Edward Calabrese joined the faculty of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences in 1976.
Paradoxical Poisons
Maverick professor honored for toxicology research
Will it kill you or cure you? After 30 years researching this question, Professor Edward Calabrese ’73PhD, ’74EdD, has received international recognition for his work in toxicology. The Paris-based Council of Nuclear Workers awarded him the 2009 Marie Curie Prize for outstanding achievements in research.
Calabrese’s unconventional and often controversial thinking about toxic chemicals has made him the world’s foremost expert on a phenomenon known as hormesis. Hormesis is the counterintuitive theory that poison can be good for you: Low doses of some chemicals stimulate or promote growth and many other types of biological performance (including memory, immune function, longevity, and neuroprotection), but higher doses are toxic or inhibit growth. The theory’s proponents suggest, for example, that low doses of toxic substances, including even the most feared agents, such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead, and even ionizing radiation, can induce adaptive/protection responses at low doses. He has also demonstrated that most drugs act in a similar fashion, showing the same dose-response relationship.
Calabrese has long urged mainstream science to recognize hormesis as a basic biological principle and to explore its applications in the biomedical, therapeutic, and environmental areas. The Marie Curie prize recognizes him for his career contributions in hormesis research and for bridging the gap between chemical hormesis and ionizing radiation.
A professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, Calabrese joined the faculty in 1976. He received the 2009 Marie Curie Prize in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in late September.
Everyday implications of hormesis for risk assessment are significant. If chemical hormesis is a basic biological principle, Calabrese says, society is needlessly over-regulating the environment to protect against low exposures that are not dangerous, and we’re missing possible benefits. “The traditional threshold model is not very good at explaining or accounting for data that’s below the toxic threshold, and that’s where we live,” he says. “But hormesis is quite good at that.”