Dr. Bruce Ames got a well-deserved plaudit in the current issue of The Scientist, aptly entitled “Mutagens and Multivitamins.” These two topics have come to define his research accomplishments: the first highlighted by the Ames test, which is anin vitro method (i.e., uses test tubes and petri dishes, rather than animals) to determine the degree of mutation-inducing properties of a tested substance, be it a chemical (e.g. a pesticide) or a pharmaceutical. In the 1970s, he and his colleague and close friend, Dr. Lois Swirsky Gold, established the Carcinogenic Potency Project database at UC-Berkeley, ranking various substances in order of their observed mutagenicity on the Ames test. (Sadly, Dr. Gold, another good ACSH friend, passed away prematurely a few years ago).
While
Dr. Ames has been a long-time friend of ACSH, his main specific contributions
have been as a reviewer and co-creator of our classic Holiday Dinner Menu, which informs
about the presence of animal “carcinogens” in our daily diets, and our 2005
monograph, “America’s Misguided War on ‘Carcinogens’”,
which formed the basis for our petition to the EPA to trash the standard rodent
tests for chemical toxicity and substitute a more reliable test, e.g. the Ames
test…..To Read More…..
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