2018 meeting of the International Dose-Response Society

By Vince Giuliano

As in previous years, I am posting this note regarding the forthcoming 2018 annual meeting of the International Dose-response Society.  It will be held as usual on the Campus of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst MA on April 17-18.  The program appears to be particularly interesting this year, and I plan to attend.

As regular readers of this blog know, my opinion is that non-linear responses at very low doses to a broad variety of stimuli is a fundamental characteristic of all biological entities at each of their multiple levels of organization In various writings I have repeatedly pointed out how this property, broadly known as hormesis, is fundamental to biology and understanding of development and aging.  It is likely to be a fundamental pillar of any emerging Grand Unified Theory of Biology. Non-linear responses to dangerous stresses, for example, trigger evolution by  an identifiable mechanism, namely transposable DNA elements (ref).  Some of the articles Jim Watson and I have produced on this hormesis phenomenon are listed here.     Suffice it to say that the International Dose-response Society is the central professional group concerned with hormesis, and the 2018 program looks at some of the highly practical and exciting applications of it and further groundbreaking research in this field.

Conference Program

The theme of the 2018 program continues to be PRECONDITIONING IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE – MECHANISMS AND TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH,  similar to that of last year’s program.

The announcement website for the 2018 meeting including registration information can be found here.  You can download a PDF for the detailed program from that site.

From last year’s preliminary conference program: “Low levels/doses of numerous stressors (e.g., exercise, intermittent fasting, hypoxia, heat, cold, radiation, electricity, toxins, chemicals/drugs) are known to stimulate a wide range of preconditioning/adaptive responses that may profoundly affect the success of medical interventions for a vast spectrum of disorders. Stressors that trigger adaptive responses also offer ways to enhance healthy aging, improve human performance, and prevent damage in tissues exposed afterward to injurious levels of stressors, including severe psychological stress. Leading researchers will present numerous examples of the adaptive response and show how understanding molecular mechanisms(s), optimizing dosimetry and selecting the appropriate stressors will be important in enabling scientific and technological advances that can translate into future benefits for society.”

A little personal anecdote.  As a child from about age 3 to 16  my mother  draged me from shoe store to shoe store in Detroit, looking for shoes that best fit my feet and that were most economical.  She would never buy me a pair of shoes until we visited at least 3 or 4 stores.  At each store I would have to try on multiple pairs of shoes.  And for  each pair I would have to stick my feet in a buzzing fluroscope x-ray machine and keep them there while my mother and the shoe salesman looked at the flickering green image of  my feet and foot bones.  They  had long discussions about the fit.  All the time  I kept getting x ray exposure on my feet and lower body while the interminable fit discussions dragged on.  Those machines were not lined with lead, and sprayed x-rays everywhere including on my sexual organs.  I am talking about the 1930s and early 1940s.  This was before the concern about radiation that happened after the Hiroshima first atomic bomb explosion.  As a teeneager I got the Smyth Report and read all about the atomic bomb and the horrible dangers of radfiation.

  • For most of my life after that, until I learned about hormesis , I thought that the immense amount of childhood exposure to  radiation had doubtlessly damaged my DNA, shortened my life, and possibly made it impossile for me to have healthy children.  (Turns out I am very healthy at 88 and have had numerous very healthy children and grandchildren.)
  • Finally when I learned about non-linear dose response curves for radiation in the last ten years, my take on that childhood radiation exposure completely flipped.  I read a ton of research studies of the impacts of radiation that indicate that within a “hormetic” low dose of exposure, the radiation is actually health-inducing.  I now think that is what happened to me as a result of shoe shopping and am glad for my mother’s diligance.

There are papers in this 2018 conference related to this radiation hormesis effect.  And the feeling is intimate and welcoming.   If you see me at this conference, please say hi.

 

About Vince Giuliano

Being a follower, connoisseur, and interpreter of longevity research is my latest career, since 2007. I believe I am unique among the researchers and writers in the aging sciences community in one critical respect. That is, I personally practice the anti-aging interventions that I preach and that has kept me healthy, young, active and highly involved at my age, now 93. I am as productive as I was at age 45. I don’t know of anybody else active in that community in my age bracket. In particular, I have focused on the importance of controlling chronic inflammation for healthy aging, and have written a number of articles on that subject in this blog. In 2014, I created a dietary supplement to further this objective. In 2019, two family colleagues and I started up Synergy Bioherbals, a dietary supplement company that is now selling this product. In earlier reincarnations of my career. I was Founding Dean of a graduate school and a full University Professor at the State University of New York, a senior consultant working in a variety of fields at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Chief Scientist and C00 of Mirror Systems, a software company, and an international Internet consultant. I got off the ground with one of the earliest PhD's from Harvard in a field later to become known as computer science. Because there was no academic field of computer science at the time, to get through I had to qualify myself in hard sciences, so my studies focused heavily on quantum physics. In various ways I contributed to the Computer Revolution starting in the 1950s and the Internet Revolution starting in the late 1980s. I am now engaged in doing the same for The Longevity Revolution. I have published something like 200 books and papers as well as over 430 substantive.entries in this blog, and have enjoyed various periods of notoriety. If you do a Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano, most if not all of the entries on the first few pages that come up will be ones relating to me. I have a general writings site at www.vincegiuliano.com and an extensive site of my art at www.giulianoart.com. Please note that I have recently changed my mailbox to vegiuliano@agingsciences.com.
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One Response to 2018 meeting of the International Dose-Response Society

  1. rbmats says:

    Vince, it has been awhile (2011, I think) since you updated your personal supplements/exercise routine/hormesis routine. I am expectantly awaiting yourcombination supplement that I understand you will be marketing, but in the mean time would you update us on what you have changed with your personal routine.

    rbmats

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