Doctoral Dissertation Research: History of Aflatoxin and Liver Cancer

在20世纪下半叶，癌症已成为生物医学研究、临床护理、公共卫生和监管的一个关键对象。黄曲霉毒素是一类真菌毒素，是由生长在作物上的真菌产生的有毒化学物质。黄曲霉毒素每年导致全球多达17.2万例致命性肝癌。这一研究项目将通过追溯黄曲霉毒素自1960年代初以来的历史，研究肝癌和黄曲霉毒素知识的产生，以及黄曲霉毒素的原因和预防，当时兽医发现黄曲霉毒素是导致家禽广泛死亡的原因。黄曲霉毒素的发现引发了关于黄曲霉毒素与人类肝癌之间是否存在因果关系的研究。在20世纪70年代，监管机构开始引入食品和饲料中黄曲霉毒素的阈值，并规定了确定黄曲霉毒素污染的标准化测试。为了防止黄曲霉毒素在人类和牲畜中发生，植物科学家开始研究和确定作物中黄曲霉毒素的发育条件。该项目将重点关注黄曲霉毒素如何成为一个健康问题，不同的科学学科、机构和研究实践如何相互作用以产生有关癌症的知识，以及这些知识如何形成监管和公共卫生干预措施。研究结果将用于指导针对健康安全和农业标准的政策。随着科学家们利用分子流行病学和肿瘤基因组测序的方法研究基因、肝炎病毒感染和黄曲霉毒素对肝癌癌变的协同影响，对黄曲霉毒素与肝癌之间关系的生物医学理解变得更加复杂，该项目有助于科学历史文献。这项研究的结果将引起科学史家和研究发展、监管和科学政策的学者的兴趣。这项研究将在存放国家和国际卫生组织科学记录的档案中进行。该项目还将完成口述历史，以记录毒理学、流行病学、兽医学和植物科学等学科如何相互作用，产生有关癌症和黄曲霉毒素的知识。该项目将通过研究自20世纪60年代初以来监管制度和科学知识如何相互影响来探索实验室和实地的关系。此外，该项目将绘制出由科学家组成的研究网络，以了解不同规模、学科和研究与监管环境如何相互作用，从而产生有关癌症和黄曲霉毒素的知识。该项目将展示随着冷战结束和遗传学在生命科学中日益重要，研究互动、实践和方法是如何变化的。对监管制度和知识创造之间相互作用的历史理解将有助于制定更有效的政策。

Doctoral Dissertation Research: A History of Aflatoxin and Liver Cancer Cancer has emerged as a key object of biomedical research, clinical care, public health, and regulation in the last half of the 20th century. Aflatoxins are a class of mycotoxins, toxic chemicals produced by fungi that often grow on crops. Aflatoxins cause up to 172,000 cases of lethal liver cancer globally per year. This research project will study the production of knowledge about liver cancer and aflatoxin, as well as its causes and prevention by tracing the history of aflatoxins since the early 1960s when it was discovered by veterinarians as being responsible for the widespread death of poultry. The discovery of aflatoxins lead to studies asking if there was a causal link between aflatoxin and liver cancer in humans. In the 1970s, regulators had begun introducing thresholds for aflatoxin in food and feed and for prescribing standardized tests to determine aflatoxin contamination. Plant scientists began to study and identify the conditions of aflatoxin development in crops in order to prevent the occurrence in humans and livestock. This project will focus on how aflatoxin became a health problem, how different scientific disciplines, institutions, and research practices have interacted to produce knowledge about cancer, and how this knowledge shaped regulation and public health interventions. The findings will be used to guide policy targeting health safety and agriculture standards. This project contributes to the historical literature on science because biomedical understandings of the relation between aflatoxins and liver cancer has grown more complex, as scientists have studied the synergistic influences of genes, hepatitis virus infections, and aflatoxins on the carcinogenesis of liver cancer with methods of molecular epidemiology and tumor genome sequencing. The results of the research will be of interest to historians of science and scholars of development, regulation, and science policy. The research will be done in archives where scientific records of national and international health organizations are housed. The project will also complete oral histories to document how the disciplines of toxicology, epidemiology, veterinary medicine, and plant sciences have interacted to produce knowledge about cancer and aflatoxins. The project will explore the relationship of laboratory and field by studying how regulatory regimes and scientific knowledge have influenced each other since the early 1960s. In addition the project will map out the research networks formed by scientists to understand how different scales, disciplines, and settings of research and regulation interacted to produce knowledge about cancer and aflatoxins. The project will show how research interactions, practices and approaches changed as the Cold War ended and genetics gained an increasing importance in the life sciences. A historical understanding of the interaction of regulatory regimes and knowledge-making will help to develop more effective policies.