Dr. Madeleine Scammell, PI of the Community Outreach Core, is one of three experts who have volunteered to review a cancer study of residents surrounding the Glendale Road Landfill in Northhampton, Massachusetts. This cancer study, conducted by the Gradient Corporation, examined the cancer rates for 18 types of cancer and concluded that none of these rates were statistically higher in the residents living near the Glendale Road Landfill when compared to the state average.  Members of Citizens United for a Healthy Future reached a different conclusion from the study, arguing that the study shows a significantly higher rate of total female cancer within a mile of the landfill when compared to the state average.

Scammell, Dr. Richard Clapp, and Molly Jacobs will review the data from the Gradient study and present their results next month.

The BU SBRP Open Science Policy was recently featured in a post on the Science Commons Blog. In a post titled “A public commitment to Open Science,” Donna Wentworth describes the importance of having an institutional policy that supports Open Science:

“Good design choices are the key to powerful network effects. And when the goal is accelerating scientific research, there may be no more powerful design element than institutional policy. By making the right policy choices, people at institutions can help usher in new norms for knowledge sharing — where research results are systematically “plugged into” the network, multiplying the opportunities for discovery.

Boston University’s Superfund Basic Research Program (BU SBRP) has embarked on just such an endeavor. The program, which works to uncover the effects of improperly managed hazardous waste on reproductive health, has published its own open science policy.”

Wentworth’s post was then picked up by Open Access News blogger Peter Suber who raised a number of questions about our policy:

“I applaud what the SBRP is doing.  But I have lots of questions.  Is it putting all its peer-reviewed research articles on its wiki?  (Some publishers who have no problem with depositing postprints in repositories do have problems with depositing postprints in wikis.)  Either way, does it require this kind of OA archiving?  Merely encourage it?  Does it have an OAI-compliant OA repository in addition to its wiki?  Are these questions (largely) moot because all its articles are published in OA journals?  Does it require submission to OA journals?  Encourage it?  Does it pay processing fees at fee-based OA journals?”

To answer Suber’s questions, our current policy is to strongly encourage our researchers to submit to OA journals. With the development of the NIH Public Access Policy we have also developed a centralized method of submitting articles to PubMed Central for our researchers. While still under development, we hope to create an internal archive that will be OAI-compliant while also fulfilling the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy.  We also pay the processing fees for our researchers to submit publications to fee based OA journals.

The BU SBRP is now featuring epidemiologist Dr. Tom Webster in the current edition of the “Ask the Researcher” column. As the PI of Project 2, Tom examines patterns in epidemiologic and toxicologic data through the development of mapping techniques. To read more about his work, or to read his Q and A, please visit Tom’s “Ask the Researcher” page. If you have a question for Tom, please email it to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Project 4 researchers Dr. Jennifer Schlezinger and Dr. David Sherr recently published an article titled “An Endogenous Prostaglandin Enhances Environmental Phthalate-Induced Apoptosis in Bone Marrow B Cells: Activation of Distinct but Overlapping Pathways” in the Journal of Immunology. Phthalate esters are used as plasticizers in a variety of polyvinyl chloride products, including toys, i.v. lines, blood bags, and shower curtains. In humans the main phthalate plasticizer (DEHP) is metabolized into a chemical called MEHP.

In this paper Schlezinger and Sherr sought to understand the signaling pathways that allow MEPH and the endogenous prostaglandin 15d-PGJ₂ to induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) in bone marrow B cells. After a series of experiments, the authors found that MEPH and 15d-PGJ₂ induce apoptosis through overlapping yet separate pathways.