Emeritus: On the trail of aflatoxin
Editor’s note: This is part of a series of articles linking the work of MIT’s emeritus faculty members with the current state of research in their given fields.In the spring of 1960, a mysterious liver disease killed hundreds of thousands of turkeys in the United Kingdom. The outbreak was soon traced to ground peanut meal, shipped from Brazil and contaminated with mold that produces a poison known as aflatoxin.At the time, little was known about aflatoxin, but some scientists suspected it could be linked to liver cancer in humans. Soon after the U.K. outbreak, a young MIT toxicologist named Gerald Wogan launched a thorough, decades-long investigation into the toxin, eventually exposing it as one of the most potent carcinogens humans can encounter.Throughout his career, Wogan not only made discoveries illuminating aflatoxin’s role in liver cancer, which kills about 600,000 people a year, but he also used his knowledge to shape...