In the morning, Grace, Dr. Malarkey, and I traveled to another National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences building, known as the National Toxicology Program Archive. At the NTP Archive, we joined some of the staff there on a tour of all the different storage units there. First, we visited a fire and vacuum sealed room containing all the NTP project files, dating from 1980 to present. Next, we visited the room that contains all the histopathology slides from projects; government policy requires that all slides must be archived. The NTP archive staff is currently in the process of scanning all histopathology slides to put on a public atlas for easy access; it is currently in a pre-release phase only accessible by NIEHS scientists. Later, we toured the wet tissue archives, which houses all the tissue that has been studied in previous projects. Each tissue is preserved in chemicals and vacuum sealed into a plastic container. Finally, we had the opportunity to travel into the massive freezer warehouse, which houses dozens of minus eighty degrees Celsius refrigerators, and for extreme cooling, roughly twenty liquid nitrogen tanks for samples. Grace and I also, briefly, walked into the minus twenty degrees Celsius freezer about the size of a school bus.
After our tour, we sat down with Dr. Malarkey at a microscope to review some of the archived slides from the GSM and CDMA Modulated Cell Phone Radio Frequency Radiation study. We went through a couple of different histopathology slides from male rats and attempted to identify what lesions if any, the radiation caused on the tissue. We identified a particularly interesting malignant oligodendroglioma in the brain of one mouse, which is indicatory of an adverse effect from radiation. The challenge, though, is determining if an unusual brain tumor in one rat out of ninety is enough to justify cell phone radiation as a carcinogen. Further studies are required and are currently in planning at the NTP, as present data is inconclusive. We also found some cataracts in the lens of the eye, a tumor in the liver, and extramedullary hematopoiesis (the creation of blood cells outside of bone).
During lunch, Dr. Malarkey challenged Grace and me to take our food up to one of the conference rooms where he would be reviewing tumors and lesions with veterinary pathology students. I tried my best to stay focused on the screen while eating, but some of them made me look away while trying to stomach my meal! Nevertheless, I learned a lot and had another great day.
