Lecturer: James P. O'Callaghan

I have spent over 40 years in toxicology developing and characterizing models of neurotoxicity. An emphasis was placed on using positive control (“known”) neurotoxicants to create a “tool box” for assessing neurotoxicity regardless of the brain region or neural cell type affected. I had a lot of help along the way and will mention of few of my co-conspirators in this long-term program. Over the years we encountered many unexpected response modifiers to our expected results. It seemed that some of our knowns were not quite as known as we thought. Of course, serendipitous findings have played a significant role in the progress of science, and we can all think of physiological, environmental, pharmacological, and genetic factors, to name a few, that can affect toxic outcomes. Often, we tend to think such response modifiers do not contribute that much to overall toxicity findings. That would be a mistake. I have cherry-picked some of my findings that show how dramatically neurotoxicity and neuroinflammation profiles can be unexpectedly affected by stressors and changes in body temperature. Most of the focus will be on substituted amphetamine neurotoxicity and an animal model of the multisymptom disorder known as Gulf War Illness, a disease that still affects veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. Most of the data presented will be from neurotoxicity studies but the unexpected findings from the response modifiers should have broader implications for all toxicology as well.