Introduction to the Second Bill Morgan Memorial Special Issue: an update on low dose biology, epidemiology, its integration and implications for radiation protection

Dr. William Francis Morgan, known as Bill by many of his friends and colleagues, was a leading figure in the field of radiation research. He passed away on 13 November 2015, at the age of 62 years (Hamada et al. 2016, 2017). His work spanned the range of radiation biology from cell and animal studies to impacts of the work on radiation protection. Bill’s expertise and experience in low dose radiation effects were extremely valuable in reviewing and providing scientific insights. Thus, he served on many national and international radiation protection committees.

To commemorate the first anniversary of his passing, the first two-part Bill Morgan Memorial Symposium was held in October 2016 in Kona, Hawaii, USA, during the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Radiation Research Society (RRS): part one was on ‘Biology, Epidemiology and Radiation Protection’ (Held and Hamada 2017), part 2 on ‘Low Dose Epidemiology’ (Salomaa et al. 2017). In October 2017, the first Bill Morgan Special Issue consisting of 18 articles was published in the International Journal of Radiation Biology (available at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/irab20/93/10).

On the fifth anniversary of Bill’s passing, the second two-part Bill Morgan Memorial Symposium was held in October 2020 during the 66th Annual Meeting of the Radiation Research Society. The plan was to hold a face-to-face meeting in Kona, Hawaii, USA, but due to the pandemic of SARS-2 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) this was changed to a fully virtual meeting. Part 1 was on ‘Low dose biology, epidemiology, its integration and implications for radiation protection: an update’, co-chaired by Evagelia C. Laiakis and Nobuyuki Hamada (Laiakis et al. 2021). Part 2 was on ‘Epidemiology: Updates on epidemiological low dose studies’, co-chaired by Cato M. Milder and Mark P. Little (Milder et al. 2021). This second Bill Morgan Special Issue consists of two meeting reports (Laiakis et al. 2021; Milder et al. 2021), four review articles highlighted from recorded presentations in parts 1 and 2 (Chauhan, Villeneuve, et al. 2021; Kendall et al. 2021; Little et al. 2021; Paunesku et al. 2021), three original articles (Chauhan, Vuong, et al. 2021; Golden et al. 2021; Karpov et al. 2021) and one review article (Preston et al. 2021).

In this Special Issue, Paunesku et al. (2021) give an overview regarding cancer effects of low dose and low dose rate low linear energy transfer (low-LET) radiation in animal models. Chauhan, Vuong, et al. (2021) report protein level changes in human lens epithelial cells exposed to X-rays at various dose rates. Kendall et al. (2021) give an overview of epidemiological studies on childhood cancer and natural background radiation. Little et al. (2021) give an overview of epidemiological studies on low- and moderate-dose non-cancer effects of radiation in directly exposed individuals, especially circulatory and ocular diseases. Golden et al. (2021) provide a cohort profile for four early uranium processing facilities in the US and Canada. Karpov et al. (2021) provide descriptive characteristics of occupational exposures and medical follow-up in a new cohort of workers from the Siberian Group of Chemical Enterprises in Seversk, Russia. Toward integrating radiation biology and epidemiology, Preston et al. (2021) give an overview of NCRP Report No. 186 (NCRP 2020), with focus on the adverse outcome pathways (AOPs) and key events approach. Finally, Chauhan, Villeneuve, et al. (2021) consider the need of collaborative efforts among the scientific community to advance the AOP concept in areas of radiation risk assessment.

Last but not least, we are indebted to the distinguished authors for their invaluable contributions, and are grateful to the expert reviewers for their cooperation, dedication and constructive comments. We wish to acknowledge the International Journal of Radiation Biology for the opportunity to guest edit this Special Issue, and extend our special thanks in this respect to Gayle E. Woloschak (the Editor-in-Chief of the journal) and Dianne Dixon (the Managing Editor of the journal). Many thanks are also due to RRS for two symposium sessions. Without contributions from all of them, this Special Issue could not have come out in such good shape.

We dedicate this Special Issue to our colleague and friend, Bill Morgan.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper. The views expressed in this paper represent collective opinions of the authors, and are not necessarily those of their professional affiliations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nobuyuki Hamada

Nobuyuki Hamada, RT, PhD, is a Senior Research Scientist at CRIEPI Radiation Safety Research Center and a Visiting Professor at Hiroshima University Research Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine. He serves on ICRP Task Groups 102 and 111, NCRP PAC 1, and Consultation Committee on AOP development for space flight health outcomes (Canadian project). He has published >125 papers in peer reviewed international journals.

Evagelia C. Laiakis

Evagelia C. Laiakis, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Oncology at Georgetown University. She received her PhD degree from the University of Maryland at Baltimore under the mentorship of Dr. William F. Morgan. She is an elected Council Member to NCRP and has been serving at PAC-1 since 2016. She is also a Councilor-at-Large of the Radiation Research Society, the recipient of the 2019 Jack Fowler Award, and a dedicated mentor to students and postdocs.

Lydia B. Zablotska

Lydia B. Zablotska, MD, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she serves as the Leader of the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Area of Concentration. Dr. Zablotska is a physician and epidemiologist with extensive training and publications in radiation epidemiology, biostatistics, and risk modeling. Her research activities have focused primarily on the examination of risks of radiation exposures in various occupational and environmental settings. Dr. Zablotska's work has clarified the understanding of the effects of occupational radiation exposures on health risks of nuclear power industry workers and workers of the uranium fuel production cycle in various occupational cohorts from the United States and Canada.

Harry M. Cullings

Harry M. Cullings, PhD, was Chief of the Statistics Department at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, until 2018 and is now a consultant to RERF. He has been conducting research at RERF since 1999. RERF is a public interest International Journal of Radiation Biology 5 foundation funded by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Dr. Cullings holds a BS in Fundamental Sciences from Lehigh University, and an MS in Medical Physics and PhD in Analytical Health Sciences (Biometrics) from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Radiation Sciences, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) at the University of Pittsburgh. The emphasis of Dr. Cullings' research is on radiation dosimetry and other aspects of radiation epidemiology, including dosimetric uncertainty and applications of spatial statistics. Dr. Cullings has published numerous reports, papers in scientific journals, and book chapters on subjects related to radiation dosimetry and radiation health effects research. He served as a member of the Joint U.S.-Japan Working Group on the Reassessment of Atomic-bomb Dosimetry, which created the Dosimetry System 2002 that is currently in use at RERF, as well as being first author on the revision DS02R1. Dr. Cullings' research has been funded strictly through the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, in part through DOE award to the National Academy of Sciences.