Trosko Included in Marquis Who's Who

November 4, 2024

IIT-affiliated faculty member, Dr. James Trosko, has recently been included in Marquis Who's Who which chronicles the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process. 

Dr. Trosko was a founding member of the Institute for Integrative Toxicology in 1978 and retired from MSU in 2014 and is now a Distinguished Professor Emeritus. During his 48 years here at MSU, Trosko taught thousands of students and helped many more people worldwide through his scientific discoveries. His research has taken him from Michigan to Japan to Sicily to Korea. He has been recognized as a model teacher and an internationally-recognized basic science cancer researcher. Over the course of his career, Trosko has used his extensive research in radiation and chemical-induced human health effects to publish close to 500 peer-reviewed articles in professional journals including Nature, Science, Cancer Research, Toxicological Science and the Journal of Stem Cell Research and Therapy. 

Trosko was a freshman in college when Sputnik went overhead and the great science race began. This event not only enabled Trosko to get a college education but also stimulated him to become a scientist. During his time as a graduate student at MSU, Trosko interacted with the late Barnett Rosenberg, during the period when he discovered the anti-cancer drug, cisplatin. Trosko was included on Rosenberg’s historic paper in Nature because he demonstrated that the drug was not mutagenic. Trosko was then awarded an American Cancer Society fellowship to do postdoctoral research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His time there led to the discovery of the role of radiation-induced DNA damage, and its repair and mutation formation in human cells.

After accepting an assistant professor position at MSU in 1966, Trosko was also able to study with Dr. Van R. Potter at the McArdle Laboratory of Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin. It was during this time that Trosko changed his research direction to “chemical carcinogenesis” and his whole philosophy and world view of how he should direct his research efforts in the years to come. Under Dr. Potter’s mentorship, Trosko made a major discovery that chemicals which promote growth of cancer are not mutagenic, but worked by “epigenetic” mechanisms. It was at this time that Trosko coined the term, “epigenetic toxicants.” During the next few years, he started to detect chemicals that promoted the growth of tumors, caused birth defects, were reproductive – and neuro-toxicants. In addition, he also could detect cancer preventive and chemotherapeutic chemicals. All this was done based on assuming the “stem cell theory of cancer.”

In the early 1990’s, through several opportunities and awards to study abroad, Trosko gained a more scientifically sound picture of how the Japanese, Sicilian-Mediterranean & Korean diets could affect childhood diseases. Together with his discovery that normal human adult stem cells are target cells for cancer, he then developed a 3-D assay to screen for drugs, nutrients, toxins, toxicants that could affect these stem cells.

During the later part of his career, Trosko was a pioneer in developing a new concept to provide a mechanistic explanation of the “Barker Hypothesis,” namely that events early in embryonic/fetal/neonatal development can alter the risk to chronic diseases, such as cancer, to the individual later in life, simply by altering the quantity of adult stem cells in utero.

While Trosko is unaware of who nominated him for this award he believes, "The award should have been given to the thousands of undergraduate, graduate, medical, postdoctoral students, colleagues, visiting scholars and collaborators who contributed to the success of my laboratory over the past fiifty plus years. Without their creativity, skills and passion for science, none of the many achievements associated with our lab would have been noted internationally. My teaching, my mentoring, and my outreach with these individuals was not to make "mini-me" copies, but to unlock their own potentials in basic research, and highlight what Michigan State University has afforded all of us."