Mission

Welcome to the Epidemiology website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Epidemiology" is here used in the sense of the studies that aim at discovering the factors that underlie risk for common mortal diseases. To us this includes organization of very large population-based data sets, creating biologically-based mathematical models for analyses of historical and age-specific risk, inherited risk and timing of somatic risk for cancers and atherosclerosis, two forms of clonal disease accounting for about 3/4 of deaths in the U.S.A. and Japan. It also includes developing the analytical tools to measure and identify mutations in human tissues and genes that carry inherited risk for any common disease.

Background

The original design for this laboratory database was the work Dr. Pablo Herrero-Jimenez, now at St. Lawrence Cement. Dr. Herrero-Jimenez uncovered and transcribed the relevant mortality data for the United States and matched it with the appropriate Census numbers from the year 1890-1992 for the United States. The complete description of this extraordinary effort is recorded in his MIT Ph.D. thesis, "Determination of the historical changes in primary and secondary risk factors for cancer using U.S. public health records."(2001). His immediate area of study was the US national cancer data but he responded to broad interest in lung diseases and other forms of mortality. Currently, mortality data is available for most diseases from the year 1890-1997 for the United States and from the year 1951-1994 for Japan. For more information, look under the DATA portion of this site.

Metakaryotic Biology

Ongoing interactive website that records the progress in defining the physiological roles and molecular mechanisms of the bizarre cells and syncytia with bell-shaped nuclei that on the basis of their numbers, division kinetics and observed symmetrical and asymmetrical amitotic nuclear fissions appear to comprise the stem cell lineage in human organ development from the ~5th week of gestation through all or some of the juvenile period.

These cells appear also to comprise the stem cells of preneoplastic and neoplastic growths arising from human tissues. This work emanates from the discoveries of Dr. Elena V. Gostjeva recorded in Gostjeva and Thilly, 2005 [link], and Gostjeva et al. 2006 [link].

Inherited Risk for Cancer

The laboratory of Kari Hemminki, Professor of Epidemiology, [German Center For Cancer Research, Heidelberg] has provided clear evidence from Swedish family cancer records that late onset forms of nearly all cancers have a clear familial component, which for the recording period 1958 forward appears to be chiefly attributable to inherited as opposed to shared environmental risk.