Nigel Walker served as a roving reporter at the SOT 2013 Annual Meeting and submitted the article below.
The punches were flying at SOT.
Well, the verbal punches were really flying at SOT last night as the Risk Assessment Specialty Section joined with the Regulatory and Safety Evaluation Specialty Section to have a "Great Debate" on the topic of that "Non Monotonic Dose Responses Should not be Used in Risk Assessments."
There was a very large crowd gathered to see Jim Lamb and Paul Foster verbally spar on the motion and they were not disappointed. While not exactly the "thriller from Manila," these scientific heavyweights gave the crowd a highly entertaining and insightful battle. While non monotonic dose responses are clearly observed, the fighters deftly made their cases on the interpretation and context of the science while debating the motion. And judging by the number of questions from the audience, this issue is clearly one of great interest among the membership and one unlikely to be resolved easily anytime soon, as it was pointed out by both speakers that the prevalance of NMDRs are often seen in in vitro and hence with efforts such as Tox21 this issue will need to be tackled more and more in the future.
There were no knockout punches, it went down to points and indeed the crowd was quite divided on the winner.
But ultimately it doesn't matter who won or lost, as having such lively debates is a great way to truly get at the heart of some issues and air some of the extremes of opinions that are thrown about. A sucker punch in the eye of scientific conflict!