Ken Donaldson: retirement of a young mind

Our plain-English summary of Ken Donaldson: retirement of a young mind, by P. Borm, F.R. Cassee (Particle and Fibre Toxicology, 2013).

The study

• Authors: P. Borm, F.R. Cassee
• Journal: Particle and Fibre Toxicology
• Published: 2013;10:8
• Type of article: Editorial, Historical article
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

In plain English

This article was an editorial reporting no new research data. Two editors of Particle and Fibre Toxicology wrote it to mark the retirement, on 8 April 2013, of Ken Donaldson of the MRC/University of Edinburgh Centre for Inflammation Research. The authors traced Donaldson's career from work as a medical laboratory technician at the University of Edinburgh in 1966. From 1981, at the Institute of Occupational Medicine, Donaldson worked on the health effects of coal, quartz and asbestos. Later work covered air pollution particles, very small 'ultrafine' particles and nanomaterials. The authors wrote that Donaldson applied what they called the Stanton theory, drawn from asbestos and man-made fibres, to carbon nanotubes. They referred to a separate 2008 paper by Poland and colleagues, which in their account showed that stiff, rigid carbon nanotubes could behave like asbestos if certain conditions were met. Its listed title describes a pilot study in which carbon nanotubes were put into the abdominal cavity of mice; the editorial gives no detailed methods or numbers. The authors also described Donaldson co-founding this journal in 2004.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Editorial (a retirement tribute); not a research study and reports no data of its own
• Who was studied: No study population. The editorial is about one researcher, Ken Donaldson, on his retirement in April 2013.
• Exposure: No exposure was studied. The editorial names coal-mine dust, quartz and asbestos as subjects of Donaldson's early research, and later ambient particles, ultrafine particles and carbon nanotubes.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors wrote that Donaldson's contribution to particle and fibre toxicology was to bridge the different particle eras and to preserve and increase know-how in the field.

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