Martyn Smith receives the 2024 Stokinger Award from ACGIH

Martyn Smith received the 2024 Herbert E. Stokinger Award from the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) in recognition of his contributions to understanding the toxicity and adverse health effects of benzene exposure.

Earlier this year, the ACGIH revised the Threshold Limit Value (TLV) for benzene from 0.5 parts per million (ppm) to 0.02 ppm, with the goal of minimizing the risk of bone marrow toxicity, chromosomal damage, myelodysplastic syndrome, and acute myeloid leukemia in exposed workers.

The awards ceremony and PowerPoint presentation, ‘Hazards of Occupational and Environmental Exposure to Benzene,’ took place virtually on October 23. A recording of the presentation is available on YouTube.

Smith has studied the toxic effects benzene for around 40 years and generated key findings. Together with collaborators in the U.S. and China, he showed that hematotoxicity -measured as decreases in different types of white blood cells – was present in factory workers in China who were exposed to relatively low levels of benzene, on average around 0.5 ppm in air. The findings, which also showed impacts on early progenitor cells and stem cells in the blood and bone marrow, were reported in an article published in the journal Science in 2004.

Subsequent studies led by Smith and co-workers explored susceptibility to benzene toxicity, metabolism of benzene to toxic metabolites, mechanisms of benzene toxicity, and demonstrated that benzene exhibits eight of the ten key characteristics of carcinogens.

Smith is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Toxicology and the Kaiser Chair of Cancer Epidemiology at UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He is also Director of the long-running, multidisciplinary, NIEHS-funded UC Berkeley Superfund Research Program.