A Lifelong Love of Metals
When he was a child, Doug Templeton used to put copper pennies in his backyard birdbath to keep the water clean. He didn’t know any science but the Ottawa native knew he loved metals.
Today, Templeton is a world authority on metals that kill and cure. A Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, he studies the toxicity of cadmium, nickel and iron overload. But he’s also fascinated by platinum’s cancer-fighting power. And to him gold is precious not for its beauty but because of its potential in the fight against cancer and its history in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.
Templeton loves the complexity of metals, and their endlessly changing effects when different species of an element form in and interact with human biology.
“If we think of zinc, cadmium and mercury, those three elements are from the same column of the periodic table,” says Templeton. “But their biologies are so different. Zinc is safe and mercury is poison — but in such a different way to cadmium. There’s a tremendous amount to understand by looking at the diverse reactions the cell has to any given metal. There’s a very rich chemistry in the cell biology.”
Templeton earned his PhD in physical chemistry, and then went to medical school. While finishing his MD, he joined the lab of a biologist/toxicologist who was interested in his expertise in chemistry. He fell into a very interdisciplinary scientific career at the interface of chemistry, medicine and toxicology, ahead of his time in the 1980s.
Today, Templeton is most concerned with cadmium, an element that has no function in the human body and is strictly toxic.
“People weren’t exposed to cadmium until the Industrial Revolution when we dug it out of the ground,” he says. “It’s very toxic, and has a half-life of 30 years in the human body. We see it causing kidney damage among people in highly industrialized areas.”
Cadmium was banned in Germany and Scandinavian countries in the 1980s, after scientists learned about its damaging effects on industrial workers in the 1960s. Templeton says the metal is “becoming an increasing problem because it’s in e-waste like computer circuit boards. In southern China you have kids picking through this waste, burning it over open fires to recover other metals, and inhaling cadmium fumes.”
In his lab, Templeton is studying cadmium’s effects on our bodies – such as its ability to mimic calcium and increase oxidative stress and the intriguing way it encourage cell growth in some cases and cell death in others. He is exploring all the subtle ways it damages kidney cells, so that doctors can find it earlier.
“Depending on the cell, cadmium can kill it in different ways,” he says. “We’ve been trying to map out this mix of death and growth at different times and concentrations. Cadmium has been helpful in teaching us about cell death and cell survival in general.”
Despite a career spent studying metals, Templeton’s interest in them is more intellectual than aesthetic.
“Any inorganic chemist will say you’ve got the whole spectrum of colour in the world in those metals,” he says. “But what I like is the diversity of their interactions with the human body.”
