ALS Crowd Radio: Dr. Paul Cox, PhD, Environmental Causes of ALS

S2:E3 Dr. Paul Alan Cox, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for Ethnomedicine, will speak about his research in finding and fighting the environmental causes of ALS.  Dietary exposure to an environmental toxin called BMAA may trigger ALS related symptoms.   Large doses of the dietary amino acid called L-serine may reduce the risk of BMAA exposure.  Dr. Cox published his most recent findings in the Proceedings of the British Royal Society published on Jan 20, 2016.

A Harvard Ph.D., Paul Alan Cox has spent his career searching for new medicines by studying patterns of wellness and disease among indigenous peoples. For these efforts, TIME magazine named Cox one of 11 “Heroes of Medicine.” His work with indigenous peoples in preserving their island rain forests won him the Goldman Environmental Prize. Cox has published over 200 scientific papers and four books.

He has held academic appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, Brigham Young University, the University of Melbourne, Uppsala University, the Swedish Agricultural University, and the University of Illinois, Chicago, and served as Director of the Congressionally-chartered National Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hawaii and Florida.

Cox founded Seacology, the world’s premier environmental non-profit organization for island conservation, headquartered in Berkeley, California. Through partnerships with indigenous people, Seacology has now saved over 1.3 million acres of island rainforests and coral reefs in 56 nations. Throughout Polynesia, he is known by the chiefly title Nafanua.

Cox currently serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethnomedicine in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. His research there is focused on finding and fighting the causes of neurodegenerative disease including ALS and Alzheimer’s disease.