Iron in hematology: an historical perspective.

See the related ASH 50th Anniversary Review articles under the RED CELLS AND IRON section of the publication ASH 50th Anniversary Reviews: A Salute to the American Society of Hematology. The pathophysiology of iron deficiency and overload has been reported at ASH meetings for the past 50 years. In1958, Professor Clem Finch published the first two articles on factors influencing dietary iron absorption in man and was conducting studies of iron kinetics, which eventually led to the development of a ferrokinetic method for evaluating erythroid marrow function in man. Also in1958, Eugene Goldwasser published in Blood his studies on the effect of cobalt on the production of erythropoietin. For several years researchers had known that cobalt increased red cell production in experiment animals. In the Blood paper, Goldwasser and coworkers showed that cobalt exerts this effect by stimulating the production of erythropoietin. The molecular mechanism of this stimulation was understood 35 years later, when the involvement of hypoxia-inducible factor 1 in transcriptional response to hypoxia was defined.