Emily Ho
Nutritional biochemist. PhD from the University of Toronto, postdoctoral work at Ohio State. Joined the faculty at Oregon State University in 2003; appointed Endowed Director of the Linus Pauling Institute in 2017, the third person to hold the directorship since Balz Frei. Her own laboratory has worked, for more than two decades, on a single question: how does a level of zinc intake that would be classified as adequate under current reference ranges, but that is below the level required for optimal cellular function, register in the genome and in the immune system across the life course.
The 2025 paper as pivot
In June 2025, her group published, with Carmen P. Wong (first author) and Laura M. Beaver, Protective role of dietary zinc on DNA damage, oxidative stress, and metal toxicity in Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences. The paper opens with an explicit invocation:
The Triage Theory provides a causal link by which inadequate micronutrient intakes lead to DNA damage, loss of mitochondrial function, accelerated aging and age-associated chronic diseases.
It then works through, on the case of zinc, the mechanisms that Ames and colleagues had proposed as a general principle: differential prioritization of zinc-dependent enzymes under marginal supply, with the enzymes involved in immediate survival preserved and the enzymes involved in long-term repair sacrificed first. This is, in 2025, the clearest published extension of the triage-theory framework to a specific micronutrient by a laboratory that carries the argument institutionally.
Her own research programme
Her laboratory has produced, over twenty years, a coherent body of work in which marginal zinc status is shown to:
- accelerate DNA single- and double-strand breaks in human cells at intake levels above the RDA threshold for acute deficiency but below the level required for full genomic stability;
- disrupt the epigenetic regulation of inflammatory genes, particularly in aging immune cells;
- interact with sulforaphane and other phytochemicals from cruciferous vegetables in the modulation of chronic low-grade inflammation;
- register in the immune system of older adults, with predictable consequences for infection risk and vaccine response.
The clinical claim that emerges from the aggregate of that work is that the current U.S. RDA for zinc, calibrated to prevent acute deficiency, is insufficient to preserve genomic integrity across the healthspan. That claim is the direct biochemical form of the physiological rights argument.
The Linus Pauling Institute she inherited
The Institute was founded by Linus Pauling in 1973 in Palo Alto (as the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine), relocated to Oregon State in 1996, and reorganized around the biology of micronutrients across the healthspan. Its Micronutrient Information Center publishes, in the format that a public health authority ought to publish and does not, per-nutrient monographs that go well beyond the prevention of acute deficiency and cite the clinical, animal and mechanistic literature at the level of individual studies.
Ho succeeded Balz Frei, who had directed the Institute from 1997 to 2015. The Institute is the closest thing in the world to the institutional embodiment of the physiological rights argument, in the sense that its published guidance on individual micronutrients treats optimality, not the absence of deficiency, as the correct object of nutritional science.
The Ames network still active at the Institute and around it
Bruce Ames died on 5 October 2024 at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, at 95. His laboratory at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) had already ceased to exist as an independent entity by 2020, when UCSF absorbed the facility (now the Martin Luther King Research Building of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland). No successor centre bears his name. The intellectual programme, however, continues, and the largest concentration of it is at the Linus Pauling Institute.
- Tory M. Hagen, Helen P. Rumbel Professor for Healthy Aging Research at the Institute, was Ames’s direct scientific collaborator on the alpha-lipoic acid / acetyl-L-carnitine mitochondrial rescue programme and co-founded Juvenon with him in 1999. His laboratory continues that work at Oregon State.
- Cecilia Giulivi at UC Davis (Department of Molecular Biosciences and the MIND Institute) co-edited the 2026 Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences special issue in Ames’s honour and published, in 2025, The legacy of Bruce Ames and mitochondrial DNA mutagenicity.
- Joyce C. McCann, Ames’s principal co-author on the triage-theory review series in FASEB Journal, Am J Clin Nutr and PNAS from 2005 to 2018, remains listed on the Ames legacy site as directing the CHORI-bar programme.
- The University of California, Berkeley Department of Molecular and Cell Biology held a memorial symposium in his honour on 23 March 2025 at 245 Li Ka Shing.
Why she matters here
Ho is, more than any other single laboratory director in 2026, the person to whom a written engagement with the triage-theory framework should be addressed. Three points.
First, she directs the only institution in North America whose published guidance already reflects, in practice, what this resource argues ought to be a public authority’s guidance. The Micronutrient Information Center is not a marketing document, not an industry text, and not calibrated to the prevention of acute deficiency. Its monographs are what the FAO, the WHO, the Codex nutrition texts and the national dietary reference publications would produce if they treated optimal physiological function, not the absence of clinical deficiency, as their object.
Second, her own laboratory’s zinc work is the clearest empirical demonstration of the general argument this resource develops. Zinc adequacy defined by the U.S. RDA is not zinc adequacy defined by genomic stability. The gap between the two is the specific object of her published work, and it is measured in DNA strand breaks per cell.
Third, on the network. Ames is dead; his laboratory dissolved into an institutional structure that no longer bears his name; McCann is likely near the end of her active career; Hagen and Giulivi carry pieces of the programme. Ho is the youngest of the four, the one with formal institutional leadership, and the one who has taken the responsibility of publishing, in 2025, an explicit continuation of the triage-theory argument. Any productive engagement between the right-to-health apparatus (Mofokeng, O’Neill, Georgetown, Petrie-Flom) and the biochemical apparatus that would give it specificity will pass through her Institute.