Douglas A. Granger - Salivary Bioscience: Foundations of Interdisciplinary Saliva Research and Applications

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Thousands of investigators worldwide are actively engaged in basic, applied, and clinical research involving salivary bioscience. Our literature search reveals that across the past two decades the number of empirical papers published annually has increased substantially; in 2019 more than 1500 empirical salivary bioscience papers were published. Investigators engaged in salivary bioscience span many academic disciplines including medicine, public health, psychology, sociology, education, neuroscience, biological science, animal behavior and welfare, infectious disease epidemiology, social neuroscience of humananimal interaction, drugs/drug abuse, social networks, nursing, psychoneuroendocrinology, anthropology, cognitive science, bioengineering, dentistry, oncology, oral health, and pediatrics.

To date, the foundational information in salivary bioscience (i.e., 25 years of literature) is not easy or efficient to find. It is scattered across many different journals, over at least two decades, and some of the early work has been subsequently shown to be in error. This makes it challenging for new investigators interested in the topic to find the right information on their own. Unfortunately, and to the best of our knowledge, there is no definitive state-of-the-art guide to interdisciplinary salivary bioscience research. Over the years there have been edited volumes from the proceedings of highly specific conferences. Understandably, the nature of these presentations is highly technical and narrow in scope, and the content chapters in those texts are written for an audience of highly trained experts. By contrast, this edited volume is written by leaders in multiple fields and fulfills a demand for abroad understanding of salivary bioscienceacross a range of disciplines.

The history of the emergence of interdisciplinary salivary bioscience has been influenced by many mentors, advisors, early adopters and visionaries over many years. Here we call attention to some of these key individuals for the significant roles they played in the development of the foundation of knowledge that scripted the big pictureDaniel Malamud, Lawrence Tabak, Harold Slavkin, John R. Weisz, James T. McCracken, John L. Fahey, Barbara Henker, Herbert Weiner, Dirk Hellhammer, Ben Weigand, Margaret Kemeny, Lynn Kozlowski, Elizabeth Susman, Alan Booth, James Dabbs, Jr., Peter Ellison, Lynn Vernon-Feagans, Ann Crouter, Megan Gunnar, Dante Cicchetti, Dan Leri, Clancy Blair, Martha N. Hill, Gayle Page, Deborah Gross, Robert Blum, Janet Dipietro, Tina Chang, Keith Crnic, Cary Savage, Karen Rook, Dele Ogunseitan, and Nancy Guerra. We also call attention to some of the many technical and operational experts who have made significant contributionsNajib Aziz, Eve Schwartz, Mary Curran, Skip Nelson, Laurie OBrien, Tracy Hand, Jon Peterson, Rebecca Zavacky, Jessica Acevedo, Lillian Buitenhuys, Kelly Henning, Greg Reinhard, John Stebbins, Kaitlin Smith, Hillary Piccerillo, and Anthony Tette.