Robert K. Naviaux

Professor of Medicine, Pediatrics, and Pathology at UC San Diego, and founder of the university’s Mitochondrial and Metabolic Disease Center. Author of the Cell Danger Response (CDR) model, an integrated account of how cells respond to threats through a conserved metabolic and signaling program, and of how chronic activation of that program underlies complex conditions that are not otherwise unified by classical diagnostic categories.

Recent publications include a 2024 synthesis of the CDR in Communications Biology and a 2026 paper in Mitochondrion on the metabolic signaling model of autism spectrum conditions.

Why he matters here

The CDR framework offers a coherent biology for something this resource insists on: that a deficit or an overload invisible to the standard panel can nonetheless produce a chronic pathological state through the persistent activation of conserved cellular defenses. It is the theoretical scaffolding that a rights-based approach to physiological parameters requires, because it makes the invisible object of the right conceptually available.