| Shaking up life sciences by crossing disciplines
By Scott Allen, Globe Staff, 6/9/2004 One is a mathematician leading perhaps the world's most ambitious attempt to mine the human genetic blueprint for medicines. Another is a physicist using the tools of engineering to prevent falls among the elderly. A third is a father of diabetic children whose search for a cure put him at the forefront of understanding the rejuvenating power of cells. These Boston-based scientists -- Eric Lander, James J. Collins, and Douglas A. Melton -- are at the vanguard of upheaval in life sciences as biologists become increasingly systematic in figuring out what makes people sick or healthy. Armed with a complete readout of human genes and increasing ability to make cells do what they want, they say scientists are only years away from once unthinkable goals such as cataloguing all the genes that cause cancer and learning to create all forms of human tissue in a petri dish. Key to the creative surge, the researchers made clear at the Ideas Boston 2004 conference yesterday, which was organized by The Boston Globe, has been an influx of scientists new to the field who look at the issues from a fresh perspective. For instance, Collins, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, was laughed at by colleagues when he first suggested turning cells into living on/off switches -- but then he went out and did it. Angela Belcher, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and bioengineering at MIT, who spoke at a later session, also demonstrated the benefits of a cross-disciplinary approach, asking whether we can persuade organisms to make materials they normally wouldn't make. For example, Belcher has studied how abalone create shells out of chalk and proteins, in ocean temperatures, with nontoxic materials. Could you train an abalone to create other kinds of materials, she wondered? Belcher is currently working with microchips, viruses, and bacteria, trying to get the viruses to produce crystals and wires. If you broke the wire, it would be able to self-heal. Would it be possible, someday, to make textiles and fibers out of these versatile viruses? This kind of approach, utilizing concepts from a variety of fields, will have a major impact, according to Eric Lander. "There's a real revolution going on that will leave our fundamental understanding of life so much changed that we won't be able to remember what it used to be like," said Lander, the director of the new $300 million Eli and Edith L. Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT, whose mission is to turn the human genome into real-world cures. "Students will look back with horror at how biology was conducted in the 20th century." Lander, trained as a mathematician before taking a leading role in the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, said the advances of the 20th century have really only given researchers the tools they need so the real work can begin. Until now, Lander said, "if you wanted to find the cause of a disease, the basic approach is that you have to be kind of lucky." But Melton, a Harvard embryologist who works with stem cells from human embryos, said the new world of biology will raise challenging ethical questions as scientists get better at manipulating life. He said researchers already have crossed a sheep with a goat and he predicted it would be only a matter of time before human-animal hybrids are created. He envisioned a day when, after transplanting human stem cells into a monkey's brain, "you walk into a lab in 2090 and the monkey says, 'Good morning.' " Would such a creature be a human or a monkey, and what rights should it have, he asked. Scientists believe that if they can learn to control embryonic stem cells, which have the ability to become any cell in the body, they could replace damaged tissue and cure conditions such as diabetes, which afflicts both of Melton's children. The Bush administration has banned federal funding for research involving most stem cell lines derived from embryos, but Melton bypassed the restrictions earlier this year, releasing 17 lines of embryonic stem cells for other researchers to use for free. "This type of problem for the first time has shown me how valuable tenure is," he said. Dr. Mark S. Klempner, associate provost for research at the National Biocontainment Laboratories at the Boston University Medical Campus emphasized that the creative urge in science often comes from "looking at things in a completely different context." Although he spends a lot of time in the lab trying to understand how Lyme disease, anthrax, and other microbes wreak their havoc, he retreats to his woodworking shop or small farm when he needs to reflect. "I've written some of my best grants when I'm sanding wood," said Klempner, who is overseeing creation of the biocontainment lab where researchers will study defenses against the plague and other agents of bioterror. Collins, who has developed vibrating shoes to help elderly people keep their balance, said he stumbled into biology a few years ago when his department head at BU asked him to talk to potential grant funders about the way a physicist could solve issues in biology. BU didn't get the grant, but Collins became fascinated at the possibility of using engineering to address medical issues. Collins recalls that biologists initially chuckled at his efforts, cautioning him that "biology is very complicated." But Collins' team persevered, developing programmable cells that can be turned "on" and "off" by manipulating their genes. He imagined a time when a person might take a pill to activate such engineered cells already in their body to fight disease. Noting that the Defense Department is funding research on using cellular switches in computers, Collins cautioned that people shouldn't get too carried away about our ability to harness the power of microbes. "I don't think any time soon we're going to have jars of bacteria on our desk to surf the Web," he said. Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com. This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 6/9/2004.
|