Never-Ending Fireworks

I made my first big discovery while working at home. I was looking at photographs of chromosomes when I noticed that those of a patient with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) were abnormal. Parts of chromosomes 8 and 21 had exchanged positions in the cancer cells. Other patients with this same type of AML showed the same change, or translocation.

I had been working part-time for over 20 years at the time of the finding in 1972. I had four children at home, and they were my primary focus. But soon after I discovered the AML translocation, I went back to the lab full-time. Within a short period, I found several other translocations that were each characteristic of other leukemias and lymphomas. I was very fortunate.

I started university at a young age, but got into research relatively late and with little formal training. I first attended the University of Chicago when I was 15. After my second year of high school, I received a scholarship to participate in an experimental program to complete high school at the university. It was an unparalleled opportunity.

I eventually received a Bachelor of Philosophy and a Bachelor of Science and then enrolled into medical school. I graduated at age 23, one of six women in my class of 65.

Over the next decade, I did clinical work. Then my husband, who is still a very productive experimental immunologist, went to the University of Oxford for a sabbatical, and I tagged along. Since I could not practice medicine in the United Kingdom, I applied for a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health to learn cytogenetics. I spent a year studying the pattern of DNA replication in Oxford.

I found the work so fascinating. I wanted to continue the project I had started in England when we returned to the United States. That is how it all began!

Through the generosity of one of my professors, Leon Jacobson, I joined the faculty at the University of Chicago and devoted myself to research. The university was and still is a wonderful place for women. My colleagues were supportive of my part-time work schedule and very encouraging of me doing strange things. I wasstudying chromosomes in leukemia when few others were doing so.

I have been on the faculty for 44 years now. If you have the fortune to have good health, then the decision of whether or not to keep working becomes a balance between what you see you could still do in science and all the other interests you have—interests that you may have deferred because you could not find time to do them.

I think I always managed to mix my interests and work well. But the laboratory and science remain, for the moment, my main focus.

I have young people in my laboratory whose careers I am helping to start. And I can look all around the world and find people who were in my lab and who are now successful scientists. I cannot think of anything more rewarding than that.

There have been so many great advances in genetics. A good example is the recent flurry of publications about the role of microRNAs in regulating gene expression and controlling development, and possibly initiating cancer. Just a few years ago we did not even know these molecules existed. It is never-ending fireworks!

For me, it is important to be able to switch fields and learn new things. We have just started using small interfering RNAs to study how embryonic stem cells differentiate into blood cells. This is a new area for us. I know scientists who have been doing the same experiments for 20 years. I would go crazy doing that. It is the excitement of the "new" that is so rewarding to me.

This year, will be the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the correct number of human chromosomes. When I went to medical school, we had 48 chromosomes. We went from not knowing the number of chromosomes, to being able to look at them and count them. Then, 10 years later we were able to use banding techniques to see chromosomes in more detail. And now, with the new labeling methods, we can see all the rearrangements at an unsurpassed resolution. I look back, and I am just amazed!