Having a Good Time

I grew up in Illinois and went to the University of Illinois. I got a bachelor's degree in microbiology and did some research in a microbiology laboratory. It was the first job I ever had where I came in and the clock just rushed forward to the end of the day. Since then, I really have never looked back. I became interested in stem cell research during an internship at Amgen in a group working on hematopoietic stem cells. I was thinking about going to medical school but I wasn't sure, so I took a 2-year detour at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doing a predoctoral fellowship. Some people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) came through the Institute, and I thought, “Wow, I'd be excited to work for any one of them.” One was Rudolf Jaenisch. An acquaintance at the time said, “Wouldn't it be cool if even one of those slides that he showed was your thesis?” And I thought, “Yeah.” That's why I ended up going to MIT for graduate school. It's nice to think that some of his slides in future talks were my thesis.

I joined Rudolf's lab at an opportune time. That year mice had been cloned for the first time in Ryuzo Yanagimachi's lab. I and a postdoc in Rudolf's lab went to Hawaii and transferred that technology back to his lab. He realized that there were a lot of tools there that he could bring to bear studying nuclear transplantation, which still is a difficult and notorious technology to transfer from place to place. We had a lot of help from Hidenori Akutsu. I've been really fortunate to work with a series of incredible friends and collaborators, and the first one was Hide. With his help, we got the technology set up in Rudolf's lab. We did a lot of interesting experiments on the regulation of gene expression in cloned embryos and also in a neural system in collaboration with Richard Axel's lab.

I was lucky and earned a 3-year faculty position through the Harvard Society of Fellows and began moving nuclear reprogramming and nuclear transfer technologies to human systems. One of my first collaborations was with Chad Cowen, a postdoc in Doug Melton's lab at Harvard University. Doug realized early on that it would be exciting to make human embryonic stem (ES) cell lines that had the genes of patients, not just for autologous transplants but to study the diseases that they have. We found that human ES cells have factors that can reprogram adult cells.

On July 1st, I finished my first year as an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard College. Chad and I are also funded by the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, MO. Stowers traditionally have recruited top people to come to their institute, but because of proposed legislation in Missouri, they've been unable to recruit top human ES cell researchers, so they are funding us while the legal situations are clarified. We need new ES cell lines because we're still learning how to culture the cells. No one uses the first mouse ES cell lines that we derived. Those cells have more limited capacities and potencies because of the substandard conditions in which they were grown, cultured, and propagated. Although human ES cells are immortal, there are limitations to how long they can be propagated in a pristine condition. Advances and these shortcomings are going to require that we derive new cell lines from time to time. It seems silly to say that there should be some chronological reason to use one cell line and not another when they are derived from the same material in similar ways.

The best advice I got while pursuing my studies was “Have a good time. Enjoy what you're doing.” I tell my students the same thing. Being in grad school and doing the experiments is one of the most fun things that one can do. I like my job now as an advisor and a principle investigator, but I'm still having the most fun on those rare days when I can get into the lab. I'm hoping in 5 years to be a more advanced version of what I am now. This is a super exciting time in my life. The field of epigenetics and reprogramming is just taking off. I hope where we'll be in 5 to 10 years is using these models to discover drugs that will be useful in treating diseases.