In this episode, Ushma Neill interviews the physician scientist and gene therapy, pioneer Dr. Katherine High. After a long career as an academic hematologist, first at the University of North Carolina, then at the University of Pennsylvania and HHMI, Kathy transitioned to a role in industry, first at Spark Therapeutics, then at ASK Biopharma where she led the first FDA approval for gene therapy for a genetic disease.
Neonatologist and pulmonary biologist Jeffrey Whitsett of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital provided understanding of pulmonary surfactant biochemistry and structural biology that underpins the widespread application and usage of surfactant replacement therapy in neonatal respiratory distress.
Lo is often called the father of noninvasive prenatal testing. After discovering fetal DNA in maternal blood, Lo catalyzed a medical revolution that has saved millions of pregnant people from having to undergo invasive tests like amniocentesis. With Lo’s pioneering technical advances, those who are pregnant can easily and reliably be screened for Rh factor mismatch, trisomies, and genetic disorders, and the implications of his work have and may go further in cancer testing, transplantation, and perhaps beyond.
On any given day, over 50 billion of the cells in your body will die. The question of how we live while our cells are continuously dying has captivated Dr. Vishva Dixit. After a long career in academia, Dixit rose through the ranks at Genentech and currently serves as the Vice President of Early Discovery Research. His scientific work has focused on the elucidation of the mechanisms of apoptosis, including the discovery of caspases.
While great strides have been made with regard to gender equity in biomedical academia, there remains a stubborn imbalance in representation in senior leadership roles. The graduate students from the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School have launched a series called The Roots of Change: Conversations about Women’s Empowerment to grapple with the issue of representation. They invited two giants in medicine to reflect on their lives in medicine: Viviane Tabar and Elizabeth Blackburn. Dr. Tabar is the chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and leads a stem cell biology lab focusing on the development of human embryonic stem cell–derived dopaminergic neurons for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, among other cell-based therapies for the repair of brain injuries. Dr. Blackburn is the former president of the Salk Institute for Biomedical Studies and, before that leadership position, had a long career on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Francisco. She is best known for her scientific work on telomeres; she shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of telomerase. The first hour of the Roots of Change conversation, with feminist icon and writer Gloria Steinem, is available on the Sloan Kettering website (https://www.mskcc.org/watch-conversations-about-women-s-empowerment).