Conversations with Giants in Medicine
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).
In this episode, Ushma Neill interviews Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), about her work with trailblazing imaging studies of the brain’s frontal cortex and its dopamine-driven circuitry. Volkow has helped to reveal the neurobiological underpinnings of addiction and how drug-induced changes in brain chemistry contribute to its trademark craving, compulsion, and loss of control. Watch to hear more of Volkow’s views on the value of being an effective communicator and lessons learned from the double pandemic of opioids and COVID-19.
It has been estimated that in the first six months of 2021, mRNA-based vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 have saved 280,000 lives in the US alone and prevented well over a million hospitalizations. It is the scientific body of work of biochemist Katalin Karikó, Senior Vice President at BioNTech SE, that made these vaccines possible. Karikó’s work into nucleoside modifications to suppress immunogenicity of RNA provided the key to successful vaccines and an exit from the global COVID pandemic. In this episode, Ushma Neill discusses this and much more with Dr. Karikó.
Dr. Dan Drucker, of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, and the University of Toronto, is a diabetes treatment pioneer. Drucker’s early work explored the biosynthesis, secretion, and action of glucagon, and he later went on to delineate the novel mechanisms of action of glucagon-like peptides (GLP) 1 and 2. His work on GLP-1 and -2 agonists as well as DPP-4 inhibitors provides the foundation for the largest spectrum of drugs for both gut disorders and type 2 diabetes. Watch the full interview to learn about his early stumbles in the lab and his prediction that his next five to ten years in the lab will be very boring.
We shift our format this month to bring you three giants in medicine, Dr. Jesse Roth of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Dr. C. Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Jeffrey Flier of Harvard Medical School, as part of the JCI’s salute to the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin. Roth, Kahn, and Flier all played instrumental roles in the discovery and description of the insulin receptor and in elucidating the critical role it plays in diabetes. Enjoy the full interview with their anecdotes and to get a glimpse of their extraordinary camaraderie.
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