Collins Lab Blog

Cell Biology in the Translational Era

Fresh from a visit by Susan Michaelis as a Cornell University Lecturer. These lectures are intended to “enhance the academic environment and cultural life of the community” and spread knowledge about the relevance of an area of academic investigation to the community at large.

The lectures are advertised to the Cornell community and the public at large is invited; we distributed the posters widely around town.  The turnout was terrific, there were over 250 attendees and the lecture hall was packed with many people standing at the back.

I can’t think of a better topic than to inform society at large than the relationship between basic scientific research and medical applications.  Susan Michaelis’ talk really hit the mark. Who would have guessed that studying how yeast cells mate with each other would be a critical key to understanding aspects of human aging? If you were a novelist you couldn’t make this stuff up!

The research described by Susan Michaelis provides a case study that makes several important points about the balance between discovery and application. The first point is that the relationship between discovery/research and application(s) cannot be predicted.

If one cannot predict the relationship between research and application, does this mean that every basic science research project proposed has equal potential merit? Importantly, the answer to this question is NO. This leads to a second key point learned from this and other studies. Regardless of the precise relationship between research and application (which cannot be predicted), we CAN say that the outcome from a rigorous scientific study will move our understanding forward and, critically, provide a platform that enables applications to be made.

In turn, this begs another question; what constitutes a rigorous scientific study? A brief answer is that a rigorous scientific study is one that uses the scientific method to its fullest extent.

As a quick example in the biological sciences, research that asks precise and illuminating questions, on a model system that enables more controls and more accurate testing, will provide more rigorous insights than research where many anticipated variables cannot be controlled (never mind the unanticipated variables!). Susan Michaelis’s research utilized a model organism, a well-characterized, quantitative assay, and she asked key questions that were clearly defined.

There are two other points that I’d like to make. The first one is the issue of how long does it take after discoveries are made before we can expect clinical applications? The May 2010 issue of Genome Technology has a nice article about genome wide association studies (GWAS) which makes this point:

“it’s important to realize that clinical translation will take time. There’s so much more work to be done after finding a GWAS hit. It takes years.”

and

“it’s important to foster a greater public understanding of the time that is required to go from a GWAS hit to a deep understanding of what that means.”

The above is true for any type of “hit”, genetic or pharmacological that connects to disease. To drive the point home there’s a great quote “every GWAS hit is a career”. I like this quote because it not only reinforces the time it takes to understand discoveries but reminds us of the point that it is PEOPLE who make this happen. In other words, it’s really important that we do not neglect the resources to develop and appropriately train the scientists who will be solving these problems.

Susan Michaelis conducted her PhD training with Jon Beckwith at Harvard, and her Post-Doctoral training with Ira Herskowitz at UCSF. Aside from the scientific achievements emanating from the Beckwith and Herskowitz labs and the excellence of the general environment at Harvard and UCSF, these individual scientists are renowned for the quality of training provided in their laboratories and the enormous impact of their scientific progeny.

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