On Location 2018 ASH Annual Meeting
Continued from page 76
When did you decide to focus in hematology?
It was pure circumstance. When I completed
the PhD program, I had to decide where I
wanted to do my post-doc training. By this
point, I was married with two kids, so there
were certain moves that were easier for our
family to make. That led me to Toronto and
the Ontario Cancer Institute, which is now the
research division of Princess Margaret Cancer
Centre.
This was the mid-1980s, when the institute
was the mecca of stem-cell research. James Till,
PhD, and Ernest McCulloch, MD, conducted
their pioneering work there in the early 1960s,
which launched the modern era of stem-cell
research. This was my first exposure to hema-
topoietic stem cells. My PhD training involved
biochemistry and taking a genetic approach
to figuring out why cells grew in an abnormal
way; before I came to Ontario Cancer Institute,
I would estimate that I had read fewer than 10
papers about blood.
It was a wonderful introduction to the
blood system. One of my eventual mentors,
Alan Bernstein, PhD, and his lab had pub-
lished one of the first papers on gene transfer
into stem cells using retrovirus vectors and
everyone was energized by the promise of gene
therapy. We all thought it was going to cure
everything.
It sounds like you were “hooked” early, but
was there any other area that you could see
yourself in?
I couldn’t see myself in another career. This is
all I’ve ever done, aside from a minor detour
while I was a third-year undergraduate. I was
working as an X-ray technician on weekends
and during the summer to support myself
as a student. The doctors with whom I was
working were planning to set up a new clinic.
They offered me an opportunity to be involved
at the ground floor, and essentially, to make
radiology my career. But I didn’t take that of-
fer. I decided a long time ago to that I wanted
to stay in the lab. If an offer came my way –
typically, these were for leadership positions
or positions that required a more administra-
tive role – I thought about what it meant for
my time in the lab. If it meant less time there,
I declined. I get my kicks at the lab and, 30
years later, I’m still doing it. Anything else is a
distraction from that.
Which mentors helped you in establishing
your career?
My mentors at the Ontario Cancer Institute
were Dr. Bernstein and Robert Phillips, PhD –
both of whom worked with Dr. McCulloch and
Dr. Till.
I have such fond memories of that period of
my life. Neither lab was very big – about six or
seven people, a couple of techs, and a post-doc
or two, but mostly students – so each fostered
an interactive, collaborative environment. Dr.
Bernstein was doing interesting work with
Friend virus–induced leukemia. His early ex-
periments provided insight into tumorigenesis
and, combined with his lab’s work on retro-
viruses, they were able to perform retroviral-
mediated gene transfer.
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ASH Clinical News
Dr. Phillips was a classic stem-cell biologist.
His studies in the late 1970s and ’80s helped
define the image of a blood stem cell. There
was no way to track stem cells in that era, but
using low-dose radiation to induce chromo-
some translocations, he and his team developed
a new method for lineage-tracing. Dr. Phillips
also was a noted immunologist, and he worked
on the early development of severe combined
immunodeficiency (SCID) in mice.
What lessons did you learn from your
mentors that you continue to share with your
own mentees?
While I was finishing my time as a post-doc,
Drs. Phillips and Bernstein were working on
a joint project regarding gene therapy, which,
understandably was a competitive area. It felt
like a race; many people around the world were
trying to develop successful gene therapy – to
put a virus into a hematopoietic cell and cure,
for example, thalassemia.
At our weekly meetings to discuss our
progress, I would come in with a hotshot idea
for a set of experiments. Dr. Phillips would
think it over, sit back, and then explain why it
wouldn’t work or how it had already been done
before by Drs. Till and McCulloch in the 1960s.
It happened repeatedly. It sounds disappoint-
ing, but it taught me an important lesson: Don’t
reinvent the wheel.
I still see this in science today; generations
of scientists forget what went on before them.
They spend time and effort and resources get-
ting to the same point that has already been
reached.
They also taught me about doing an experi-
ment for the right reasons. That was hard to
remember during the era of competition to
get to gene therapy. At the time though, they
showed me that if somebody else gets to that
crucial discovery first, it’s fine. It just means
that you can now leapfrog; you can take that
information and continue to advance the idea.
The goal of the experiment shouldn’t be as nar-
row as a single success; there should be a bigger
question that you’re aiming to answer.
What qualities do you think make someone a
good mentor?
Mentors should be willing to share their
advice freely. Dr. Phillips was a wonderful
example of this. After my post-doc training, I
was at SickKids, the Hospital for Sick Children
in Toronto, where he also had moved as head
of his own group. He continued to join our
lab meetings and offered his perspective on
the experiments we were running. In fact, our
experiments that led to the identification of
leukemia cells came out of discussions with
Dr. Phillips at lab meetings.
He offered me tons of advice during the first
10 years of running my own lab, and he gave
it without asking for anything in return. He
didn’t ask for credit or coauthorship – which
is important for junior faculty working in the
lab. Of course, one should be acknowledged
for making strong contributions to a body of
work, but at some level, advice and collegiality
should not be treated as currency. Today, the
publish-or-perish environment has forced us
into a situation where people might say, “I’m
not going to lift a finger to help you unless I get
authorship on a paper.” This happens before the
experiments even get started!
How did you learn to become a mentor
yourself? Were there any missteps along the
way?
Again, it was happenstance. I never set out to
be a mentor. My philosophy when I started
setting up my own lab was to treat people in my
lab the same way I treat people in life: Be en-
gaging and interested and supportive of them,
rather than treating them as commodities used
to advance my own goals. I just wanted to treat
people properly. At the end of the day, that’s
what mentoring was to me.
For a while, it wasn’t a conscious effort on
my part. But, after working with a few genera-
tions of trainees and seeing what they accom-
plished after they left the nest, so to speak, I
started to take pride in the part I played in their
careers. There is a special pleasure in picking up
a journal and seeing a paper written by one of
my former lab trainees.
Of course, I have gone through learning
periods. When you start a lab, you’re not much
older than the staff you’re hiring. Coming
from a collegial atmosphere in Drs. Bernstein’s
and Phillips’ labs, I was eager to establish a
similar, nonhierarchical environment. But
there are a lot of personalities in the lab. I’ve
likened it to bringing together a bunch of
thoroughbreds; they are all terrific in their
own right, but stick them too close together
and they can buck up against each other. So, at
some point, I realized that what my lab needed
was for me to make decisions. When it boils
down to it, I am the boss. It took me a while to
come to grips with that.
Still, I try to do most things by consensus.
We sit, we talk, we think; we argue, we make
mistakes, we bring our biases. This is important
because being the leader also means trusting
your team and fostering their creativity – which
isn’t always easy. Science is an art; it’s standing
in front of a blank canvas and trying to create
something new. I have learned to let people
follow their instincts, and that leads us in a
direction none of us would have imagined.
If someone were to ask you for your secret to
success, what would you tell him or her?
Luck. I’ve had such good fortune to work with
amazingly creative people and supportive
institutions.
What do you do when you’re not in the lab?
There’s more to life than work; I wholeheartedly
believe that and live my life that way. Family
is important, so I’ve strived to keep an achiev-
able level of work-life balance. That balance
changes at different phases of your career. For
where I am now, that means spending time
with our two terrific kids, who have given us
four wonderful grandkids. They live close by, so
whenever I get free time I spend it with them.
December 2018