♫MUSIC♫
JANET ROWLEY: It's by accident. I was a physician working in a
clinic for retarded children when it was discovered that
Down's Syndrome was a chromosome defect. And my husband was going
to Oxford, I couldn't practice medicine, but I thought "well, I
could learn chromosomes" so I could study patients with mental
retardation and other developmental disorders. But I
got involved in a research project so I didn't want to go
back to the clinic. And I decided, I approached the
professor at the University of Chicago to (a) let me have use
of a microscope and a darkroom, and by the way, would he also pay
me. And I only wanted to work part-time because I had three
children. And he said yes to all of those conditions. As a
consequence, I worked with him although I was doing my own
research which he didn't really understand very much about.
He was a hematologist, and it had been discovered at that point
that one particular type of leukemia had a chromosome
abnormality. So he would ask me to look at the chromosomes of
his patients with leukemia, and naturally since he'd been
generous to me, I was delighted to do that. And it turned out,
as I looked at these chromosomes from these patients, that they
had different abnormalities.
At the time, it was thought that chromosome abnormalities were a
consequence of the leukemia, not a cause. But I learned, again on
a second trip to Oxford, how to distinguish individual
chromosomes from techniques that had been developed. And I could
then go back and look at the cells from patients with
abnormalities and identify them very precisely. And I was very
lucky that the chromosome abnormality that had been
identified earlier in 1960, which was thought to be a result
of missing chromosomal material, a missing DNA, I found that in
fact it wasn't a deletion but rather was a translocation --
that is, a switching of the ends of chromosomes. And this was an
important observation even though in the 1970s when I made
the discovery we couldn't tell what it was due to -- what was
happening to the chromosomes. Were they the same in different
patients? All of that was completely unclear. But in
the next decade, they began actually identifying the DNA at
the breakpoints and showed that they involved genes that had
already been identified as cancer-causing genes, and that
translocations actually activated those genes. So that
not only explained what the translocations were doing,
it identified genes that were important in the translocation,
and finally led to the development of Gleevec which is
an important drug for treating the particular form of leukemia
that has this translocation and it's transformed the lives of
those patients. It was an "ah ha" moment finding that instead
of a deletion, this was a translocation. Though as
I've already indicated, we didn't understand what the
translocation really meant but it just, to see it,
was an amazing discovery.
Whereas I discovered translocations in leukemia and
in some [] I was limited to hematologic diseases because
that's the material that I had to study. Others have shown that
there are translocations in all kinds of human cancers and
they're really the focus of treatment and, in some cases,
successful treatment for other types of cancer. So that's
really important and to have patients come up and say, you
know, "Thank you for my life" is -- though I'm just one small cog
in the whole chain of events -- it's extraordinarily rewarding.
I think that my research and what it led to in terms of the
drugs that now can successfully treat leukemia show the value of
science, not only intellectually but also to the general public,
and that science is really an aspect of society that should be
supported as generously as is possible.
I think science should be exciting. And science is a very
demanding mistress in that you really have to think -- not
necessarily all of the time but most of the time -- about what
you're doing, what the implications are, what you
should do next. But most importantly you have to follow
your curiosity. What do you find challenging? What are the
questions that excite you? And those are the things that
you should do.
♫MUSIC♫