17 minute read
BRITON BREAKTHROUGHS
FROM THE HOSPITAL FRONT LINES TO THE AIRWAVES, AND TO THE FOREFRONT OF MEDICAL RESEARCH AT THE EARLY AND LATE STAGES OF LIFE, MEET AN ALBION ALUMNI TRIO AT THE TOP OF THEIR FIELD.
Battling COVID-19, and Taking House Calls
For Dr. Mia Taormina, ’00, infectious disease expert and burgeoning Chicago radio star, the last year has been nothing she ever expected yet everything for which she prepared.
“In one period, I worked 77 straight days,” she says. “But the thought was, with my colleagues and me, ‘We’ve got to do this, so let’s do it.’ I haven’t had a day off in a year but that was the way it was going to be. This is what I trained for. Something has happened and I was ready.”
Yes, something had happened. And Taormina, who majored in biology and English at Albion and always knew medicine was going to be in her future, was on the front lines almost from the beginning.
It was the coronavirus, a virulent and previously unseen version of an ancient virus, that first made an appearance in the world in late 2019, found its way to the United States early in 2020, and has wreaked havoc for more than a year.
As part of DuPage Medical Group (DMG), the largest independent, multispecialty physician group in Illinois with more than 750 physicians in over 100 suburban Chicago locations, Taormina diagnosed her first case of the illness in early March and knew instinctively that the respiratory disease, which would be known to all as COVID-19, would get worse— much worse—before it got better.
“There was definitely a sense that we were in crisis mode,” she says. “It was quite unbelievable. There were so many cases at one point that we looked like a field hospital.”
Physician Mia Taormina (above and top) has served patients through DuPage Medical Group since 2012.
ANSWERING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS
It was in early March, on what Taormina called a “random Friday” at DMG that she was asked by a hospital spokesman if, in her position as chair of the infectious diseases department, she could go on WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station, and talk about the virus.
“There were some nerves because I had never done anything like that before,” she says.
But with her informal style and ability to relate complex information in understandable terms, it struck a chord with a nervous, anxious public that called in with questions. In fact, she was asked back the next week because there had been so many listener calls, they could not all be answered, and she remained on the line afterward to continue answering them.
She came back the next Friday. And the Friday after that, and the Friday after that.
“The station asked if they could have me every week until June,” Taormina says, and that has stretched to the point where she is on every Friday during the 11 a.m. hour, with plans to keep her on to answer questions in a postpandemic world.
“It’s a great part of my week,” she adds. “I really enjoy it.”
The topic, of course, remains the virus, which has killed more than 575,000 Americans and continues to hang over everything despite several vaccines that have helped slow its spread.
Indeed, Taormina has heard a change in the tone of the phone calls in recent months as a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel began to grow brighter.
“In the beginning, you sense the fear in their voices,” she says. “People were doing a lot of things that were fear-based: wiping down mail, cleaning grocery bags, things like that. We’ve had to pivot so many times through this as science has shown a different way. And now I hear a lot more optimism. They ask what’s safe and what’s not. Can I go on vacation? What about spring break? Callers have been excited about vaccines and what it means to them now.”
Taormina’s enthusiasm and devotion to her work has led her to being named a 2021 Notable Health Care Hero with DMG’s COVID-19 response physician leaders by Crain’s Chicago Business; a 2021 Top Doctor by Chicago magazine; a 2020 Top Doctor in Infectious Disease by Chicago; a 2020 Notable Health Care Hero by Crain’s; a 2017 Top Doctor by Castle Connolly, and DuPage Medical Group’s Physician of the Year in 2020.
“That’s a big source of pride but, really, that could have gone to a dozen of us,” she says. ‘Everyone has worked so hard during this time. There were no reservations, no hesitation.”
A ‘PERFECT FIT’
Taormina developed that attitude at Albion, a college she admits she knew nothing about as a high school senior from Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
She did know she wanted to make medicine her life and she knew that Michigan State University and the University of Michigan might be a little overwhelming for her. So, she recounts how she went to a college fair where the smaller colleges were listed alphabetically at tables in a gym.
“I started with the A’s and went to Adrian, then Albion, then Alma,” she recalls with a laugh. “I never made it past the first row.”
She said Albion caught her attention immediately and, after attending an admissions fair later at Michigan, she asked her dad how much farther it was to drive to Albion to see what it had to offer. So they drove the additional 40 minutes.
“It changed my life and I never looked back,” Taormina says. “It was an absolutely perfect fit for me. It allowed me to have a voice and I never got lost in the crowd.”
She participated in Greek life, played clarinet in the British Eighth marching band, and not only explored her passion for medicine but wrote stories and poetry as an English major.
“That’s what a liberal education allowed me to do,” she says. “I was able to explore all kinds of things.”
Dr. Dale Kennedy, who in May received emerita status upon her retirement as professor of biology, remembers Taormina as a sophomore in her vertebrate biology field class.
“She was interested in everything about biology and I knew a career in medicine was something she was serious about,” Kennedy says. “It was clear then she was not going to be denied. She knew what she wanted.”
Taormina went on to graduate from Michigan State’s College of Osteopathic Medicine and, after five years of residency at Beaumont Hospital in Farmington Hills, she joined DMG in 2012 and has been serving Chicago patients (and listeners) ever since.
She admits this has been a year like no other. She has witnessed scenes of heartbreak, courage, tragedy, and triumph in the most stark terms. But Taormina believes she is a better doctor for having seen, experienced, and dealt with it all.
“So many people have gone above and beyond,” she says. “We look back on this year….”
She pauses.
“Oh my goodness, what we’ve all been through.”
—Chuck Carlson
Forging New Pathways in the Parkinson’s Fight
In addition to the Breakthrough Prize, Richard Youle has received more accolades over the last year. He was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and at Homecoming he will be presented with a Distinguished Alumni Award.
Dr. Richard Youle, ’74, has spent his entire adult life asking, “How?”
A senior investigator for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, for the past four decades, Youle has always asked questions that often did not have the easiest answers.
The Midland, Michigan, native gained much of his inquisitive nature from Albion College and, specifically, from longtime biology professor Ewell “Doc” Stowell.
Last September, asking those questions and finding some important answers led to Youle being named one of four recipients of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his decade-long work studying Parkinson’s disease.
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation—the creators of which include Google co-founder
Sergey Brin, 23andMe co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki, and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg—has awarded the prize since 2012 in recognition of vital recent achievements in fundamental physics, life sciences, and mathematics.
“It was a complete surprise,” Youle says. “I knew I had been nominated but I’ve been nominated for a lot of things. I never would have dreamt I would have won.”
Youle was acknowledged “for elucidating a quality control pathway that clears damaged mitochondria and thereby protects against Parkinson’s disease,” according to the Foundation press release.
He received a $3 million award for recognition and, eventually, will receive the award itself. But the COVID-19 pandemic has made that problematic. The ceremony was originally set for last November but was postponed to March and then postponed again to November 6, 2021 (which will also honor the 2022 award recipients). The star-studded event will be held at Hangar One, the iconic Silicon Valley landmark in Mountain View, Calif., in front of what is expected to be a guest list of luminaries, scientists, and pathfinders.
“The point of it is that scientists do so much for society,” Youle says. “These are tech people and it’s to help promote math and science. This is really quite surprising.”
And, he admits, he’s a little overwhelmed by the prospect of the event.
“It’s an Oscar-type ceremony with the red carpet and they have movie stars hand out the awards,” he says. “Morgan Freeman hosted the event one year and Pierce Bronson another year.” After a pause, he adds, “I don’t know who’s going to give me my award.”
A POWERFUL DISCOVERY
At NIH since 1978, Youle’s love of medical research has taken him into studying the immunology of bone marrow transplantation, therapies for brain tumors, and programmed cell death. That led him to his groundbreaking work on Parkinson’s, a brain disease that afflicts some 500,000 Americans a year.
Youle and his research team began exploring Parkinson's in 2007 and, in time, they discovered a quality control pathway for the brain cell “power plants” known as mitochondria. They learned that Parkinson’s could develop if that pathway was missing.
“We saw that it’s the loss of that pathway that’s bad,” Youle says. “And if we can boost it, that may be good. There could be clinical trials.”
He acknowledges that while there is still no cure for Parkinson’s, new treatments can halt the progress of the degenerative disease.
“If we could treat it early we could stop it worsening,” he says. “Those motor symptoms we can ameliorate now with drugs, and if we can stop the neuron death in its tracks it wouldn’t progress. It’s like early-stage Alzheimer’s; if you could stop it right there, you can continue to have a quality of life.”
With all of the research advances in neurological diseases, Youle says there is still much to do.
“We know what goes wrong in these patients,” he explains. “Part of the brain dies. Over the last 10 to 15 years there’s been a revolution in genetics and they’ve discovered genes that are passed down and lead to Parkinson’s.
“Now we know there are five to 10 genes, and this gives us a handle on what causes the disease,” Youle continues. “And when you know that, it gives you an insight. We hadn’t known what causes it. We didn’t know why one person gets it and another doesn’t, but now we have more insight. We’ve found out what some of these genes do, and it tells us what may be going wrong.”
A CAREER BECKONS
It has been a long journey from studying botany at Albion to the neuroscience labs at NIH, but Youle still treasures his undergraduate years.
“At Albion I wanted to become a biology professor, and I spent a lot of time outdoors with Doc Stowell,” says Youle, recalling his mentor who passed away in 2009. “He’d take us on field trips and I was interested in ecology. I wanted to be like he was: be a professor; be outdoors; interact with students. Then the research bug bit me and I never went outdoors for research again.”
That love of research took root and blossomed through graduate studies at the University of South Carolina—“I had heard early success in science is addictive and I wanted to hit that bar over and over,” he says—and post-doctorate work in medicine at NIH stretched out into a highly impactful career. A career he credits Albion for helping him navigate.
“I really had a great experience at Albion,” says Youle, who counts as fellow Britons his sons Thomas, ’07, and John, ’10, as well as his brother Jeff, ’81, a current College trustee. “I was pleasantly surprised as I moved east what a strong liberal arts foundation Albion gave me. I felt I could compete with anybody. Albion has served our family well.”
Similarly, Youle’s research has served and benefited science and humankind. It has been fulfilling and vital. But for someone who is always asking “how?” there is always a new question to ask.
“It’s the law of diminishing returns,” he says. “My work in Parkinson’s has reached a turning point. I like those big discoveries and we’re now heading in new directions.
“There are links to inflammation and Parkinson’s, and we’re now appreciating there’s an innate immune system in flies and earthworms that recognize bacteria, and that’s a pathway that might be linked to Parkinson’s, too,” Youle explains. “The mitochondria work was outside the box when we started this research. But now that box is built, so we’re heading outside of the box again. I probably learned that at Albion.”
But through it all, Youle’s eyes have never left the real prize for which he is being honored: finding ways for people afflicted with diseases like Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Alzheimer’s to live better lives.
“Because that last series of discoveries was so productive and exhilarating, there’s a temptation to burrow in and fine-tune the details,” he says. “Or, you can be more adventurous.”
Over the last whirlwind of a year, that sense of adventure for Youle has extended outside the lab. He admits the Breakthrough Prize and the visibility that comes with it still haven’t sunk in completely. But he does know this: the $3 million is going to good use.
“Some of the money will go to my research because there is a gap in funding at NIH,” Youle says. “I want to continue to support other areas, such as glaucoma research. But we’ve been so thrifty our whole lives, I don’t think much will change.”
After a moment, he laughs. “But I’m not going to change the oil in my car myself anymore.”
—Chuck Carlson
Peering Into the Great Divide
Kevin Chalut (left) took part in a 2020 video shoot after being named an Albion College Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.
At Cambridge in England, biophysicist Dr. Kevin Chalut, ’99, is exploring stem cells -- specifcially, how they create new cells -- and expanding our understanding about life’s building blocks.
Sometimes the biggest questions, and decisions, come down to one of two choices. Yes or no? Heads or tails? Stay or fold? Aisle or window? Kirk or Picard?
Kevin Chalut has spent much of the past decade on just such a “choice of two” question, in the process becoming an internationally recognized cell biologist—not bad for a guy who doesn’t actually have a degree in biology. A Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society, Chalut (who does have a Ph.D. in physics) runs a research lab exploring the mechanical processes involved in one of life’s literally fundamental choices: stem, or something else?
First, a biology refresher: All animals, including humans, exist because stem cells exist. These unique building blocks, formed in the earliest stages of development, transform into the countless types of cells that eventually become bones, blood, brains, and every other part of an organism.
Bodies are created when one stem cell transforms into a liver cell and starts building a liver, another stem cell becomes a bone cell and starts building a skeleton, and so on. But—and this is the two-choice question Chalut is investigating—some of those stem cells don’t choose to become other types of cells. They remain stem cells and continue making more stem cells. Those new stem cells, in turn, either become some other type of cell or remain stem cells. In the end, without any obvious instructions or command center, these stem cells produce complex organisms, most with the appropriate number of muscles, nerves, organs, and other components necessary for life.
“Throughout this very simple choice is incredible complexity,” Chalut says. “The question is: if there’s a decision to be made, how do the stem cells make those crucial decisions?”
‘ON FIRE WITH CURIOSITY’
In nominating Chalut for a 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award, the late physics professor Dr. Dave Seely noted that Chalut’s appointment at Cambridge University was an unusual honor for an American, especially one with a small-college background. Seely didn’t mention his own role in preparing an initially unremarkable student to become a world-class scientist, but Chalut clearly remembers their first meeting.
Chalut was a sophomore in 1996, “adrift with a lot of uncertainty, insecurity, and quite a bit of boredom, and certainly no driving force or focus,” he says, when he signed up for Seely’s Introductory Physics class, just to fulfill a science requirement.
Before the first class was over, “I was on fire with curiosity,” Chalut recalls. At the end of that year, Seely invited Chalut to join his summer research project at the University of Toledo. With the knowledge gained from two 100-level physics courses, Chalut headed for Ohio.
It wasn’t a tremendous success. “I didn’t know much about physics; I’m pretty sure I just got in the way,” Chalut recalls with a laugh. “But to see the people working and setting up an experiment to answer their question, that was enlightening. This was how science is actually done. It’s a lot of spending time, trying to make things work.”
Chalut moved to Cambridge in 2011, initially to apply to stem cells his Duke University doctoral work with lasers and cancer cells. While many researchers were (and still are) looking at biochemical signals as a likely trigger for stem cells to transform into other cells, Chalut wanted to use his physics background to study the mechanics of that transformation.
As one might imagine, studying the physics involved in “cell fate decision” (the scientific term for stem cells either transforming or not transforming) still involves a lot of biology. They’re both natural sciences, but Chalut notes that the approach for each is very different.
“Physics has done almost too good of a job at defining laws and using them to explain the natural world. With biology, you basically have the theory of evolution and that’s it,” he says. “That’s what makes biology exciting, but also explains why there aren’t many biological principles that can apply to physics. We don’t know a lot of the pathways of biology; there’s a lot that’s not understood.”
Luckily, Chalut was at one of the world’s premier academic institutions—and he had learned something about learning at Albion. “At first, I didn’t have any idea what the biologists were talking about. But I kept at it, asking questions and trying to learn what I didn’t understand,” he says. It felt a little like Albion, studying “literature, psychology, religious studies … once you start making connections between disparate areas, it becomes easier.”
POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS
Today, as a senior research fellow with Cambridge’s Cavendish Stem Cell Institute and a lecturer at Cambridge, Chalut oversees a multidisciplinary team that uses physics, engineering, and cell biology to study the mechanical changes that occur in stem cells just before and just after the moment of transformation. His team has been especially successful with analyzing these “microenvironments” with liver cells.
Meanwhile, Chalut’s work on identifying the mechanics associated with the “stiffening” of certain brain cells was published in Nature and is in the top one percent of the journal’s reprinted articles. He has received more than £5 million ($7 million) in grant funding and he and his team have formed two companies focused on culturing and the 3D-printing of cells for potential applied uses.
“StemBond and StemBond Therapeutics will open up academic and industrial collaborations across the world,” Chalut explains. “StemBond exemplifies that whilst my lab is primarily interested in probing fate decisions, we are also developing many tools that will advance regenerative medicine.”
Brexit aside, Chalut loves his adopted country and the work that should hold his attention for decades to come. Ironically enough, for a man studying the “decision-making” process of cells, he appreciates the benefit of—sometimes—leaving things up to fate.
“I never really had a whole lot of success thinking about what I wanted to do and moving in that direction. I spent a lot of time not knowing,” he says. “Don’t spend time worrying about what you’re good at or what you can’t do; just do what you can do and the rest will become clear.”
He smiles. “That advice has worked well for me.”
–Jake Weber
