Chapter 03: The Creation of Basic Science Departments Focused on DNA (50s – 70s) and A Fellowship Year Using Drugs to Study Viruses
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. Bowen talks about his work at MD Anderson as a postdoctoral trainee and his impressions of MD Anderson’s president, Dr. R Lee Clark. He also discusses the development of the virology department at MD Anderson and the “pervasive, and sometimes overwhelming, but most of the time reassuring, sense of family in the group in those days.”
Identifier
BowenJM_01_20000327_C03
Publication Date
3-27-2000
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The Researcher; Research; MD Anderson Culture; Working Environment; Understanding the Institution; MD Anderson Culture; Institutional Mission and Values; The Researcher; Personal Background; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; MD Anderson History; MD Anderson Snapshot; The Researcher; Discovery and Success; Healing, Hope, and the Promise of Research
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
James M. Bowen, PhD:
What I found when I came, as a Ph.D., and I had been warned by some of the academic faculty and some of my colleagues, that a Ph.D. moving into a medical environment was always and invariably a second-class citizen.
Louis J. Marchiafava, PhD:
You anticipated one of my questions.
James M. Bowen, PhD:
I was led to believe that the Ph.Ds were the scut workers. We did the work and wrote the papers and left the authorship blank and the physicians put their names in, and if we were lucky, we got our name down somewhere in the authorship. Otherwise, we might get an acknowledgment. Otherwise, we might just be viewed as hired help. And on my first interview with Dr. Haas, when I came for my postdoc, I told him about this concern. He also wanted to laugh and I think he also wanted to cuss a little because it both amused and offended him. He said, "No one here is a second-class citizen. Everybody who works at M. D. Anderson, whether he does surgery, or radiotherapy, or does laboratory research, or makes the beds or sweeps the floors, whatever they do, they are here because Dr. Clark believes that they have a skill that he needs." And he said, "Tell me at the end of your postdoctoral training period of time if you felt like a second-class citizen." And it was an amazing experience because never for one moment during more than 30 years of association with M. D. Anderson was I ever made by anybody to feel like a second-class citizen. It was really just amazing.
Louis J. Marchiafava, PhD:
That is quite a compliment to the institution.
James M. Bowen, PhD:
It was an incredible philosophy, and this is not to say that there weren't people who did not have that feeling. I mean, you know, there were molecular biologists who felt superior to cell biologists, and cell biologists who felt superior to microbiologists. And I am sure there were pathologists who felt superior to nurses and so forth, but you never uttered it around Dr. Clark because the retribution was swift and terrible! And Dr. Clark enforced his vision. He made everybody invest in it. And if they did not invest in it, he did nothing to make it comfortable for them to stay. But the interesting thing was that practically everyone did invest, because he had a way of making you believe what he believed, and he was visible. He was visible. Let me give you a little aside story that is not in the chronology here, but I saw it first as a postdoc. The postdocs used to sit around over our beer and laugh at this situation. And then I particularly saw it as a young faculty member when I came back. I'll get back to that story. Dr. Clark began every week of the year at M. D. Anderson with a general staff meeting of department heads and other key staff, both administrative, scientific and sometimes medical. But all the department heads, and other people that he selected . . . With a meeting at 7:30 on the 7th floor in the director's conference room. Dr. Clark was an exercise nut. He always walked in the back door from the parking lot every Monday morning and walked up those seven flights of stairs to his office to get his notes for the Monday morning meeting. And anyone that he happened to see on his way, he conscripted and they had to walk up with him. And it was always a source of humor for us to see significant scientists, heads of medicine and other people, hiding from Dr. Clark on Monday morning, so that they could wait until he got out of sight and then take the elevator up to the seventh floor, and not have to walk all those flights with him. One of the things that is more significant to that story is there was a pervasive, and sometimes overwhelming, but most of the time reassuring, sense of family in the group in those days. Everybody had a sense of belonging. And everybody worked his tail off because we understood that it was expected. And we understood that there were people dying, and the harder we worked, the sooner they might not. Now, that sounds a little bit like an aggrandizement of the situation, but I promise you, it was a real philosophy that was shared by practically everyone.
James M. Bowen, PhD:
But, to get back to the organizational structure of M. D. Anderson, what we found was the initial steps towards the realization of Dr. Clark's original vision. We had clinical departments and we had three fully operational basic science departments. Each of them focused on some aspect of understanding . . . [break in audio tape]
James M. Bowen, PhD:
. . . These three fully structured basic science departments were all focused on some aspect of DNA -- its structure, how it functioned, how it changed when a cell went from normal to cancerous, and a whole variety of things. The departments were Biochemistry, Biology, and Physics. The Physics department, as I understood it at the time, had grown out of the need to recruit physicists to help to build the first COBALT 60 unit, which I believe was the first such unit to be constructed in the United States. One of the results of that early pioneering of physics was that M. D. Anderson became one of the national and even world centers for understanding radiation dosimetry, and has always, and is today, a leader in all aspects of both diagnostic and therapeutic radiology. It all began in the basement of M. D. Anderson with a bunch of physicists and radiologists building that unit and then applying it to treat cancer. Ultimately, biophysicists were brought into the group and they were studying, in a variety of ways, the structure of DNA and of RNA and of proteins, and of how they interacted with each other. Dr. Haas, who was a trusted advisor of Dr. Clark's in those days, and probably the most effective early recruiter of basic scientists to M. D. Anderson, convinced Dr. Clark that within biological science, it was the subscience . . . Who knows better? He is a subscientist . . . Of genetics that probably offered the most promise. And Dr. Clark allowed Dr. Haas to recruit and to develop programs in several aspects of genetics -- microbial genetics, cellular genetics, and even whole-animal and human genetics were coming along as sciences in their own right at the time. And Dr. Haas and Dr. Clark, and the people that they recruited, established major programs in each of these areas.
Louis J. Marchiafava, PhD:
Now, which period or what years are we talking about?
James M. Bowen, PhD:
This period began in the late 1950s and carried through well through the 1960s and 1970s. I was a part of one of the sections in the Biology department, but we were a hybrid of biology because we were studying viruses and cells in which viruses were growing and causing changes. But our best tool at that time was the electron microscope which, in fact, existed within the physics department and was part of the physics program. So, our section was part of biology and yet, drew heavily on physics. But Dr. Dmochowski's dream, although he was staying fairly quiet about it to everyone except in private visits with Dr. Clark, was to have a major multidimensional virology program independent of other aspects of biology, and for a few years, that was actually realized. We will reflect on that also in a moment.
James M. Bowen, PhD:
In the meantime, let me pick up a little bit of my own personal experience at that time . . .
Louis J. Marchiafava, PhD:
Now, you were in a position . . . In the time we are going to talk about, what position were you in?
James M. Bowen, PhD:
I am going to go back now to that year as a postdoctoral trainee. In that year, I brought an understanding of how to use drugs to study virus development, how to study viruses in the laboratory using tissue cultures and similar things, and I learned an enormous amount. I learned how to handle viruses that cause cancer. There was an old, rather dilapidated building down on Blodgett Street in those days that had once housed the Houston Dental Institute, which ultimately, I think, became the University of Texas Dental School at Houston. But the old building was taken over by a few specific projects and by a dental school project where one of their faculty was actually raising marmosets to study the various aspects of research in these small primates, and Dr. Leon Dmochowski and a few others had a huge rodent colony in the basement. And he was able to import from all over the world strains of mice that were specific for various kinds of cancer, and for associations with various kinds of viruses, particularly the viruses of mouse leukemia and of mouse mammary cancer which, at the time, everyone who was working in the field believed might be a good model for human breast cancer. And a window in my own head that had been closed for a few years opened up because here was a chance to study a model for human breast cancer. And as events turned out, mouse mammary cancer turned out to be one of the most invaluable tools for studying virus cellular associations that ever existed, but it did not turn out to be a particularly good model for human breast cancer. Other models came along that were better. But we did that year a tremendous amount of work. We worked very long hours, designed and carried out lots of experiments, both in the tissue culture laboratory where we were growing cells artificially in culture, and treating them with various viruses, to try to understand why some viruses cause cells to die, others cause them to transform and become cancerous, and others had no effect at all. And we also tried to study the transmission of these cancers that we knew were virus-associated; namely, leukemia, mammary cancer in mice, and this strange kind of oddball virus that was capable of causing both cancer and what we used to call lytic destruction of cells. It just killed and destroyed them, called polyoma. And all over the world, other people were doing this kind of work, too, and we began to develop a catalog of viruses that were associated with various forms of cancer. Dr. Dmochowski had begun to see, in the samples taken from human leukemia patients at M. D. Anderson, the same kinds of structures that were associated with the virus-transmitted leukemia in mice. This, of course, created an atmosphere where we began to believe that there might, in fact, be a virological association with leukemia, perhaps with breast cancer, and perhaps with other forms of cancer in human beings. But it was in childhood leukemia where we began to see these characteristic virus particles that, in those days, were called C-type because of an arbitrary structural designation. And we began to think that maybe there would be a human counterpart to the virus causation of leukemia in mice. And that was an extraordinarily productive year.
Recommended Citation
Bowen, James M. PhD and Marchiafava, Louis J. PhD, "Chapter 03: The Creation of Basic Science Departments Focused on DNA (50s – 70s) and A Fellowship Year Using Drugs to Study Viruses" (2000). Interview Chapters. 678.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/678
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