What Could Your Future Hold?

This month’s The Scientist hosted an article on Michael Hengartner. You might not have heard of him, but today he is a Dean at the University of Zurich and is held as one of the leaders in programmed cell death research. His journey to the top was one that he never expected. As an MIT graduate student who had a background in Biochemistry, Michael knew that he wanted to work with the protein NF-kappaB, a transcription factor that helps regulate a cell’s response to various stimuli. Even though he was determined to work with that protein, Hengartner attended a group meeting in another lab with his classmate. That meeting is where Michael met Robert Horvitz, who later mentioned to Hengartner that he was working a small side project investigating programmed cell death in C. elegans. Michael thought it was such a “stupid” concept that “an animal just threw away whole cells,” but the stupidity of it just made him determined to find out why first hand.

Ten years later Hengartner was still working with Horvitz’s lab researching programmed cell death, or apoptosis, pathways. The pathway that they discovered has three main stages: the killing of the cell, the engulfing of the cell by a neighboring cell, and then the digestion of the cell tissue by the neighboring cell. While in Horvitz’s lab Hengartner cloned and identified ced-9, a gene that prevents apoptosis from happening in certain cells of C. elegans. Mutants where then found that carried an overactive form of this gene, which caused cells that were supposed to die to actually live. He later found homology of this gene with a human gene called Bcl-2 which is known to be involved with some cancers.

Horvitz was using his apoptosis research to try to discover why some cancers occur, and the possibility of treatment. Horvitz stated, “We normally think of cancer as too much cell division, but cancerous growth really is a change in an equilibrium. If you have too much cell division, you get an increase in cell number; if you have too little cell death, you also get an increase in cell number. Either can lead to cancer.” Hengartner’s research in the Horvitz lab, especially the discovery of the homology between ced-9 and Bcl-2, which effectively linked underactive apoptosis as a possible cause of cancer, played a large role in Horvitz’s 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology, and paved the way for a boom in apoptosis reasearch.

Although Hengartner was not given the Nobel Prize for all his efforts, his name was still known throughout the scientific community allowing him to get a lab of his own, and later move up the academic ladder to become a Dean. Inspired by his own fortune, Hengartner now tries to motivate the youth to find their true path. He invites high schoolers into the lab to help screen C. elegans for fluorescing dead cell markers, and has helped establish a new molecular life science PhD program. Overall, Michael is a role model for taking opportunities as they come and never looking back.

For More information here are some links to the magazine and Michael Hengartner's lab page:
http://www.the-scientist.com/
http://www.imls.uzh.ch/research/hengartner.html