John Gearhart Interview (page: 2 / 6) Stem Cell Research	Print Interview

When did you first become interested in science?

John Gearhart: Probably when I was completing high school. I came from a farm family. Science interested me, the ability to manipulate science in a way that we could benefit from. I was very interested in crops, believe it or not. This was something of great interest to me, trying to provide healthier, faster-growing crops.

Where was the family farm?

John Gearhart: It was in Western Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny Mountains. I was there for a fairly brief time before I was placed in the orphanage.

A lot of kids would have felt a sense of lowered expectations in that environment, but it seems like you've always had high expectations about what you could achieve.

John Gearhart: Yes, but when I left there I had no idea what I wanted to do.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I know I didn't want to go back to Western Pennsylvania, a very depressed area. I mean, it was a -- but I really didn't -- and I sort of went along on this -- what I was saying is that the people in this group that I went with, there was 25 or 30 of them; they all went to college, so the thing to do was to go to college. And, I remember the counselor at the time saying, you know, essentially "You are not going to amount to anything." I mean, it was very -- a very hard kind of an institution. You know, "Why waste your money on college."

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So he could tell that I was sort of a mediocre kind of a student. No real, you know expectations of anything. So I went to college and then did extremely well there because I had -- I mean, I had never had a glass of alcohol in my life. I had never had any association with females. These things we were taught were not good things, to be honest with you. I mean, it is bizarre but this was our teaching. And so I went through the first year or couple years of college just with the same kind of regimen that I had, and did extremely well. I thought college was a piece of cake. And then the third year I found these other things and you know, plunk! I mean, for quite a while I was in a tizzy and then came out the other end of this fine.

Other things meaning alcohol?

John Gearhart: The alcohol and the women. Yeah, that is right. Many of my fellow students from Girard found these things earlier than I did and they didn't survive college. They couldn't make up. They have these GPAs you are supposed to keep up, so many of them floundered and had a problem. I was fortunate that I had a base first before these things struck. Then in college I just fell in love with genetics. I was enthralled with genetics.

You have made such dramatic developments in science, do you now look back and see the seed of that scientist as a kid? Did you have a feeling you were going to achieve something considerable even when you were growing up?

John Gearhart: No, not at all. To be honest with you I just didn't know what I was going to do. I don't want to give you the impression I was just flopping around for decades and suddenly fell into something. Not true.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My dad had, before he died had actually -- He was one of the first people to sign up for Social Security, and this is what put me through college, was the funds that had accrued during that time. And I had gone to Penn State University with an interest dating back to those farm days of wanting to do something in agriculture and horticulture.

I went into an area of horticulture and of plant breeding which was the real hot genetic area at that time, trying to improve on corn, wheat, all kinds of crops. But crops weren't fast enough; it took years to develop something.

When I started in college I wanted to be the best pommologist in the world, to grow apples and pears and peaches and things like this. Breeding was the thing to do to improve those crops, but it takes decades, as you can imagine, to breed an apple tree and see what is going to happen. This led me into other areas of plant breeding and into floriculture. I was breeding snapdragons and geraniums, and things like that. I actually got some All American selections out of these things. That was fun; I had a good time with that.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I got interested in animal genetics, and particularly the model system, which was this fruit fly drosophila, melanogaster. I got my Ph.D. actually studying that and then I wanted to extend it immediately to humans if I could. Now, this is an era where the genetics of human beings was in its infancy, but I decided to go through the mouse as a model system. The model, the mammalian model at that time, of course, was the mouse, and then 30 years later I am finally into humans, where I wanted to be many, many years ago, and having the resources and having the environment at Hopkins now, where I am Director of Research in Obstetrics and Gynecology. My interests are still in human development and what controls it, what regulates it. I am very interested in the basises of congenital birth defects, what is the cause of them, and then how we can ameliorate the problems with them.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

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