John Gearhart Interview (page: 3 / 8) Stem Cell Research	Print Interview

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.

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.
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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.

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.
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Were you in contact with your mother after you left the orphanage?

John Gearhart: I saw her (my mother) a couple of times a year but for fairly brief periods, and didn't really get to know her until she developed breast cancer and came down to Baltimore and was admitted as a patient, and so sort of in her terminal several months of life I spent a lot of time with her trying to find out who the family was, who she was. Anyway that's what happened.
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Was there a point when you went back to see your mother and told her you were going to be a scientist?

John Gearhart: Oh yeah. She had remarried, and it wasn't until after her death that I really got to know my stepfather, who is still alive. They thought I should return and work on the farm. They wanted help on the farm and it was almost as if they thought too much education is not good for you.

This was in the era of the hippies. To return home at this point with long hair down the middle of your back in that culture! I remember one time I drove home. I had purchased a little foreign car; it was the only thing I could afford. The fact that it was a Japanese car and everything that was just the wrong thing to do in this community in Western Pennsylvania. It was a cultural thing.

Did you stay close to either of your brothers?

John Gearhart: No, I didn't. It was only years later that we began to forge a relationship. I'm still trying to get to know them. My older brother is 58 or so, and my younger brother is about 50.

Did they go into any similar fields?

John Gearhart: No. My older brother went to work in construction immediately and he has been doing that ever since. He's worked his way up and now he's the president of a construction company in Western Pennsylvania. My younger brother went into the service, which is the normal thing people in that area did, and then took a job in one of these huge energy producing stations, with coal, and has worked there ever since.

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