Bert Vogelstein Interview (page: 4 / 4) Cancer Researcher	Print Interview

Where does your sense of humor come from?

Bert Vogelstein: No one has ever asked me that question before. There's a lot of humor in our lab, which I guess comes from failure, from a kind of pain. In science, you're always failing. Almost everything you try fails. The words that I like to hear best from the people in my lab are, "It works!" Those words are music to my ears. Because what I almost always hear is, "It didn't work." Then we have to figure out why.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Most things don't work, either because the idea was wrong -- the connection was wrong -- or because of execution. Trying to prove that the idea was right is very difficult. And the combination of those two things almost guarantees that somewhere between 90 and 99 percent of experiments will fail. And in order to cope with that, you need a sense of humor. You need to understand that, yeah, it didn't work, but there's got to be something good that came out of it. You must have learned something, or there's got to be something funny about how it didn't work, or something that we can be happy about that will stimulate us to try it again the next day.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Bench scientists, people who work at the bench and do science with their own hands, generally have a pretty good sense of humor. It's a fun place to work.

You also play music as a sideline, or hobby. Do you feel it's important to have another outlet in your life?

Bert Vogelstein: Our laboratory has a band, we play music. I play the keyboard, and Ken, the scientist who co-directs my laboratory with me, plays the drums. Students play guitars, and do the vocals. We have a blast.

It's a great diversion. We work hard all the time, cancer is a very serious disease and we're very serious about what we do. It's rejuvenating to do something completely different, and it takes your mind off the problems. It gives you a sense, after you've done it, that you can start again.

Even if all the experiments today didn't work, at least your music worked. That's the nice thing about music or sports. When you're doing science you can work for months or years without any real success. When you do something like music, or sports, or virtually anything that's a hobby, you get immediate satisfaction, because it works. You can hear it, it sounds good. That's very important, design some things that work into your life. I think it makes you feel good about everything else.

The other reason, of course we do it is that it's a lot of fun. Everyone likes to have fun, scientists are no different.

How do you balance your commitments to work and family? Is there a conflict?

Bert Vogelstein: That's one of the lessons I've learned from talking to people who are very accomplished, and have done more for mankind than anyone else. Legendary people, and not so legendary people, just good people, ask them what regrets they've had. Uniformly, across the board, they will all say, "I wish I had spent more time with my family."

I've never heard anyone say, "I wish I had spent less time with my family and more time with my work." It's the one constant theme that emerges from every wise person who's had that experience. I think it's important to learn that lesson before you're 60 or 70, and to try to put it into your life. When you get to be 60 or 70, you won't look back. You'll probably still say, "I wish I could have spent more time with them," but you'll know you spent as much time as you possibly could with your family.

Can you describe the potentially positive effects of cloning?

Bert Vogelstein: Cloning is used to describe numerous scientific areas. We clone genes all the time, but that's not the kind of cloning that people are talking about now. They're talking about cloning whole organisms, like sheep, which was done recently. And in particular, they're talking about taking a cell from a person, like taking one of your cells, and making a genetically identical copy of you from that cell.

That is obviously an incredibly intriguing idea. Unfortunately, people have largely thought about only the ethical problems associated with that line of research. Non-scientists have only recently started to realize that there are many potential benefits of that kind of research.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Two people married, and they had genetic diseases circulating through their families. They were very scared of having a child who would be very sick and probably die from diseases that other people in their family had. Or worse, suppose they already had two children, both of whom had a genetic disease inherited from their parents that had killed them.

The child was born, the parents got to love them. Two or three years later the child got sick, they went through a terrible course of hospitals, the whole thing, and then the child died. That is the worst tragedy that ever happens to anyone. The parents still want to have a child of their own, which is the most natural and uniform desire of all people on earth.

If cloning were possible, they could take one of their cells, say the father's if they want a male, and clone that into a child that would be their own and that they would raise just as any other child. They would know that that child was genetically okay, because he would have exactly the same genes as the father. It's only the mix of the father and the mother's genes revealing recessive conditions that resulted in the genetically defective children that they had before. That's a very practical way to use the technology to help that family.

Here's another way, which is a little farther off, but could involve the same technology. Suppose a woman 40 years of age has a heart condition, and her heart is not working properly any more. The only way to save her is to transplant a new heart. The best heart to put in would be her own. You can get heart transplants now, but they're very difficult and they're often rejected.

If you could take one of her cells and grow it as an embryo, or a partial embryo until a heart forms, and use that heart to replace her own existing heart, then she could presumably live out a normal life span.

There are, to be sure, certain ethical questions that have to be very carefully considered before doing things like that, but I personally think it would be wrong to dismiss those possibilities automatically as ethically wrong, or to put a ban on the kind of experiments that might lead to advances in that regard. I think we have to be sensitive to the patients, not just to the public.

Let me give you a personal example that's not something 50 years in the future. Cloning of humans, if it's possible at all, will take decades to work out. So this is kind of a theoretical argument, but let me give you something that's here and now.

In some cases, we can identify individuals at risk to develop colon cancer. We know with 100 percent accuracy, just from looking at their genes, that they're going to develop colon cancer by the time they're 30. We can do that by taking a blood sample from a child. We can do it prenatally. We can take a sample from a developing embryo and tell with 100 percent accuracy whether that child is going to develop colon cancer.

Is it right to do prenatal testing for cancer predisposition? When I present that question to a public audience, It's interesting the response you get. Because remember, even though this child will develop cancer, they won't do so until their 30s. They'll have a very normal life up until they're 30. Even once they develop cancer, with appropriate surveillance, the cancer can be removed, they can be cured, they won't die. They may get very sick, they'll need to have a lot of medical examinations, periodic checks, but they're likely to live a normal life span, although with some significant sickness.

So is it ethical to do prenatal testing, with the idea that if the child has the mutation, you're going to abort it? Is that ethical for a disease that won't necessarily kill the person, and if anything, won't kill the person until they're at least 30 and have lived 30 good years? The response that I get from an audience of several hundred people at a lecture is, "No, that's not ethical. You really shouldn't do prenatal testing for that. You should do prenatal testing for diseases that you know are going to kill children in the first year of life, that we understand. But for this kind of disease, it doesn't seem right. What happens, happens."

Now, if I'm talking to a different group of people, a group of patients and their families who've had hereditary colon cancer, I get a much different response. They say, 'This disease killed my mother, and killed my sister, and made my brother really sick, and now you're telling me that you have the technology to tell me whether I can make sure I won't give this bad gene to my child. I can spare my children and my family from having to go through this incredibly painful process, and you're telling me that I can't have it? Is that fair? Is that ethical, to withhold that possibility from me?"

I agree with them. If they want access to this information and we've had the good fortune to be able to provide it to them, who am I to say that we can't, because others, who have been spared this, think it's wrong? My inclinations are to go with the patients. If something can help people, I'm much less inclined to put much stock in completely theoretical dangers to society. I see benefits to people, and those, to me, are very meaningful.

What would you like to accomplish in the future?

Bert Vogelstein: What I would like to accomplish in the future is simple. I would like the things that we have learned about cancer, and about the genes that cause cancer, to be applied to people, so that we develop methods to diagnose cancers early when they can be cured, and eventually develop new treatments, based on what we've already learned, and what we're going to learn in the future.

That's one thing I'm very intense about doing, and I hope that we'll have some success. I'm not foolish enough to think we're going to cure cancer in my lifetime, but I'm optimistic enough to hope that we'll make some strides in that direction.

The second thing that's very important to me professionally, is that all of the students that have worked with us over the years, and there have been dozens, will be able to continue doing their work. And that they will continue to make discoveries on their own that will advance the field, and eventually help people with cancer. Those are my goals for the next 20 years.

I hope you achieve them. Thank you very much for your time.

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