Thinking Outside the Box to Make Significant Advances in Disease Research

As a scientist and basic biology researcher, it can be difficult to explain how laboratory work at the cellular and molecular level will positively impact human health. In short, basic biology is the critical first step required to make important advances in the medical field. Although bench scientists may not interact with patients on a daily basis like physicians, we are driven to improve lives through inquiry and discovery. Through our own personal experiences with disease and our innate detective skills, we are motivated to investigate the intricacies of the cell and work toward findings that will lead to new treatments. Even though basic science is vital for clinical development of new medicines, research as a whole still needs to find a way to rise above incremental improvements and (at the risk of sounding too cliché) "think outside the box." This type of thinking is even supported by federal grant opportunities that eliminate or deemphasize the need for traditional preliminary data. As physicist David Bohm put it, "[t]he ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained."

Our lab's research at Van Andel Institute is largely conducted with a focus on cancer, but given our expertise when it comes to the mTOR pathway, we are also positioned to study other diseases -- for example, tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). Because TSC is not a cancer, traditional academia might consider the disease outside our "box." Characterized by tumors in vital organs, including the brain, eyes, skin, heart, kidneys and lungs, TSC can cause serious health problems, such as autism and epilepsy. The disease has varying degrees of manifestations, from mild to severe, and is generally diagnosed during childhood. Seizures and infantile spasms can be extremely detrimental to the development of young patients. TSC tumors are not malignant, meaning that they are not cancer and do not metastasize, and the majority of disease occurrences result from mutations in the either Tsc1 or Tsc2 genes. These two genes play an important role in suppressing tumor growth and are part of the mTOR pathway. Although my team can be characterized as a cancer research lab, we can also leverage our cancer pathway perspective to better study this tumor-causing disease. What we learn in the process will not only benefit the TSC field but will have implications for cancer research.

While branching out into a new disease area could be considered an "outside-the-box" approach, investigating study outliers is another unorthodox tactic for making discoveries. Scientists have realized that there are a vast number of unknowns when it comes to diseases like cancer and TSC, which can be highly individualized and specific to a person's unique genome. As a result, the traditional drug development process may no longer be the most effective approach to combating genetic diseases. The National Cancer Institute and other oncologists are taking a unique approach to advancing cancer treatment. Scientists are taking a closer look at patients whose disease responded favorably to investigational drugs that failed in traditional clinical trials. These studies validate the notion that each individual's disease is different and represent a resourceful strategy to investigate cancer and ultimately make meaningful discoveries for patients. This road less traveled could lead to significant advances in the cancer field.

Personalized medicine is another innovative research method making more than just incremental progress in health research. With the development of genome sequencing and its relatively new affordability of sequencing, personalized medicine can match patient genomes with individualized treatment plans. Personalized medicine can involve a cocktail of approved and investigational drugs, some of which may not normally be prescribed for the patient's disease. Prescribing a drug generally used to treat cardiovascular disorders to treat an unrelated disease certainly represents a radical approach. Personalized medicine has proven to be successful for some cancer patients. With the help of experienced clinical collaborators, our lab is breaking ground to bring this strategy to TSC patients. It is our hope that this personalized medicine collaboration will result in rapid advances for TSC patients, whose current treatment options consist of surgery to remove tumors from affected organs, and therapies that address TSC symptoms.

Scientists and researchers want to make a positive impact on human health and improve lives. Whether it's biologists at the laboratory bench or clinicians at the patient's bedside, we are all hoping and striving to make discoveries that benefit the health of patients. Although research progress has traditionally taken an incremental route, innovative and unorthodox approaches are the tickets to major advances. My hope is that biomedical researchers utilizing these approaches will continue to innovate and discover new and effective treatments in years, rather than in decades.

My 50 Favorite Quotes About Space

For nearly 20 years I have collected a list of my favorite quotes about space. After careful consideration, these are my favorite 50. I hope you enjoy them.

1. We are at a point in history where a proper attention to space, and especially near space, may be absolutely crucial in bringing the world together. - Margaret Mead

2. Nothing endures but change. - Heraclitus, about 500 B.C.

3. If I could get one message to you it would be this: the future of this country and the welfare of the free world depends upon our success in space. There is no room in this country for any but a fully cooperative, urgently motivated all-out effort toward space leadership. No one person, no one company, no one government agency, has a monopoly on the competence, the missions, or the requirements for the space program. - Lyndon Baines Johnson

4. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, 1892

5. The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly along distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration to be. - Simon Newcomb, 1900

6. Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible. - Simon Newcomb, 1902
(eighteen months before Kitty Hawk.)

7. The aeroplane will never fly. - Lord Haldane, Minister of War, Britain, 1907 (statement made four years after Kitty Hawk.)

  8. It is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind. - Space Act of 1958

9. The 1990s will differ from the 1970s as profoundly as the nineteenth century from the eighteenth. - Clive Sinclair

10. For I dipped into the Future, far as human eye could see; saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1842

11. And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. - Winwood Reade, THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN, 1872

12. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. - Dennis Gabor, 1963

13. I know that some knowledgeable people fear that although we might be willing to spend a couple of billion dollars in 1958, because we still remember the humiliation of Sputnik last October, next year we will be so preoccupied by color television, or new-style cars, or the beginning of another national election, that we will be unwilling to pay another year's installment on our space conquest bill. For that to happen well, I'd just as soon we didn't start. - Hugh L. Dryden

14. Where there is no vision, the people perish. - Proverbs 29:18.

15. A vision must be much more than a project, even a big project. - Robert S. Walker, FINAL FRONTIER, April 1989.

16. You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck...I have no time for such nonsense. - Napoleon (commenting on Fulton's Steamship.)

17. It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and reality of tomorrow. - Robert Goddard

18. The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine. - C. P. Snow

19. What good is the Moon? You can't buy it or sell it. - Ivan F. Boesky, Wall Street broker convicted of insider trading (shortly after his release from prison.)

20. ...the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward, and so will space. - John F. Kennedy, 1962

21. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade... not because they are easy but because they are hard; - John F. Kennedy, 1962

22. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? - John F. Kennedy, 1962

23. Mankind will not remain on Earth forever, but in its quest for light and space will at first timidly penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and later will conquer for itself all the space near the Sun. - Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, father of cosmonautics.

24. I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go. - Captain Cook (on his voyage to the Pacific in Endeavor.)

25. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Albert Einstein

26. When men are arrived at the goal, they should not turn back. - Plutarch

27. Taking a new step...is what people fear most. - Dostoyevski

28. Man's mind and spirit grow with the space in which they are allowed to operate. - Krafft A. Ehricke, rocket pioneer

29. Freedom lies in being bold. - Robert Frost

30. I do not know what I seem to the world, but to myself I appear to have been like a boy playing upon the seashore and diverting myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay before me all undiscovered. - Sir Isaac Newton's, English philosopher and physicist, 1727 (his last words.)

31. The Earth is a cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle. - Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Father of Russian Astronautics, 1896

32. To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament. - Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Father of Russian Astronautics, 1896

33. It may be said that the development of science in the field of space flight and related research will be of great significance for the progress of human culture. - Professor Leonid Sedor, U.S.S.R.

34. There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings... - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

35. If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. - Astronaut Virgil I. Grissom (On January 27, 1967, astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee died from a flash fire aboard Apollo 204 Spacecraft.)

36. First I believe that this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon... - John F. Kennedy, May 24, 1961

37. Some day people will travel to Mars. It will be a long trip, but fun. This will be a big step for mankind. We would be able to find out if there was life on this planet. It probably will look like a red desert. - J. Stephen Hartsfield, Seventh Grader, 1984

38. Science-fiction yesterday, fact today- obsolete tomorrow. - Otto O. Binder, Editor in Chief, SPACE WORLD MAGAZINE

39. The greatest gain from space travel consists in the extension of our knowledge. In a hundred years this newly won knowledge will pay huge and unexpected dividends. - Professor Wernher von Braun

40. Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It's not a thing to be waited for - it is a thing to be achieved. - William Jennings Bryan

41. Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention and the first wave of nuclear power. And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be part of it - we mean to lead it. - John F. Kennedy (at the onset of the lunar landing program.)

42. Now is the time...for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth. - John F. Kennedy

43. ...because of what you have done the heavens have become part of man's world... For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all of the people on this Earth are truly one. - President Richard M. Nixon (on first lunar landing.)

44. Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND. - Apollo 11 plaque left on Moon.

45. ...the swifter the pace of change, the more lovingly men had to care for and criticize their institutions to keep them intact through the turbulent passages. - John Gardner

46. Where there is no vision, the people perish... - Proverbs 29:18

47. Where no counsel is, the people fall; but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. - Proberbs 11:14

48. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. - Thoreau

49. New ideas are not only the enemies of old ones; they also appear often in an extremely unacceptable form. - C.G. Jung

  50. I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's. - William Blake

Report: One in Five Reptiles at Risk of Extinction

A new study by the Zoological Society of London has found that 19% — nearly one in five — of the world’s 10,000 species of reptiles are threatened with extinction. The study, which has been printed in the journal Biological Conservation, was carried out by more than 200 experts who assessed the risk of extinction of 1,500 reptiles selected at random from around the globe.

The primary author of the paper, Monika Bohm, explained to the Zoological Society: “reptiles are often associated with extreme habitats and tough environmental conditions, so it is easy to assume that they will be fine in our changing world.” However, that’s far from the truth: “Many species are very high specialized in terms of habitat use and the climatic conditions they require for day to day functioning,” Bohm said. “This makes them particularly sensitive to environmental changes.” The paper highlights three critically endangered species in its research, including the jungle runner lizard Ameiva vittata, which has only ever been spotted in the Cochabamba region of the Bolivian jungle — an area under threat from the growth of agriculture and logging. The two most recent searches for the species have been unsuccessful, writes the study. Meanwhile in Haiti, six of the nine species of Anolis lizard in the country risk extinction due to increased deforestation.

Also at risk are freshwater turtles, with 50% of all species at risk of extinction from hunting; turtle parts are in high demand as ingredients in traditional medicine. According to the study 30% of freshwater reptile species are also in danger of completely disappearing.

Reptiles have a long evolutionary history: certain orders, such as snakes, lizards, amphisbaenians (worm lizards), crocodiles and tuataras first appeared on earth around 300 million years ago. They are an important part of many ecosystems, and play roles as both predator and prey. “This is a very important step towards assessing the conservation status of reptiles globally,” Philip Bowles from the IUCN Species Survival Commission said in response to the study. “Tackling the identified threats, which include habitat loss and harvesting, are key conservation priorities in order to reverse declines in these reptiles.”