Circle of connections

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Finding the hidden connections, especially in terms of academic lineage, is a fun like some kind of detective story for me, especially after long years of working in laboratories. I will tell one of them so to show you how small the academic world is. A lot of friends already heard some parts of this one, so please bear with me for the whole story.

After I went to Ph.D. Program in M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in 2000, I got to know Tamara Terzian in Dr. Gigi Lozano's lab. We become good friends immediately. In 2004, I was graduating and looking for a postdoc position. Tamara suggested me to contact Dr. Terry Van Dyke at UNC-Chapple Hill. She explained that both Gigi and Terry did research in the lab of Arnold Levine, who discovered p53. Gigi proved the function of p53 as a transcriptional factor, and Terry made the first mouse model to prove that disruption of p53  resulted in cancer in vivo. They know each other very well, and Terry would be a wonderful mentor for me. Later I visited Terry's office in UNC without scheduling in advance, and found she was out of town. I missed the opportunity by myself to meet with her. Eventually I got an offer from Dr. Glenn Merlino at NCI and moved to Maryland in 2005. 

In Glenn's lab I studied melanocytic developmental program in melanoma. It focused on MITF, the master regulator gene of melanocytic development, discovered by Dr. Heinz Arnheiter at National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, with the help from Drs. Nancy Jenkins and Neal Copeland, at Mouse Cancer Genetics Program, NCI-Frederick (This is a fantastic story how an unexpected result led to a significant discovery: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-148X.2010.00759.x ). We collaborated closely with Heinz. 

However, in George W. Bush's second term of presidency, his administration set severe restriction on whatever uses of stem cells, impairing many research projects in an unexpected way  (for example, in you use HEK293 cells, you may get in trouble, as they are immortalized human embryonic kidney cells) . This upset many scientists. Meanwhile, Singaporean government caught the opportunity to recruit big names from US with nice offers. Nancy and Neal therefore moved to Singapore. Earlier in those years, Dr. Edison Liu (President Emeritus of the JAX) also went to Singapore. Interestingly, before his relocation, Edison worked first in UNC and then in NCI. It's likely that he knew Terry, Nancy, and Neal.

In 2007, Glenn and Drs. Stu Yuspa and Bev Mock decided to merged three NCI Laboratories (equivalent to Departments in universities) to form Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Genetics (LCBG). Glenn's research focused on melanocytes and melanoma, while Stu studied keratinocytes and basal cell carcinoma. We joked that we became a mini dermatology center. Glenn told me we'd have a new collaborator in mouse models. He explained, Nancy and Neal's moving left the Director position vacant in their Program. Finally, NCI recruited one of the best experts in mouse cancer models to lead the program. I asked for the name, and Glenn said, "Terry Van Dyke". When Terry came to visit Glenn at our lab, I met her for the first time, telling her that I've knocked the door of her office in UNC three years ago. I was very happy that she visited back.

In 2010-2011, somehow quite a few scientists left Singapore. Nancy and Neal moved to Methodist Hospital at Houston, Texas, across the street to M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Edison moved to the JAX, serving as CEO and President. Terry founded the Center for Advanced Preclinical Research (CAPR) at NCI. We collaborated for eight years to create many mouse melanoma models and run many preclinical studies of targeted therapy and immune checkpoint inhibitors. These works eventually generated many models and reagents for melanoma research community and resulted in quite a few publications, including one in Nature Medicine 2020 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0818-3 ).

Terry retired from NCI in 2015, in the same year that Dr. Harold Varmus quitted from the Directorship of NCI. After that, NCI was led by Drs. Doug Lowy (acting 2015-17), Ned Sharpless (2017-19), Doug Lowy (acting again 2019), Ned Sharpless (returning 2019-2022), Doug Lowy (acting the third time 2022), Monica Bertagnolli (2022-23), Doug Lowy (acting the fourth time 2023).  

In the December of 2023, Dr. Kimryn Rathmell was nominated by the U.S. president as the NCI Director. In an interview she said that she got precious experience in basic research when she was a postdoc in Terry's laboratory, years ago in UNC Chapple Hill. She is the newest addition in this Terry-centered network of connection.

p.s. Two more interesting connection related to this story:

1. Tamara married to Neil Box, a postdoc in Dr. Dennis Roop's lab at Baylor College of Medicine, across the street to M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. They moved to Colorado with Dennis around the time I moved to Maryland, when Dennis received a big offer to found a skin regeneration center and appointed Tamara and Neil as faculties. Later I understood that Dennis was Stu's postdoc in NCI years ago.

2. Dr. Yurong Song, the Scientific Manager at NCI-Frederick, was a postdoc in Terry's lab. In 2018 she went to Chicago for AACR Annual Meeting. One day a kind lady shared a table with her so she didn't have to wait longer for lunch. They chatted and found both of them knew me. That kind person was Tamara. The story was written here: https://communities.springernature.com/posts/serendipity

 

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