Annual report : 2000 / Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

  • Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Date:
2000
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Annual report : 2000 / Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “I quickly developed the comfort level to enable my lab to grow and delve into new areas.” Bruce Lahn spent seven years studying what makes a man a man. As a Ph.D. student and then a postdoctoral fellow, he studied the genes of the human Y chromosome, the tiny misunderstood partner to X that determines the essence of maleness. Once written off as a chromosome with few genes and little to inform science, the Y chromosome has enjoyed a resurgence of interest since a group of molecular biologists, including Dr. Lahn and his mentor David Page, Ph.D., of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, an affiliate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began analyzing the genes on Y. The researchers showed that four major genetic shuffling events through evolution were responsible for the generation of distinct X and Y sex chromosomes. The group also demonstrated that under- standing the genetic differences between X and Y is relevant to understanding the causes of male infertility and, conversely, to the possible development of male contraception. In fact, Dr. Lahn was so successful in his graduate work that he won a national technology-transfer competition, sponsored by Merrill Lynch, for his proposal to develop a male contraceptive from a sperm-producing enzyme that he discovered. Dr. Lahn, now an assistant professor of genetics at the University of Chicago and a 1999 recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, has not been content simply to extend his Y chromosome research, although he is continuing that work. He quickly realized that the genomics revolution is opening vast unexplored territory that his training in large-scale sequencing, gene comparison, and the study of evolution would enable him to exploit. Making such a large jump, from the now relatively crowded field of Y chromosome studies to a new field of interest, neurobiology and the evolution of the brain, was a bold step, particularly since he had no reputation in the field and would likely need at least two to three years to build up enough data to submit a grant applica- tion to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary federal funder of this type of research. “I knew it was a risk, but I quickly developed the comfort level to enable my lab to grow and delve into new areas,” Dr. Lahn says. “Coming in to my position with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund grant made a critical difference. I was able to hire two postdocs, two technicians, and a lab manager, and to take on three graduate students, in my first year. That first burst of growth helped me build a critical mass of personnel for my lab. I now have 15 people working in the lab.” Dr. Lahn wants to ask big questions, such as why humans developed a much larger brain than monkeys and what that means for human evolution. He wants to know why adult human brains have stem cells, which can repair and regenerate damaged tissue, when conventional wisdom says mature cells in the brain do not regenerate. These are questions he thinks he can answer, and he is building the infrastructure to do it using comparative genomics. “I recognize the need to develop databases and computational tools that will help us perform these kinds of analyses, so, for example, I have three people in my lab who do nothing but computation,” Dr. Lahn says. “I believe that having people doing ‘wet lab’ experiments along with people using computational methods creates an incredible synergy that allows us to ask and answer questions using a combination of methods.” Dr. Lahn’s work has now caught the attention of other funders, and in 2000 he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute assistant investigator, which carries with it a promise of research funding for years to come. Where will he go from here? Among other projects, Dr. Lahn is doing large-scale sequencing of genes expressed in the brain of the macaque monkey. He believes that the evolutionary distance between the macaque brain and human brain, about 35 million years’ worth, is just right to help answer questions about how the human brain evolved from a common primate ancestor. He plans to create a library of macaque genes that can be compared to human genes for key differences. It is a leap from maleness to the macaque brain, but one that Dr. Lahn thinks will pay off. BWF recognizes that the transition from working in a mentor’s research area to making one’s own stamp is not easy and is fraught with potential pitfalls. That is why we created our Career Awards in the Biomedical Sciences program—to enable awardees with a proven track record of excellence to take risks and push science in new directions. As Dr. Lahn says, “NIH is not going to give me money to do work in a field where I have no credibility. The Burroughs Wellcome Fund award allowed me to make some mistakes and learn a new field without fear of running out of money.”