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by Adam
Liz O’Day is trying to cure cancer and I’m
trying to help. We’re in Boston College’s chemistry
laboratory, leaning over a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrum and
looking for stray signs of feces. “You don’t want
any shit or crap,” she says. I look for shit and crap
and don’t see any, but I’m not really sure what it would
look like. The chart is a two-foot-long printout that resembles
a barometric pressure reading from a tranquil day like today. Presumably
a printout from a stormy day, with spikes of pressure changes and
static, would make Liz unhappy. Fortunately this chart, her
latest one, is feces-free.
I ask Liz what, exactly, we were looking for on the NMR. I’m
feeling intellectually bold because curing cancer, so far, seems
surprisingly easy. If all I have to know is how to find “shit
and crap,” maybe I could be an award-winning biochemistry major
like Liz.
Perhaps I’ve been encouraged by Liz’s general
appearance. She looks normal. Before entering the Merkert
Chemistry Building, I had pictured corridors full of caged monkeys
and pale men in white lab coats, but Liz, a twenty-one-year-old senior,
is wearing the official undergraduate uniform: jeans and a Polo shirt
(yellow, with up-turned collar). On her feet are old Asics
running shoes. Her hair is blond, her eyes are blue, and contrary
to stereotype, those eyes aren’t covered by thick glasses. This
isn’t how I pictured the future of cancer research.
The NMR, Liz says, tells her about the compound she made. I
know what a compound is, so I’m still able to follow. “The
active site of the enzyme that I work on has a lot of positive charge,” she
informs me. “So if you were trying to think of a small
molecule that could not only fit nicely into this active site, but
also bind with some sort of affinity, you would want to find something
that has negative charge.”
From there she begins to lose me. I recognize some words,
mostly conjunctions and articles, but the meat of her sentences means
nothing. Each word is ten syllables long, a rumbling train
of scientific jargon that passes in a blur. As I try to process
each new word, I get further and further behind and now I’m
not even listening to Liz, I’m just watching her draw a molecular
diagram, which looks a little bit like a blueprint for a spacestation
with pods and pods connected by tunnels and tunnels.
Liz points to two circles labeled with H’s and says something
about turning these protons into a triplet. I nod. Now
she’s explaining how one uses the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
machine, which I gather is a room full of magnet. I ask her
if that’s right, if the NMR really is a room full of magnet,
and she says, “Kind of,” probably just to humor me.
Now she’s back to enzymes. It seems that there are
some enzymes that begin synthesizing too prolifically. “The
enzyme is all out of whack,” Liz explains. “It’s
up-regulated and it just keeps pumping out DNA. So the thought
is if you can shut this baby down and stop the cells from growing,
you can stop cancer.” I like that Liz has called the
enzyme a “baby.” It’s like the human body
is a car, and she’s the mechanic, and all she has to do is
tinker with a few nuts and bolts to get the baby running again.
“So what are you actually trying to do here?” I ask.
She says she’s trying to design and synthesize something something
inhibitor compounds.
“Excuse me?”
She repeats herself. I hear, “Aspartate trans… inhibitor
compounds,” but there’s something between trans and inhibitor that
I can’t catch. It’s about eight syllables long,
delivered in one tenth of a second.
“I know,” she says, her tone almost consoling. “Sounds
funny to say. When I first started, I couldn’t pronounce
it either, but after you say it repeatedly, it kind of becomes ingrained
in your brain.”
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Liz O’Day grew up in Braintree, MA, not too far from the Boston
College campus. The Boston accent comes out whenever she says
words that contain R’s, like aspartate transcarbamoylase (I
made her write it down). She describes her parents as “wicked
cool.”
She adored her brothers growing up and spent most of her childhood
running through the neighborhood with them. They’re the
reason she didn’t grow up as a “girly girl.” But
when Liz was in first grade, one of her brothers, Rob, became ill
and was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a form of cancer that targets
children, usually in their abdomens. Rob was only in third
grade. He recovered, but not before undergoing treatment that
left lasting changes. Rob’s doctors had to remove two
of his ribs.
Liz still admires her brother’s perseverance and calls him
her biggest role model. “Everyone told him and us that
he was going to die, but he kicked the shit out of [cancer],”
she says. “I’m sure [my brother’s experience]
influences me on some subconscious level,” she reflects.
“I like to say that I was supposed to do [cancer research]
regardless. There’s no denying that seeing your brother
go through chemotherapy when you’re a little girl and not
understanding when people tell you that he’s not going to
get better [can have an effect]. That definitely pissed me
off and I thought there’s got to be a way for him to get better.”
If there exists a way, Liz is intent on finding it. On a
typical day, Liz wakes up around six-thirty and gets to the lab
by seven. It’s Dr. Evan Kantrowitz’s lab, and
she’s been working there since her sophomore year on a project
to design and synthesize new inhibitors for the enzyme, aspartate
transcarbamoylase (also known as ATCase). (Click
here for Liz’s detailed description of her research.)
The lab is spacious, but crammed full
of science, with bubbling experiments and strange equipment lining
the counters like props behind a Hollywood mad scientist.
When I walk into the lab, I see a machine on my right that looks
like a produce scale weighing eight plastic trays. The machine
is shaking the trays from side to side, causing the unidentified
blue liquid within the trays to slosh against the walls. I
have no idea what this machine does, or what the blue liquid is,
but it’s clear that science is happening here. There’s
also a five-foot high cylindrical tank and a giant mauve hood with
inflated balloons attached to glass vials, both of which help fulfill
the laboratory quota for impressive-looking equipment.
This is the lab that Liz enters at seven every day, two hours before
the others begin to trickle in. Her morning is full of molecular
modeling and simulations, synthesis, and biochemistry. Joby,
her lab partner, helps her with the organic chemistry as they try
to divine a chemotherapy drug worthy of being sent to the National
Cancer Institute, where it would be tested on animals, and if successful,
on humans. Even if Liz, Joby, and the rest of Dr. Kantrowitz’s
team hit a home run, their drug won’t be available anytime
soon. But Liz has patience: “There’s usually a
twenty year span from when a drug is created to when it hits the
market, so maybe when I’m in my forties, starting my own lab,
I’ll be like, ‘Hey, I made that.”
At eleven it’s time for school, then rugby practice. Liz
doesn’t have class on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays thanks
to an agreeable senior schedule, but on those days she puts extra
time into her lab work – around twelve hours worth each day. Sometimes
she asks herself, “Why am I not out drinking with my friends
or why am I not out with the rest of the senior class?” She
has an answer though: “I’m not doing [cancer research]
because it’s work, I’m doing this because I like it. It’s
not the same kind of fun as going out and partying, but it’s
still fun.”
Liz’s boyfriend, Tim, a senior at the University of Massachusetts – Boston,
is observing our conversation. He, too, is a biochemistry major. I
ask Liz if she could date someone who had a different academic concentration. She
laughs, then says, “No.” Tim, also from Braintree,
and Liz met in a high school science class but didn’t start
dating until two years ago. I ask him who’s better at
biochemistry and he admits that she is. She was his tutor in
high school.
As biochemistry tutors go, there aren’t many better than Liz. She
won the Beckman and Goldwater scholarship and now she’s applying
to become a Rhodes Scholar, which would take her to England to pursue
her dreams of curing cancer. Asked why she wants to become
a Rhodes Scholar, she says, “Not just because it’s the
coolest thing in the world and you get to say you’re a Rhodes
scholar and my parents can put it in the local paper and say ‘Oh,
my daughter’s a Rhodes scholar’ and get that bumper sticker.” She
laughs at the image of a “My Daughter Is a Rhodes Scholar” bumper
sticker, then continues on a serious note: “I would like it
because of the influence that a Rhodes Scholar has. I want
to be involved with policy decisions about how the world works…. Idealism
can turn into reality when you’re a Rhodes Scholar.”
She has also started a program called Women in Science Technology,
which brings high school girls to BC and allows them to work on an
independent research project with a female undergraduate. Characterizing
mutant enzymes will be one of the projects that Liz introduces to
the high school girls, and she’s set up tours of Brigham and
Women’s Hospital and Genzyme, a Boston-based biotechnology
company. Winning a scholarship can be a motivating factor for
teenage girls with an interest in science, Liz says: “I got
15,000 dollars because I like to do research. That’s
pretty cool. So I wanted to sort of give back and show other
young girls that if you get involved with science, great things can
happen to you, too.”
She’s interested in “educational missionary work,” but
when asked why, a misdirected Bostonism leaks out. She says, “I
think it’s pretty retarded that people in third world countries
and all over the world die because they don’t have food or
they don’t have water or they don’t have the right medicine,
when over here we’ve got it. And it’s just
because they don’t have the technology and they don’t
have the tools to grow crops efficiently. We can teach these
people how to better themselves.” She’s right about
the unbalanced relationship between the West and elsewhere, but I’m
stuck on the word retarded. I hadn’t expected
to hear it from a potential Rhodes Scholar.
Later the word appears in an even more unfortunate place, when
she’s asked an off-hand question about race relations in America:
“I mean, sure racism still exists and it will be hard to completely
eradicate it, but I look at our generation and if anyone says anything
racist or a racist comment is made, that just seems so retarded
to me.” Through most of P.C. U.S.A., the word retarded
has been retired from everyday use. But for young Americans,
especially those fom the Boston area, it’s simply a synonym
for “stupid,” just as “wicked” means “very.”
Perhaps she’s dumbing down her comments for my sake.
I haven’t exactly been wowing her with my ability to handle
large words thus far.
It is true: in many ways, she’s a typical Boston kid. She
loves the Red Sox and her favorite player is Johnny Damon, but she
liked him “before he was such a heartthrob.” He’s
a great leadoff hitter, that’s all. “He’s
the bomb.com,” she says. Then laughing, she adds, “If
I was going to say that.” It’s the same light tone
she uses to describe her work: “Every day I come into the lab
and try to figure out how to stop cancer and it’s kind of a
bitch.” Listening to her, when she’s not talking
about aspartate transcarbamoylase inhibitor compounds, one could
make the mistake of believing they could hang with her intellectually. Of
course, I already did that, and she proved me wrong, gently but decidedly.
Later Liz shows me how to use liquid nitrous to freeze a compound. She’s
wearing lab goggles and purple rubber gloves, and I am too, because
I wanted to feel like a scientist. Now, with nothing
to do but watch her work (she clearly doesn’t trust me with
the nitrous), I feel silly.
I ask her if she’s ever frozen a banana because I have, and
she says, Actually, she knows how to make a bomb out of nitrous.
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There is that one other aspect of Liz, besides her role as student
cancer researcher, that isn’t normal: rugby.
She wasn’t supposed to be a fullback on the Boston College
women’s rugby team; she assumed she would play soccer, but
the soccer coach saw a lack of size and tenacity in Liz: “It
was blatantly apparent that I was the shortest the smallest and couldn’t
really keep up with the other players. Although I tried really
hard, at the end of the week the coach told me that I wasn’t
aggressive enough to be a varsity player, so I took that to heart
and got really pissed off. So I said, what the F, I’m
going to play the most aggressive sport I can.”
Now she’s the A side’s starting fullback, a position
that’s all about aggression. “I’m the person
that’s basically responsible for knocking people down,” she
says. “That’s how I broke my face last weekend.”
“What?”
“Against Army, some girl hit me in the face real hard and
I got a bloody nose, concussion, CAT scan, jaw problem.”
I examine her face for signs of swelling or bruising, but there’s
nothing there. “You look fine though,” I say.
She smiles and jokes, “Superhealer, I guess.”
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People are always asking Liz what it’s like to be a woman
in science. She doesn’t get it. She’s just
a biochemist, not a female biochemist, and she’s never
felt discriminated against. I ask her about the comments of
Lawrence Sommers, the Harvard President who suggested that women
might be genetically programmed to be deficient in the sciences,
and Liz answers, “That was dumb.” But there’s
no long speech on the issue.
She’s almost apologetic about not having a good answer to
these questions. They’re the first ones asked in her
scholarship interviews: “They say, ‘Do you feel the prejudice? And
I always say No, and I think maybe I’m just too stubborn to
realize any other force, or I’m just so focused. But
I think [the discrimination] must exist if everyone else seems to
be having struggles with it, and I think that’s a shame because
had I not been motivated to do science, that would have sucked. What
would I be doing now?”
Maybe she’s right, maybe the whole issue isn’t even
worthy of debate. Or maybe, as she says, she’s just too
focused to see the prejudice. I wonder if it’s this very
drive that will allow her to be the scientist that finds a cure for
cancer. It’s a lofty peak to ascend, but cancer researchers
have to set their sights high. I think back to her comment
about breaking her face, but recovering so quickly. She called
herself a Superhealer.
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Liz, in her own words, describes her research: “ATCase catalyzes the committed step of the pyrimidine biosynthesis
pathway, the reaction between carbamoyl phosphate (CP) and L-aspartate
(Asp) to form N-carbamoyl-L-aspartate (CA) and inorganic phosphate
(Pi). By learning how to control the activity of this enzyme, insights
into the control of the cell cycle as well as applications to disease
prevention are possible. N-(phosphonoacetyl)-L-aspartate (PALA)
is a potent inhibitor of ATCase and has become a viable agent in
the fight against cancer. However, because its use is accompanied
by harsh side effects, there is a need to discover other powerful
inhibitors that are less toxic to the body. The goal of my
project is to use the extensive biochemical and structure information
available on this enzyme to develop a new class of inhibitors, which
may prove to be a new class of anti-cancer drugs.”
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