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Profiles

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.” Click here to go back to profile

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