She was social, saw the best in people, and had no trouble making friends. She was like oxygen and I was the drowning man she could save. Imagine how thrilled I was when, four days after that party, I received a birthday card from her. I had simply mentioned my birthday was in a few days in passing at the party. When I thanked her, believing it made me something truly special, she almost crushed my fragile heart when she replied, “Oh, I send them to all my friends.” But I was hooked.
I invited her to another party, but she turned me down. Later, I learned she’d been asked by another student, had turned him down, and didn’t want to make the other guy feel bad by showing up with me. But I persisted, and soon we were a couple.
Even after all these years, my lovely Sandy has a remarkably forgiving soul, the optimism of her Midwestern upbringing, and an honesty which is second to none. When Sandy and I traveled to Boston to meet my parents, my family’s admiration for her was in full force. My mother said she did not know me. I could have been a bank robber. My father told Sandy that she could do much better than me. Great family support!
We married in April 1970 as the Beatles song “Let it Be” played on the organ. I can still recite some of the lyrics, with the refrain stamped forever on my soul (“there will be an answer, Mother Mary”). We had our honeymoon on the Caribbean island of Aruba and returned to the University of Pittsburgh full of hope for the future.
Another fortuitous event was the selection of my advisor for my doctoral research, Dr. Lew Jacobson, whom I’d met on my first day at the University of Pittsburgh. I say you should always try to choose a mentor who is superior to you in every way, which I did.
Well, maybe I was a better basketball player than Lew.
But that’s about the only superiority I can claim over that fine man. I chose to study a project using bacteria, which was great because under proper conditions the microorganisms doubled every twenty minutes, allowing me to perform at least two experiments in a single day. That fit nicely with my plan to finish my degree in four years.
Every morning I’d enter the data from the results of the experiment from the previous night in my notebook and looked forward to several hours of analyzing the results. However, each day, Lew would have written out enough experiments for the next two weeks’ work. So I chose to take my notebooks home to ponder the results and plan the next day’s experiments. It was always a treat when I found my approach matched that of my mentor.
I’ve often found that failure is a better teacher than success and recall the shock many of us felt when our graduate class failed our first preliminary exam. Did they plan it that way just to show us how much we did not know and keep us humble?
Even fifty years later I don’t know the answer to that question.
Perhaps the major downside of being a scientist is the constant struggle for funds to do research. Learning to manage resources was a valuable lesson. But there were the positive lessons as well, such as the camaraderie between colleagues at the weekly Friday night graduate students’ pizza and beer parties at the Craig Street Inn, where we’d get together and bitch or laugh over what had happened the previous week. We wanted to be scientists after all, trying to answer the unknown questions of life. We needed to have each other’s backs.
Most mornings I’d walk past Central Catholic High School between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. on my way to Langley Hall. The early morning start times were a legacy from the 5:30 a.m. blood draws in the Air Force and have followed me all the days of my life. I’d often see a young boy at the school, usually with somebody else he’d no doubt dragged out with him, throwing a football around. That young man was Dan Marino, future NFL quarterback and one of the best to ever play the game.
Sandy and I often rode the same bus as Franco Harris, an NFL rookie, as he was on his way to practice at Pitt Stadium. I wonder how many NFL rookies use public transportation today? Harris is best known for the “Immaculate Reception,” which took place on December 23, 1972 during the AFC divisional playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Oakland Raiders. In the last thirty seconds of the game, Steeler’s quarterback Terry Bradshaw threw a pass to receiver John Fuqua. The ball either bounced off the hands of Fuqua or the helmet of Raiders safety Jack Tatum. As the ball fell, Harris caught it (Did it touch the ground or not? Football purists still argue over that question) and ran it in for a touchdown.
That play has been chosen by the NFL as both the greatest, and also the most controversial, of all time.
I think it’s a perfect symbol for the randomness of human experience.
***
Every science graduate student must pass a nerve-wracking comprehensive oral exam. And if that’s not enough stress, mine was interrupted by a bomb scare and we had to evacuate the building.
The extra time didn’t go to waste though, as I took the opportunity to formulate a more precise answer to the question which had just been asked of me. The political turmoil and violence of that time is difficult to imagine, although the recent presidential election of 2020 might give some younger people an inkling of what we experienced then. I recall at one anti-war protest at Point State Park that the pro-war protestors broke through the mounted police barricade and tried to beat us with an American flagpole. In writing, such a scene might be called too “on the nose.”
I can imagine some editor somewhere saying, “No, Frank, the symbolism of peace protestors being beaten with an American flag is just too obvious. Come up with something a little subtler.” But that’s how I remember it. The image has never left me and flooded my memory this past January 2021.
Sadly, the times are not changing.
As the old proverb goes, “When the winds of change blow, some build walls and some build windmills.” In our history, the will to change dissipates quickly and we go back to our comfortable lives. We could hope this cycle will not repeat itself in 2021, but the only way to realize this hope is to be that change. That is why we write this book.
In May 1972, I earned my doctorate and take pride in the fact that the resulting publication is still occasionally referenced in recent manuscripts. Normally one would think this would be a cause for celebration in a family. But my mother, true to form, proclaimed that I became “the wrong kind of doctor” just to spite her. Sandy had just changed research advisors, and as a result it would take her another two years to finish her doctorate. This is not unusual. I’ve found a mentor-student relationship can often be more complex than a marriage.
While Sandy was still busy working on her doctorate, it was time for me to find a job. I heard Dr. Dane Boggs, head of the hematology division at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, give an exciting lecture about their work. He said the field of blood research needed more PhDs. I applied for and was hired as a research instructor for the whopping sum of ten thousand dollars a year, which was a three-fold increase over the stipend I’d been living on as a graduate student.
Ever since my days in NASA and that centrifuge, I have been fascinated with the study of blood. The ability of hematologic (blood) stem cells to produce large quantities of functional cells of at least twelve different cell types was a source of enormous fascination for me. In science, technological advances generally precede intellectual advances in science. In essence, we are almost always blind to reality until we are given new eyes with which to see.
In hematology, a key technological advance was the 1966 publications by Ray Bradley in Australia and Leo Sachs in Israel which described the ability of blood stem cells to grow and develop into functional blood cells as clumps (colonies) in semi-solid cultures, if provided the appropriate mix of nutrients and chemicals, usually called “media” as a source of factors.1 Years later I met Bradley and found him to be a generous and humble man, the very model to me of a good scientist. At the University of Pittsburgh, I chose to learn Bradley’s technique from Dr. Paul Chervenick and his technician, Joan Turner (née Allulunis), who later went on to a successful career of her own in science.
However, as I started to investigate these questions of which growth factors were needed to grow certain cell types, I began to realize my illusion that science promoted a completely free discussion of research data and its implications was being slowly eroded.
There were unspoken rules of the game, and I didn’t know them.
One of the unspoken rules was that the truth wasn’t determined by your data, but by your seniority. An example of this is publishing data. It is extremely difficult to get data published and recognized when one is publishing second and correcting errors in the first publication. The first publication on a new topic became unassailable dogma, difficult to amend. Reviewers of future papers or NIH grant proposals would cite the first publication as truth and reject the second publication, especially if the investigators of the correct publication were young or not part of the club.
In the case of the identification of the factors needed to grow blood stem cells, the unassailable dogma was that the factors needed to grow these cells were produced only by cells called macrophages. Testing this hypothesis, we found a cell type called T lymphocytes produced such factors. It took nearly three years, several rejections and revisions, and many colleagues arrogantly challenging the data, before it was published.2
However, before publication, I made the mistake of presenting the data in both oral and written form at a prestigious clinical investigator meeting. Another investigator took pictures of the data, and his publication on the same subject beat mine into press by a month. After I presented my paradigm-changing data, which would open new areas of research, the first question I received was, “Why aren’t you wearing a tie?”
I was learning that science could be a tough game. So, I resolved never to talk about data until it was in press and to buy a tie.
Another question we pursued was: Since there were so many different blood cell types, did each one of them need specific cell growth factors?
We addressed this question using cells grown in conditioned media from animals infected with parasites which developed eosinophilia. Doing this, we in the Chevernick lab were able to grow functional eosinophils in culture for the first time. Eosinophils are a type of blood cell which combats parasites and fungal infections, but also makes allergies and asthma worse. We named the factor the Eosinophil Growth and Differentiation Factor.3
My friend and future collaborator, Steve Bartelmez, confirmed the discovery using uninfected cells. Five years later, the name was changed from Eosinophil Growth and Differentiation Factor to IL-5, when another scientist cloned and sequenced the gene for the molecule. But in what was becoming an all-too-familiar pattern, that scientist was constantly disparaging the research Steve and I had conducted and claimed credit for the discovery of IL-5. As a result of IL-5, I rewrote a failed grant of Dr. Chevernick, which included in it a position for me at a higher salary. I never knew the outcome of the grant review until another scientist showed up to take the position meant for me. Mike Kolitsky, the person hired for my position, turned out to be a great guy and long-time friend with a nice career in science education.
The mentorship and collegiality I experienced at the University of Pittsburgh was almost too good for the real world. Yet, the downside of science was starting to creep into my psyche. I was starting to believe that education did not change a person’s basic character, just allowed for the more clever expression of it. Some scientists were going to be the most unethical people on the planet. Others would be the opposite.
Sports has always been an outlet which kept the corruption from overwhelming me. I found great relief in physical activity. Every day at lunch a bunch of guys would go to the gym and play an intense hour-long game of basketball to blow off steam.
The university was starting an intramural softball league for women and asked me to coach a team for the medical school. Few of the members, whether students, technicians, or professors, had ever played softball before. I encouraged Sandy to play and joked that it gave me an excuse to yell at her and she couldn’t say anything about it. I had great fun coaching that team for two years.
Several of my team, who worked on the ninth floor in the surgery unit, introduced me to their boss, Dr. Bernie Fisher. To call Dr. Fisher a great man is an understatement. In the early 1970s, he published data suggesting that a lumpectomy was as good, if not better, for some breast cancer victims than the radical mastectomy, which was the “standard of care” at the time.4 The savagery of the attacks on Dr. Fisher’s character for suggesting less radical surgery was so stunning that one might have thought he had advocated for the cannibalism of young children. In the midst of facing multiple accusations of scientific misconduct, Fisher persevered, conducting several clinical trials that supported his theory. I remember him telling me and others that, “For far too long, medicine had depended on anecdotes, opinions, and untested theories.” A favorite quote of his, which I later put up in my own lab at the National Cancer Institute, was, “In God we trust, everyone else better have data.” I often wondered how many women were needlessly butchered by the refusal to accept paradigm-shifting science, even after their claims had been proven by clinical trials.
I’m embarrassed to say it never dawned on me in my early years that women in science were treated differently than men. Some of the best graduate students I’d met at that time were women. I figured we were all treated like crap, since we were the junior scientists. One day, I received a call from Dr. Sharon Johnson, one of my favorite graduate school instructors. She informed me that she’d filed a discrimination suit against the medical school biochemistry department for denying her a promotion. They claimed much of her work was inadequate, alleging she was a poor instructor and failed to publish in top journals. I agreed to testify for her. The night before the trial was to begin, I received a call from the dean of the medical school, warning that if I testified it could, “severely damage my career.”
I did it anyway.
The university came off looking like a fool in the trial. One of the allegations from a fellow professor was that she didn’t publish in the leading journals. Most of her publications were in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The editor-in-chief of that journal was the chairman of Dr. Johnson’s department. That meant the university was claiming the chairman of its own department was heading a poorly respected journal. Dr. Johnson won the trial, but as you can imagine, the environment was so toxic against her that she left the university. It was a great loss, as she was a gifted teacher and researcher.
From this and other experiences, I’ve concluded that corrupt patriarchal systems allow predatory men to believe they can get away with anything. In addition, I’ve come to believe that the more educated, wealthy, or successful a man is, the greater the chances are that he will be a sexual predator.
The recognition of how women were being treated poorly in science and that the unrest of the sixties was still doing little to resolve lingering racial problems was deeply unsettling to me. I remember talking about these problems with Georgia, the wonderful African-American dishwasher for the laboratory, when she said to me, “Frank, you’re too impatient. It’s always two steps forward, one step back.”
***
While I was thoroughly enjoying my hematological research at the University of Pittsburgh, Sandy was finishing her doctoral work and I thought it was time for us to move on to more senior research positions. She was interested in working in the National Cancer Institute’s intramural program and had attended a seminar given by Dr. Robert Gallo. She realized Dr. Gallo was interested in the same kind of research questions I’d been pursuing and suggested I put in an application with him.
In December 1974, Gallo and I were both attending a meeting of the American Society of Hematology, and he suggested we meet. I thought it would be a routine job interview, but instead it was more like a high-pressure sales pitch from Gallo.
“Don’t you want to be working in a lab that will someday win a Nobel Prize?” he asked me at several points during our m
eeting. That alone should have been a red flag.
His other pitches to me were that I could study the growth factor that caused leukemic stem cells to grow continuously in culture, study the virus which caused acute myelogenous leukemia, and have a salary that was a considerable increase from my current one at the University of Pittsburgh.
We found an apartment in a nearby complex where several scientists at the National Institutes of Health (the parent institution of the National Cancer Institute) lived. In fact, so many of the researchers lived in this complex that there was a shuttle bus which ran between it and the various parts of the NIH campus. I occasionally found myself seated next to Dr. Julius Axelrod, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1970, and we had some interesting and lively discussions.
But while there were many scientists from whom I would learn exciting and revolutionary ideas, it was at the hands of Dr. Gallo that I was about to get an Ivy League education in unethical behavior.
CHAPTER THREE
National Cancer Institute: Discovery and Disillusionment
See how fortune deludes us and that which we carefully put in her hands, she either breaks or causes it to be removed by the violence of another, or suffocates and poisons, or taints with suspicion, fear and jealousy to the great hurt of the possessor.
—Giordano Bruno
I arrived at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in March 1975 and was stunned to discover that most of what Gallo had promised to me in December turned out to be a lie. I later realized that when he spun out his elaborate sales pitch of my future work, he knew it to be false. To understand how this happened, some background is necessary.
The confluence of the NCI’s 1964 Special Viral Cancer Program, (SVCP)1 and Nixon’s War on Cancer Act, passed in 1971, meant that more money was available through contracts outside of the peer-review grant mechanism funding process than ever before. The first year, the budget was forty-nine million dollars for the NCI (an amount equivalent to about $320 million in 2021), and the budget increased every year after that. This caused a great deal of professional jealousy among scientists who weren’t in the government loop. The structures by which these financial decisions were made tended to be concentrated in the hands of relatively few government scientists/bureaucrats, like Gallo. For the first time, scientists were able to build large laboratory empires using the public trough rather than going through the peer-reviewed grant process of slowly building their labs as their colleagues (peers) agreed they were pursuing meaningful questions.
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