The HistoryMakers

The following program was funded in part by Toyota. AT&T, Baldwin Richardson Foods, Lincoln Financial Group, Apple, American Airlines. A complete list is available,

at https

//www.thehistorymakers.or/ (soft piano music) (crowd clapping) Thank you for having me here this evening. You know, one of the best parts of being a journalist is the fact that I can investigate a wide range of topics. And tonight I get to delve into the world of biology, with the leading minds in the field of that science. Our first guest's interest in chemistry, began at an early age.

When he was in elementary school and liked to mix the contents of his household medicine cabinet. I'm sure mom and dad loved that. He received his BS degree in chemistry from Morgan State College in 1974, and subsequently pursued his PhD with a major in Biochemistry and a minor in Neurobiology, from Cornell University. He received a coveted Postdoctoral Staff Fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health, before being appointed Assistant Professor of Biology at Brown University in 1983.

And later, Associate Professor in 1989. At Brown, he serves as the Upjohn Professor of Pharmacology and chair of the department. His current work includes a complex field that combines Chemistry, Pharmacology, Neuroscience, and cancer biology. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr.

Wayne Bowen. (crowd clapping) Thank you very much for that introduction. It's really a pleasure and an honor to be here tonight, to talk to you about some of the work we've been doing on Sigma receptors in cancer. However, since those two kids in the video have already cured cancer, I probably don't have to say too much.

How many of you out there have known someone who has had cancer or whose lives have been impacted by cancer? Lots of hands go up. So cancer, as you know, is a very prevalent and widely spread disease. And what we're trying to do, is find novel ways to treat cancer.

So what, so what is cancer? Cancer is the abnormal and uncontrolled growth of cells in the body. And most cells have a built in biochemical program that will initiate a sort of cellular suicide, after the cell reaches a certain age, or after it has gone through a certain number of divisions. This process is called apoptosis or programmed cell death.

And cancer cells have learned how to turn this process off. They've been able to disable this process so that they continue to divide and divide. And cell growth can also be stimulated by our body's own growth hormone. So for example, some breast cancers are stimulated by estrogen, the female sex hormone.

Prostate cancer can be stimulated by some derivatives of testosterone. So cancer cells sort of hijack our own cellular systems for cell survival. And these abnormal cells can spread from the original tumor site to other sites, by a process called metastasis. And there are various ways to treat cancer, but most of the problems with the current drugs that are used to treat cancer, as you know, there are lots of side effects, hair loss, vomiting, all sorts of, of very bad side effects.

And this is because these drugs tend to be not so specific. They kill cancer cells in addition to our normal cells, and that produces all of the side effects. So a one thrust today, is to try and find more specific ways to target cancer cells and so our work, the impact that I think that our work will have for medicine, is to find a novel target and this particular way of treating cancers, called targeted therapies, where you find a molecule in the cell that you can target with drugs, that will turn that cell death process back on. And the way we are trying to do that, is through activating Sigma receptors.

Now, what are receptors? Receptors are proteins in the cell, or on the cell or in the cell, that specifically recognize chemical substances, like drugs or hormones. And when the drug or hormone binds to the receptor, it turns on a series of biochemical steps that I say some biochemistry happens here, which ultimately results in a response in the cell. And what we're trying to do, is target the Sigma receptors, to produce a response and in this case, it would be turning back on that process of cell death so that we can kill the cells.

The evidence that Sigma receptors are involved in cancer are many fold. One is that tumor cells, both solid tumors and set what we call cell lines. And I'll say more about cell lines later, express high levels of these Sigma-2 receptors. And in fact, the levels of these receptors go up even higher, when the cells are in a state of rapid proliferation.

So aggressive cancer types that divide rapidly and develop tumors a very readily, express even higher levels of these receptors. And most importantly, we've discovered the compounds that bind to this receptor are able to kill the tumor cells. This slide is a list of some of the cancer types that, that express Sigma-2 receptors. And what we use in our studies are cell lines, which are actually cells that are taken from tumors.

And this brings me to an interesting side story. The very first cell line that was developed, came from an African-American woman, whose name was Henrietta lacks. She went to Johns Hopkins hospital in 1951 with cervical cancer, and they removed the cancer from her cervix, and put some of the cells in culture. And these cells have been used for many studies about cancer, and we've learned a lot about these cells and there's sort of a controversy brewing now because the family of Henrietta lacks, would like to get some compensation for that, because they're called Hilo cells, but no one really has associated this name with the cell lines.

It also brings to light another interesting thing about these cell lines, is that while cancer may ultimately kill the patient, these cells continue to proliferate forever. Henrietta Lacks passed away in 1951, and people are still using these cancer cells today. So this inability to die is very, very robust in these cells. And so what we're trying to do is turn on the cell death process.

We've gone into the laboratory and synthesized and made new drugs that we know will bind to this receptor. I'm working with my chemist friends, we've been able to synthesize these compounds, test them and prove that they actually bind to the receptor, and we're now using these compounds, to kill the cancer cells. This slide shows one type of cancer cell, a neuroblastoma, on the left are the control cells and on the right are cells treated with one of these drugs. And the yellow dots indicate that the cells are dying by this process of apoptosis, indicating that we've been able to turn back on this process with the drug.

Our data sort of looks like this. On the vertical axis is the level of cell death, the amount of cell death that you get. On the horizontal axis is the dose of the drug that's exposed to the cells. And this is cells that have been exposed for 24 hours and it shows that as you increase the dose of the drug, you get more and more cell death.

This slide shows the same thing for a breast tumor cell line. And this slide shows the same thing for pancreatic cancer cell lines. So what I've shown you is that three very prevalent types of cancer, can be potentially treated with these Sigma-2 receptor targeted drugs. Neuroblastoma, or brain tumors, breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer.

And we suspect that many other types of cancer can be treated with this drugs as well. We're also interested in the cell death mechanism. As a pharmacologist, we're always interested in how drugs work, what biochemical pathways are being turned on by these drugs. This is a very complicated slide, just showing some of the biochemical processes that go on in this programmed cell death process.

And we're able to trace the pathway to cell death and actually determine the mechanism by which the cells are dying after they've been exposed to these these drugs. So we think that this is a very promising approach, and hopefully we'll be able to bring this to the clinic, in terms of treating cancer as a modality. Finally, I'd like to end with one last approach and that's diagnostic tumor imaging. We know that one of the problems with cancer is that sometimes it's detected much too late to treat.

And so physicians would like to have a way of diagnosing cancer very early on. And we think that if we could design the correct molecule, tag these tumor cells in an animal, and then put the animal in a scanner, you would be able to visualize the visualize the tumor. And this is a result of, this is a mouse that's been implanted with a melanoma, a tumor cell line, it forms a tumor in the thigh muscle. We then inject the mouse with the Sigma drug.

It's a radioactive Sigma drug, put the animal in a scanner and what you're seeing there, that yellow spot that's the tumor. So we think that you can actually visualize tumors very early on, see where they've gone, and this will aid the physician in treating cancer. So I hope what, I've, what I've explained to you as a new approach we're trying to develop. This drug is far from being in the clinic yet, but we are at the very early stages, and hopefully we'll be able to use this approach to help save more people from dying of cancer.

Thank you. (crowd clapping) Thank you so much, Dr. Bowen. Fascinating work you're doing there.

Our next guest, comes to us originally from Muskogee, Oklahoma, where he attended Manual Training High School. He received his BA degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard university in 1963, and went onto the university of California, Berkeley, where in 1968, he earned his PhD in Biochemistry, under the tutelage of Dr. C.E Ballou. Now, after serving as the associate chairman for space and facilities in biology at the University of Michigan, he moved to Emory University in 1989, to serve as its Dean, in the graduate school of arts and sciences and vice president, for research and graduate studies.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. George Jones. (crowd clapping) Well, good evening everyone. So to begin with, how many of you in the audience have ever had an infection or any infectious disease?

Let's see your hands. A lot of you. So if you've had any such problem, you almost certainly were infected by a microorganism. So what I hope to do in the next, no more than five minutes, is to convince you that it is a small world, because of the fact that microorganisms play an extremely important role in human affairs.

So, what are we talking about first of all, when we're talking about microorganisms? They're the organisms that you would think of. Viruses are microorganisms, bacteria, fungi, protozoans like amoeba. All of these are classified as microorganisms, and again, all of them play a part in nature and a part in determining the human condition.

As you are no doubt, all very well aware, there are many bad things that microorganisms do to us. Dr. Bowen has already told you about one. There are some forms of cancer that are caused by viruses.

In particular, cervical cancer in women, has been shown in many cases to be caused by a virus called Human Papilloma Virus. So, and that's not the only example. There are other examples of viruses that cause cancer as well. In the news, quite a lot these days, as you are well aware is Swine flu.

Swine flu is caused by a virus. How many of you got your Swine flu shots? I got mine. Colds, even the common cold is caused by viruses.

And again, a very devastating disease that is still much in the news is AIDS. AIDS is also caused by a virus, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. And I've highlighted Tuberculosis here, although it's not a viral disease, it's a bacterial disease, because of the fact that tuberculosis is a disease that we thought we had eliminated about 20 or 25 years ago, but it's come back in the last decade or so. And it's come back primarily as a result of its association with HIV and AIDS.

Tuberculosis is one of the major infections, suffered by AIDS victims. And it's one of the major causes of death among those victims. So again, it's a bacterial infection that we thought we'd eliminated from the population, but the prevalence and the resurgence of HIV infections has also brought tuberculosis infections along with it. So there are many other diseases that I think you probably know, a lot of them that are caused by microorganisms.

Those are the bad things that microorganisms do to us. But they're also good things that microorganisms do for us. And I'm not going to give you a complete list, but as I like to tell my students in the courses that I teach, microorganisms, don't need us, but we do need them. Life on this planet, human life in particular, would not be possible without microorganisms.

In our intestinal tracts, and the intestinal tracts of everyone in this room right now, there are bacteria growing, that assist us in digesting the food that we take in. We provide them with nutrients, they help us to digest those food stuffs, so both of us benefit from that relationship. And without them, we'd have a lot more trouble, digesting those big Macs and French fries. But in addition to the bad things, the good things, they're also sort of annoying conditions that microorganisms cause, that are not necessarily life threatening, but are problems nevertheless.

So I'm gonna give you a little quiz. I'm gonna give you the name of a microorganism, and then I'm gonna give you a sentence that tells you a little bit about what it does. And let's see if you can actually guess the condition that the micro microorganism actually causes. So let's begin.

Propionibacterium acnes, may make it difficult to save face. What does that cause? Acne. Propionibacterium acnes is one of the bacterial species that causes acne.

Microsporum, try to worm your way out of this one. Ringworm. Microsporum is a fungus. Ringworms are not caused by worms, it's actually a fungal infection and microsporum is one of the fungal species that causes ringworm.

Pityrosporum ovalis, head and shoulders above all the others. Head and shoulders in quotation marks. Dandruff. Pityrosporum ovalis causes dandruff.

Streptococcus sobrinus, keep smiling, even if it hurts. What? What? Tooth decay, Streptococcus sobrinus causes cavities.

Again, one of many bacteria that grow in the mouth, infect teeth and cause cavities. And finally, Trichophyton, LeBron and Kobe may have to deal with this one. Athlete's foot. Trichophyton is another fungus that causes athlete's foot.

So again, these are examples of conditions that are not life threatening, but certainly can be annoying. All of which are caused by microorganisms. Finally, my own research deals with a group of bacteria called Streptomyces, that are notable for their production of antibiotics. We have any gardeners in the audience?

If you've ever picked up a handful of fresh garden soil and smelled it, what you smell in part, are compounds that are produced by these bacteria called Streptomyces. They live in the soil, they produce antibiotics in the soil, and those antibiotics can be used to treat human infections. In fact, roughly three quarters of all of the antibiotics used worldwide to treat infectious diseases, are made as natural products by this group of bacteria. So what my research deals with, is the mechanisms, the ways in which they manufacture these antibiotics.

And what we wanna try to do as sort of a longer term goal, is to get the organisms that we already know make these antibiotics, to make more than they normally do. And maybe even to be able to get them to make antibiotics that we haven't been able to, that we haven't seen them make so far. So it is a small world, microorganisms are everywhere and they play a critical and essential role in the human condition. Thank you.

(crowd clapping) Thank you. Dr. Jones. Makes science sound fun.

Our next panelist traveled the shortest distance to be here this evening, but had the longest journey, to be in Columbus. He is a native of Ghana, but now resides in the Columbus area. He attended and graduated from Ghana National College, in Cape Coast, Ghana in 1969. He then went on to attend the University of Ghana, medical school, earning his MD degree in 1976.

Between 76 and 1977, he interned at the University of Ghana, medical school. Now in 1978, after completing his residency in Philadelphia, he moved to Columbus to work as a fellow in endocrinology and metabolism at the Ohio state university, in 1996. He was appointed director of the Division of Endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism, and served as interim chairman, for the Department of Internal Medicine at the Ohio State University in 1999. In 2005, he was named Ralph Kirk's, Endowed Professor of Medicine, a position he still currently holds.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Kwame Osei. (crowd capping) Good evening, everybody. Okay, I didn't hear you well.

Good evening. -

Crowd

at https

Good evening. - Okay, we are awake. Thanks everybody for coming tonight. I also want to thank you Unana Richardson, when I got a phone call from her, but I won't tell you the long story.

So I'm here, I'm pleased to be here to join her and these history and science makers. My job is gonna be very easy. Who knows anybody or somebody with diabetes? 90%, so can I walk out of this stage?

No. All right, what we're gonna be talking about is epidemic of diabetes. And you will see that there are differences in diabetes, in different populations. So my focus will be predominantly in African Americans.

What we see recently is the epidemic of diabetes in the world. And I just wanna give you some numbers and we'll come back home and I'll give you the numbers for the United States. Here, we are looking at 2000, we had 151 million people with diabetes. 2010, this year, we will be experiencing 221 million people with diabetes.

Then you project yourself. Most of us, hopefully it will be alive by 2025. There'll be almost 300 million people who have diabetes. So this gives you a little bit of what we are faced with.

So what you see here, if you have diabetes, remember you are not alone, you'll have a companion, almost 300 million people come in 2025. What we also know, is that in African Americans in general, we have more diabetes when compared to whites. And indeed 3 million African Americans would have diabetes this year, or have diabetes, or the most important thing is that one in three of every African American over 65, will have diabetes. So it's very, very common.

One reason this is more important, and I will skip some of the slides, is the complications. Those who have diabetes, our fear for diabetes, is not the sugar alone, but what it does to the vessels. The heart, and here, I'm giving an example, end stage kidney disease. How many people have it?

If you look at African Americans, we are disproportionately affected by kidney failure. And if you go to average dialysis, almost half of the people who are there will be African Americans. The same thing applies to amputation. And you can see that on a slide.

So we got a problem and we need to find a way to do it, to prevent diabetes. So I've been told that I can skip my slides and show you what we can do. We are blessed that this is a disease that's preventable, so we don't have to have it. And the way to do that is to do a couple of things.

Exercise every day and lose some weight. It's easier said than done, but it's hard to do. All right, so the study that I will show you briefly is a very simple study. They asked people to lose some weight, 10 pounds.

That's all that asked them to do. Exercise 30 minutes a day, five times a week, that's it. You can reduce the rate of diabetes by 50 to 60%. You can cut it by half.

Can we all do that? Just 30 minutes a day, five times a week. I know we can, all right? So we can do that and therefore we are ready to go and prevent diabetes.

That will be the end of my talk. Thank you so much. (crowd clapping) Thank you Dr. Osei.

Last, but certainly not least, we have a native of Chicago, who attended the Illinois Institute of Technology, where in 1964, he attended his, he attained rather, his BS degree in Biology with a focus in Biochemistry. He remained in Chicago for his doctoral studies and pursued his PhD in Biochemistry, at the University of Illinois, at Chicago. He then received an assistant professorship in the Biochemistry and Biophysics departments at the University of California, San Francisco. The institution where he would serve in various capacities for the next four decades.

He also has received the honor of Professor of Biochemistry Emeritus, from the University of California, in 2001. He has a long history of public service, as well as service to the University of California. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. John Watson.

(crowd clapping) Greetings. So today I am a Professor Emeritus, which means I'm retired. (crowd laughing) But over those, the time before I retired, my research focused for over 30 years, in understanding how cells regulate the formation and the breakdown of natural compounds. A particular class of natural compounds that are called, that are not soluble in water, and they're called lipids or fats.

How many of you have had friends or know someone who've died of heart attacks? When those heart attacks come about, one of the high risk factors associated with it, is altered metabolism and utilization of a lipid called cholesterol. Cholesterol is a very complex lipid molecule, but your body makes it. Your body makes it, but also if you don't have it, you die.

There's no cell in the mammalian or the human body, if you do not have cholesterol, you will die. So your body is fortunate enough to be able to make it. We're not dependent upon our diet to have cholesterol there. However, we all eat eggs and we all eat meat and all sorts of other foods that contain cholesterol.

And it's this combination of the synthesis of, the making of cholesterol and the dietary cholesterol that can contribute to too much cholesterol being in the blood vessels. And that extra level, that high amounts of cholesterol can contribute to a major risk factor in Atherosclerosis. And of heart disease. And heart disease is the major cause of death in the United States.

So studying how cells control on the making of cholesterol becomes very important, in the sense that, to the extent we understand how cells make cholesterol, we could control the formation of it and reduce the incidents of heart attacks. That I was blessed in my career to be able to be engaged in research that focused on developing drugs and strategies to block the making of cholesterol and today, through the work of, I contributed to it, but also the advance in science of such a nature, there are now drugs available, that will reduce the making of cholesterol and reduce the incidents of heart attacks. One of those drugs is called Lipitor. And I know that you heard about it on TV.

My efforts in science was fun. I mean, being a scientist is a lot of fun because you can be creative and your creativity is a reflection of you. It also gave me an opportunity to be engaged in training and developing young new scholars. So for the youngsters out there, I'd say, go for it, look for it in science, because science provides you opportunities to do many different things, as you heard from my colleagues, we're all to doing different, pursuing different elements in science, and we all enjoy it.

We all have smiles on our face. Thank you. (crowd clapping) One basic question that everybody, well, at least I have tonight, and you can answer it for us and help shed some light for other people. What is Biology?

Let's start with you doctor. Well, biology I think in general, is the study of life, the study of the processes that give rise to life, the processes that maintain life and the processes that actually end life. So I talked about one aspect of biology and in terms of cancer, but all of us are dealing with the biological field in one way or another. Dr.

Jones? Well, I certainly would agree with Wayne's definition, but let me just add that sort of the subtitle for our conversation tonight from molecules demand, biology really even extends beyond that because there are elements of biology that have to do with the way biological communities interact with each other, how populations interact with each other. Ecology and evolutionary biology, for example. So there are so many aspects of, again, the human condition, of the condition of life on earth that are appropriate subjects for study in biology.

Dr. Osei? I think we have to add plant biology because there's interaction between humans and a plant. And most of our products come from plants and therefore understanding of both the human and ecological, and the plant is where our life comes from.

Dr. Watson. I would agree with all my colleagues obviously, biology is the essence of life. And that essence of life takes reactions and forms it into some expression, or the expression of what we call life.

And it results in function and form. And biology has multiple layers and there's integrative elements of it. And we, all living things are connected. So when you begin to destroy or to lose any element in that whole sphere of biology, you have an impact in other dimensions.

I truly appreciate tonight, how in your presentations, you really broke it down as far as you could, in lay terms. It's very technical, a lot of what you do, and with a lot of syllables and all of that, but you helped explain a lot of things. And we learned something about our bodies and our lifestyles just by listening to your conversation. But for the budding scientists out there, the folks who wanna be where you are today.

Tell me about what first motivated you to get involved in the sciences, and why is that your passion now? Doctor? Well, in my case, I sort of always knew that I wanted to be a scientist. I was always an inquisitive kid, I got in a lot of trouble for playing around in the medicine cabinet, as was indicated earlier.

But that was part of my curiosity, and basically science is sort of trying to figure out how things work. And I knew that it was either going to be chemistry or nuclear physics and I was telling, as I was telling the high schoolers, earlier this morning, I learned pretty quickly that it wasn't gonna be Nuclear Physics because I wasn't that good in math. And so chemistry won out, and I pursued it and it's been a lot of fun. So there's hope for us - There's hope for everybody.

who are challenged with math? Dr. Jones? Well I too have, essentially always wanted to be a scientist from, I can't remember ever wanting to be anything else.

And I was also telling the, I told the high school students this morning, that as my introduction said, I grew up in a little town in Northeastern, Oklahoma. And I used to go out at night in a place like Columbus, Atlanta, cities now with shopping malls and so forth, the lights of the city basically keep you from seeing what's going on in the sky, but a little town in Northeastern Oklahoma at night, the sky is full of stars. Just totally packed with stars. I'd go out at night and I'd look up at the sky and I'd say, "What's going on out there?

Can I figure that out? what is nature saying, that I can learn something about?" And that passion again has simply followed me all through my scientific career. Again, as I said to the students this morning, one of the things that excites me, is that essentially every day, I discover something new. Something that nobody else has ever found out before.

And that, you can't beat that. A curious mind, thank you doctor. Dr. Osei?

Yes, my pathway is little different from the two of my colleagues, in the sense that I come from a typical African village. So talk about science, in those villages where you have no electricity, you have no lights, you have no water. So I'm a delayed coming into the science. And my understanding came through and my interest actually developed when I, surely I went to college.

I was going to college after high school to do math. I beat you on that one. Very good, excellent. I was, "This is gonna be the engineer." All right?

So I got a letter from the medical school to come for interview and I went for the interview. And luckily I was accepted and you know, so I move on. But my passion is to ask questions about what is life? What's out there?

like you said. But also interesting is that, can we make people healthier and live better? And that has been my goal. My goal is what can we do everyday when you wake up, to contribute to the betterment of somebody's life?

And that's where my curiosity comes from. So when I give lectures to my students, the students have so much passion for diabetes. I said, "Yeah, because this is a deadly disease, but it's preventable disease." So we have to have passion and we think we can overcome diabetes. Thank you.

Dr. Watson, why did you get involved in the sciences? It turned me on. Okay.

(all laughing) So my interest in science, again, it's really interesting that, you know, you really don't just make someone be a scientist, it has to be coming internally. And as a kid, I had an interest in science, always had an interest in chemistry, explore, like to go into the unknown and understand, and I never lost that desire, that kind of turn on that you get from it being engaged in science. And it's, even though I've retired, I'm still engaged in aspects of science. And I think that, you know, it's, another dimension of it is that it's an expression of your creativity.

It's like an artist or, where you can identify a project, a problem, you are engaged in it, your ideas of what it is, it was contributing to driving it. And as George said, each time that you turn the corner, and you go there, you're seeing things and doing things that no one else has done. So that's all - That's great,that's great. They're all explorers still.

Dr. Bowen, what do you feel is your greatest contribution to the science that you're in? I think it's the work that I talked about today. We were among one of the first labs to discover the Sigma-2 receptor back in the late 80's and we've been working on the problem ever since, trying to figure out what the protein did, what the receptor did.

And then once we figured out that it was expressed in cancer cells and that drugs could be designed, that would kill cancer cells via that medium, we've been trying to see if we could exploit that, to bring novel drugs to the clinics. So hopefully the longterm goal is, we be a contribution to the development of a new drug target that would open up new vistas and new ways of curing cancer. Dr. Jones, microorganisms.

Talk to us about your contributions there. What do you think your greatest contribution has been? Well, scientifically, I would probably think that my greatest contribution has been the fact that my laboratory about now almost over 25 years ago, was one of the first laboratories to actually clone a gene that was involved in the biosynthesis, the production, the manufacturer of an antibiotic. That that was a time when those kinds of techniques were just being developed.

And so our ability to do that was really a significant breakthrough. But I guess in sort of the, from the sort of larger perspective, I would consider perhaps one of my greatest accomplishments, the impact that I have had on the lives of other young budding scientists. One of the things I again said to the high school students this morning, and one of the things of which I'm proudest, it's the very first paper that I published, when I got to the University of Michigan as a faculty member, was published with an undergraduate, a black undergraduate. He subsequently went on to get an MD from Harvard, he became an Associate Professor at Harvard, and he's now in private practice.

And so my feeling is that, as important as the science is, it's at least as important that I have an impact on those lives that I touch as an educator. Thank you. Dr. Osei, you talked a very penetratingly about diabetes and how it affects African Americans in particular.

What do you think your greatest contribution has been in that field? I think my greatest contribution has been trying to understand why there are ethnic differences in the diabetes. I showed you the slide, which showed that African Americans are more likely to have diabetes, when they do, they have, you know, they're more likely also to have complications of the disease. So the questions why, that's a curious mind, ask the question and try and follow it.

So we have, you know, about 25 years ago, we started the journey of going back to Africa and doing studies in Africa because, you know, obviously African Americans originated from the motherland and therefore they share the same gene. So it will allow us to define what's genetic and what is environmental. And we were amazed when we went to Africa to do the studies. When we look at people of the same age, the same body size, that we could not find major differences.

If you took them across the continent and didn't matter where they lived, this was probably the best thing we could do at that time to find the ethnic differences. We know that whites are The whites are different from us. So our contribution was to try trying to understand what happened to us, what has changed and ladies and gentlemen, nothing has changed. Your lifestyle is the commonest problem that we have across.

We've found out that genetics of the two diseases in Africa and here is the same. The difference is the rate of obesity that we have over here, which is overweight and obesity in African Americans, is equal to 60%, 70% over there, the rate of obesity is about 14, 15% and overweight about 30%. However, ladies and gentlemen, don't stop there. They are catching up.

So they are on your way to be like us. So one day we'll have the same rate of diabetes. So our contribution was going back home to the motherland and understanding what's going on out here. And that actually has given us opportunity to do more studies.

One of the things that we are doing is to understand why, again, we have more blood pressure and the same thing. We've gone back home to connect our heritage with what has happened here. And we have collaboratives in England doing the same thing. And, you know, I will also agree with you that, I have a gentleman sitting right there, who was one of my students.

And this is (indistinct) campus. This is to me, the most excitement. I have doctors in town, Mark White, somebody to talk to today and said, "Do you know Dr. Mark White?

I said that was my student 1992, you know. And that is, to me, the most exciting thing about being an academic institution and be a researcher. How do we influence people and to see them grow. So I always say, one day when we are gone, you guys will take over, now we want you to be the best.

So Quinn and others who are here, are a testimony to the passion we have, to make them the best people they can be. Thank you, Dr. Washington. (crowd clapping) Contribution, your greatest contribution you think during your career.

Sometimes it's difficult to identify the greatest. Sure, sure. But what I'm proud of and what I feel good about, is the fact that my efforts have been always oriented toward developing new models. Because one of the things in terms of trying to dissect problems, is having systems that allow you to analyze and to probe, so you can get an understanding of whatever you're studying.

And along the way, there were two models that I developed that help in the contribution of understanding aspects of cholesterol, of fat metabolism. And, and then the other, which is the real excitement, is having students in the lab and training them and having such an impact on the particular focus group that I have, in terms of African American students. And I've been very, very proud of the results. There are a number of students who have gone on to PhDs, there a number of students who have distinguished themselves in science, either in terms of the applied science or the investigator side.

I imagine the road hasn't been just smoothly paved for you. We we've got a pothole problem in Columbus, Ohio tonight. Let's talk about the potholes along the way, getting where you are today. What do you think has been your biggest failure and how you overcame that?

Boy! Biggest failure? I think my biggest failure was the C I got in Physical Chemistry, when I was in, in college, I'd gotten straight A's and everything else. When it came to physical chemistry, I got a C and I had to work really hard to overcome that and learn that material, so that was a pothole that didn't didn't derail me, but it certainly took me down a notch.

In terms of research, research is just difficult. It's full of potholes, you know, every 90% or even higher percentage of the experiments that you do don't work. And so you have to sort of have a way about you that perseveres. So there's, there's, there's potholes all along the way, and to be a scientist, a successful scientist, you have to be the type of person that does not derail.

You can't get a flat tire every time you run over one of these potholes, so, yeah. Thank you, Dr. Jones? That's a hard question to answer.

And let me take sort of, a different sort of a crack at it. I'm not, it would be, it's difficult for me to point out a single failure. - sure. Cause they've been a lot of them, but something that I certainly would have done differently, having the opportunity, do it again, as you indicated in your introduction, I spent a number of years in academic administration.

I enjoyed that, I learned a lot from it, especially about how universities work. But at the end of that period, what I realized was that at my very core, what I am is a scientist and having it all to do over again, I probably would never have gone into administration. Thank you, Dr. Osei.

We still need administrators. I think I would also change the question a little bit and define failure. And I think, I always tell my students, "Failure is somebody who falls and they stayed down there and they don't wanna get up and fight back." And so long as you fall and you're willing to get back and try and work your way through you'll be a success. So always empower the students.

Don't look at the fail, actually, fail is good sometimes. When you fail, it makes you wake up. It kicks something in your brain, in your heart. "Why did I fail?" It makes us go to set your soul and find answers.

And almost invariably, the answer you're gonna have this time is better than the one you were trying to accomplish when you started. So I always empower them, think yourself that there will be potholes in Columbus. There'd be a lot of them. Have thick skin, believe in yourself that when you fall, you'll get up, but if you fall and you stay down there, that's it, you'll fail.

So that's how I look at it. Just as we get ready to get Dr. Watson's comments on failure and overcoming, there are those of you who may have a question, if you'd like to step to the microphone there and line up, we'll start getting to you too. We wanna hear from you tonight as well.

Dr. Watson, let's talk a little bit about failure and overcoming that. Yeah, that's a, so I was asked that earlier today and I kind of turn it around because I look at failure, is it can suggest an absolutism. Yeah, and I like to look at the lack of achieving something, as an opportunity to learn.

So if you got a C on your exam, that's your opportunity now to find out, "What did I do wrong?" And from that grow and to be more productive. And as all of us who are experimentalists, know that part of doing independent research is the being able to have patience. Because you have ideas and you wanna test them and you go into the laboratory and you go around testing it, and then it doesn't work and all that. And sometimes it doesn't work because you really made a broad mistake.

Sometimes it works because your idea was stupid, and so it's the times when you have success that give you the energy that allows you to go through dry periods. So you get fat, and it may only be for a month or two, and then you get lean again, and then you come back, but each time you do, you're advancing. And that's the joy, that's the joy. Great baseball players, you know, they strike out more than eight home runs, don't they?

But they keep coming back to the plate. Sir, we'll take your question. I've enjoyed it, thank you. My name is Curtis Juul, and I'm a businessman here locally in town, but I've been on the board of this institution for many years and served as vice chair for a time because I have a passion for the young folk to learn math and science at an early age, because this institution has always been an institution where you learn math and science and have fun.

Which means kids need to get started early and not be intimidated by math and science, which many of our youngsters are, and never go into the sciences. Do you gentlemen have anything to offer, given the limited number of individual mentors like yourselves, but to recommend what institutions can do to bring that math and science to kids at an early age in a fun way and not have it be perceived as so honorous, as to be intimidated and afraid of it and not get knocked down and don't get back up? Thank you, let's start with you, Dr. Bowen.

Well, I think you're absolutely right, in that you have to start early. Most of the kids that I, young kids that I come in contact with, just sort of naturally have an interest in science because they're naturally curious. But something happens as they get older and they reach a point where maybe they think science is just too hard or they don't have, they don't have mentors. Part of the problem is in the schools with science not being made fun.

So I think part of it is, is a change in attitude of how scientists are and we're all sort of normal people, we're not nerdy or anything like that. I was telling them, I was telling the kids this morning, I, you know, I play drums, I play in a band, I have a normal life. So it can be fun. So part of it is overcoming the sort of stigma of being a scientist.

The mad scientist, you know, the image that you see in, that you see in the movies. But again, it's basic basic reading skills, basic math skills and writing has to be instilled because you need those, not only for science, but for just everything, it's just about everything you do. Dr. Jones?

I'd like to return to a point that Wayne made that I think is essential here. And that is that even given my commitment to science from a very early age, I think my perspective was that science is here and life is here. And I think we've got to impress on kids that that's not the way it is, that science and life are the same things. That science can be fun because there are all sorts of things in life that science helps us to understand, and that they can learn about science, they can learn the hard things that they need to know about science, simply by looking at examples from real life.

And I think when we do that, we can get them excited about it because they see, that not only is the science fun for its own sake, but it's also fun and important because of what it tells us about the world, in which we live. Thank you, Dr. Osei? Yeah, I think, I totally agree with what the previous speakers have said.

And I think what we need to do is start very early, bring science to them, both in the classroom and at home. We need a curriculum that should really stretch our science as a fun thing you can do. And that's how you live your life everyday. If there's a dissociation between what science is, and how they live every day.

And since they don't see the money value coming from science, they can see the basketball player who can, and see all these ads, they have the shoes, they buy their clothes. They can see the money tomorrow and they think it's shorter to get there, than science. And so we need to say, you don't have to have all the millions in the world, in a bank, but you can be a very happy scientist. There has to be a communication at that level to the kids.

And I can, I was talking to some of the students. I asked one of them, "What do you wanna do in life?" "I wanna be a basketball player." "Okay, Why?" "I wanna make some money." And he was honest about that, but I said, you know, "One in a million chance that you will make that money, but maybe one in 500 chances are that you'll be a scientist. Where would you wanna put your money?" But probably I didn't convince him, because he was wearing Nike shoes, all these nice fancy things, and he can see that, the money's here, I can see it tomorrow and take care of my family, but he doesn't see that to make it, one in a million is almost zero from my point of view, yeah. Thank you, Dr.

Watson? Well, each of us have had junctures in our life where there's been a person who, or a set of individuals who gave us that nudge, gave us that level of support, that we did a mid course correction and turned a little bit. And then someone else came along, coupled with our own internal desire to achieve and do things. Because, the question comes down to even the basketball player, is a person who makes it into the professional, he's an achiever.

This is the person that's playing basketball, out in that snow, trying to perfect the shot, you know, 24/7. Well, the same logic is involved in being successful as a scientist or a writer or anything. You have to be able to make a commitment. The money issue, is that, is in such a nature that you know, you're not, you may not.

I won't say you cannot, but you may not get rich being a scientist, but got the fun you can have for the rest of your life. You can't play basketball the rest of your life, and you are making a contribution that can be lasting. Some real income, thank you. We're out of time.

Isn't that a wonderful thing to say? In that we have so much to talk about and we're just out of time for it. Let's give a round of applause to our speakers tonight (crowd applauding) Dr. Wayne Bowen, Dr.

George Jones, Dr. Kwame Osei, and Dr. John Watson. Raffle winners for free copies of these science makers tribute tonight and DVD, you can pick up your copies outside as you leave.

Now, the names are William Johnson, Abigail Kief, Jim Arnold, Kathy Apple, Steven Warren, Brooke Tregoe, April Pulk, Keith Rosenberg, Cheryl Jones and Gabby Rosslyn. Thank you so much for being with us tonight. (crowd clapping) (upbeat music) For more information, or to order your own copy of "Biology, From Molecules to Man,"

please visit https

//www.thehistorymakers.or/ or call 866-914-1900, that's 866-914-1900. The preceding program was funded in part by Toyota. AT&T, Baldwin Richardson Foods, Lincoln Financial Group, Apple, American Airlines. A complete list is available,

at https

//www.thehistorymakers.or/