Marshall

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Last December, two Duke students received Marshall Scholarships, full-tuition merit-based awards for two years of graduate study virtually anywhere in the United Kingdom. Implemented by the British government as a celebration of the European Recovery Program (including the Marshall Plan, instituted by former US Secretary of State John Marshall), the Marshall Scholarship program aims to attract students from the United States to serve as intellectual ambassadors to the UK. It is uncommon for two students from the same institution to be awarded such a highly coveted honor in the same year: Marshall Scholarships provide for just 40 American students to study abroad annually, and competition is exceptionally intense. Only six Duke students have won Marshall Scholarships since 1994, and this year is the first time that Duke has had two recipients. Equally remarkable, however, is that both recipients at Duke have distinguished themselves in the natural sciences, particularly through their research endeavors. For this reason, Vertices sat down with both of Duke's newest Marshall Scholars and asked them about issues ranging from the formative role Duke has played in developing their research interests to embattled Harvard President Lawrence Summers's recent remarks on women in science.

Emily Heikamp, a senior biology major in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, is also an A.B. Duke Scholar, a Goldwater Scholar, a National Merit Scholar, and a Faculty Scholar, the highest honor that the Duke faculty can bestow upon an undergraduate. Heikamp, 21, is a native of Metairie, LA.

Alexander Oshmyansky, a second-year medical student, was nominated for the Marshall Scholarship by the University of Colorado, from which he earned a Bachelor's Degree in Biochemistry after just one year. Oshmyansky, 20, is also a recipient of the Boettcher Scholarship, the most prestigious merit-based scholarship available to graduating high school seniors in Colorado. He hails from Littleton, CO.

Vertices: When did you first become interested in scientific research?

A: I can’t really associate becoming interested in science with an exact time or event. I just enjoyed math and science from an early age and ran with it.

E: I actually began in environmental research when I was a freshman in high school. My eighth grade earth science teacher was my first mentor. I did a project using glass clippings and “bagasse,” a byproduct of sugar cane manufacturing, to restore coastal wetlands—because Louisiana is just a few barrier islands away from washing into the Gulf of Mexico (laughs).

Vertices: Tell me about your major research experiences before arriving at Duke.

A: At the age of 15, I started doing research on nonlinear dynamics in equity markets. The results became a stock trading enterprise. At the same time, I began researching the use of ferromagnetic microparticles repelled by superconductors to embolize tumors. In college, I spent a year analyzing the kinetics of the CRE-lox recombinase, and its potential applications as a tool for genetic engineering. I also worked part-time on projects involving the xenotransplantation of corneas and the application of combinatorics to RNA. I spent the summer after college working on image processing techniques for use in electron microscopy during a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.

E: I became interested in medical research after working on the environmental project for two years. I got a job at LSU Medical Center and worked the summer after my sophomore year in Dr. Gregory Bagby's lab in the Department of Physiology. I was the secondary researcher of a project on the immunosuppressive effects of alcohol and glucocorticoids on LPS-induced tumor necrosis factor (TNF) production. I did secretarial work at first, but then I started doing experiments in the lab. I realize now that I did not understand what I was doing at all (laughs). To this day, I like the grunt work of science, doing experiments, but now I have a much deeper understanding of what I’m doing.

Vertices: Tell me about your research at Duke.

A: At Duke I have continued with the research I started at the NIH, both finalizing the work and expanding the technique to other imaging modalities such as PET, SPECT, and MRI scanning.

E: I started off doing the Howard Hughes Research Fellows program, working with Dr. Garnett Kelsoe in the Department of Immunology. I was the secondary researcher of a project exploring the recombination efficiency of cryptic recombination signal sequences (cRS) in variable heavy chain (V_H) immunoglobulin (Ig) gene segments, which was part of a larger study on V_H gene replacement. Dr. Kelsoe works on VDJ recombination, which is the mechanism by which the body produces a variety of antibodies. We were mostly interested in situations where VDJ recombination went wrong, possibly resulting in autoimmune disease. VDJ recombination occurs at sites on DNA called recombination signal sequences. We were studying examples of cryptic recombination signal sequences, which are thought to be involved in autoimmunity.

I continued working in his lab sophomore year. I knew I was going to be in England that summer because I would be doing Duke in Oxford with the A.B. Dukes, so I found someone who would be doing research on a similar topic at Cambridge. I worked in the laboratory of molecular biology with Dr. Alexander Betz. The year I was in Cambridge was the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of the double helix. Just before I arrived, there was a huge celebration in the laboratory of molecular biology, which was built to start the field of molecular biology after Watson and Crick discovered the double helix.

Last summer, I worked in Cold Spring Harbor on angiogenesis, the process by which a tumor sprouts new blood vessels in order to obtain oxygen and nutrients. Angiogenesis is necessary for tumor survival, so if you can stop this process from happening or cut off blood supply, you can theoretically starve the tumor. It’s an indirect way of eradicating cancer. What makes cancer such a tough problem is that tumors are genetically unstable, so when people try to use a genetic approach to attack cancer, they may find that the tumor will acquire ever-more resistant mutations. On the other hand, tumor vasculature is not genetically unstable. So I wanted to take a genetic approach to blocking tumor angiogenesis: find the genes and then stop them from being expressed. The method I used was called RNA Interference. The approach in the past was to use a knockout mouse, which takes a long time to breed, and is impossible if the gene is crucial to development. RNA Interference accomplishes the same thing and can be performed in a single day on any gene in the genome.

There are three stages involved in tumor angiogenesis: migration of endothelial cells, proliferation of endothelial cells, and functional blood vessel formation. Different genes control each part of this process. If you can use RNA Interference to block any one of these genes, then theoretically you could stop tumor angiogenesis. The gene that my mentor at Oxford is working on is involved in the migration of endothelial cells, so it’s intervening at an earlier point in the process of angiogenesis.

Vertices: What are your plans for research in England?

A: I plan to research computational neuroscience at Oxford while pursuing a degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. Specifically, I plan to work on modeling the development and function of the nervous system.

E: I will pursue a degree in molecular biology while continuing the work I started with Dr. Betz the summer after my sophomore year. My ultimate career goal is to be a physician-scientist, splitting time between basic science research and clinical practice in a neuroscience-based subspecialty such as neurosurgery. I hope to begin the basic science research that I will work on the rest of my professional career at Oxford as a Marshall scholar.

I eventually want to become a professor and devote my life to research. I’m not exactly sure what field I’ll be in, but I do know that I want to do research.

Vertices: How do you feel about Harvard President Lawrence Summers' recent remarks concerning reasons behind a lack of female representation at the highest levels of math and science?

A: My gut says he was wrong. However, if I were to say anything further, I would be doing the same thing Mr. Summers did. Namely, talk about something I know little about.

E: As a scientist, I have to recognize that there are physical differences in the male and female brain. But anatomical differences do not imply functional differences. On the other hand, there’s a lot of sociological evidence to suggest why men may outperform women in science (math and physics especially) at the highest levels. I think his comments were probably not very well thought-out. I understand that he was trying to be provocative, but I don’t think he knew enough about what he was discussing to make the comments he did.

Vertices: So you weren't personally offended?

E: Oh, I was personally offended. (pulls out Alberts Molecular Biology of the Cell) This is the bible of molecular biology. This will be my life. If you look at the back of this book, it shows a picture of the authors. Notice that each one of these authors are white males. This isn’t just a coincidence. There’s a reason why the leaders in molecular biology, who have written the bible of molecular biology, are all white males. These are the people who have dominated the field since it began, and some of them still hold the notion that women and minorities are not as well-suited for the role. It will take time for an entire generation of women to supplant them. In fifty years, we will see greater diversity on the back cover.

Vertices: What scientific achievement, innovation, or theory do you feel will most impact society in the 21st century?

A: I think electricity will still be big. More recently, let’s go with the Internet having a decent impact.

E: I think that if we can solve the problem of protein folding, that would be it. If you can figure out how proteins fold, then you can theoretically engineer any protein to perform almost any task. This discovery may come from physics or mathematics rather than molecular biology, but I think it would be huge.

Vertices: What advice do you have for other rising science investigators at Duke?

A: Try a lot of different things out. The hottest areas of research are always at the intersection between fields, and you never know when you might find something in one field that is incredibly useful in another.

E: I recommend getting involved in a lab and doing it early. I think that’s the only way you can know if scientific research is for you, by getting your hands dirty. I found a lot more from working in labs about basic molecular biology and immunology than I have from any one of my basic science courses at Duke. Science can be a very unforgiving process. You really do have to have faith that what you’re doing will be meaningful, that you will be able to contribute your knowledge. But if you are really passionate about discovery and scientific research and creating new knowledge, then you’ll find that those things don’t hold you back.