Barrow geneticist looks to family, education as reasons for her work

Family and teaching young people the wonders of science are the ties that bind the chapters of Dr. Joan Shapiro's distinguished career as a geneticist and neurooncologist. Shapiro, a principal investigator at Barrow Neurological Institute of St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix since 1989, lost both of her parents to cancer as an adult, and credits their courage and care-giving during the disease as the reasons she entered oncology.

According to Shapiro, her father--who was wheelchair-bound by age 42 due to cancer of the spine—was "a scientist at heart."

"It was his curiosity that was influential in my wanting to find out how things worked," she says.

Her father battled the paralyzing tumor for 30 years. She remembers that he would often say to her: "Don't let this disease have to be for no reason. Learn something about it so that you may help others."

And help others she has, in ways that have perhaps surpassed her father's imagination.

Beyond her work in the lab on human gliomas and cellular resistance to therapy, Shapiro has reached out to the next generation of researchers and clinicians with her programs, including Science into the Classroom and the Student Scientific Enrichment Program. She has also developed workshops and lesson plans for national neurology meetings on educating high school students. In 1999, the Arizona Alliance for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education honored Shapiro with the Researcher and Mentor Award.

"I am a strong proponent of education," says Shapiro, St. Joseph's vice president of academic affairs and research, "because I feel people can understand anything I do or say I can do."

Shapiro says it is all a matter of removing the jargon and embracing scientific straight-talk. Here, she talks straight about why she chose cancer research over ballet, and how her career went from the lab bench to the classroom and back again.

What does it take to be a cancer researcher? Are there certain dispositions that are better suited for it than others?

To be in cancer research means this has to be an area that excites you. I judge my personal level of interest by how fast the time seems to proceed. I put in long hours in the lab but I enjoyed what I was doing and so the time went all too quickly. Cancer killed both of my parents and several immediate family members, and so I had a direct interest in the subject matter. Interest is the most important factor for any career you choose.

Actually, my initial interests focused on ballet with the New York City Ballet Company. I left for college with every intention of returning to this discipline. Suddenly, I was engrossed in science and math, and an accident changed my goals in a hurry. So in college I pursued an interest in mechanical engineering, until I realized that for women in the '50s there was little opportunity—which sent me in the direction of medicine on the advice of my mentors. I was glad I had the opportunity to explore many things before I actually made the commitment to scientific research, and I must say my undergraduate professors were very important in shaping the person I am today.

What was the biggest challenge that you had to overcome to become a geneticist and neurooncologist?

When I started medical school in the '50s, it was not possible to be pregnant and be in medical school. So while I took time off to raise a family, I went back into the laboratory where my interests in genetics developed over time. I had two very good mentors and they exposed me to what research could do in helping to eradicate human suffering from disease—though our techniques were relatively crude compared to the genomic technologies that are available now. So my career in genetics initially involved inborn errors of metabolism (genetic syndromes), and was refocused when I went to work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where I had the opportunity to work on cancer of the nervous system.

So that challenge actually opened new pathways for you?

Definitely. Part of the time-off that I took to raise a family allowed me to enter education. There was a great need for science and math teachers, and since I had a medical school background and a science undergraduate degree, I just walked into a school district and was hired on the spot. Over the five years I was in education, I taught biology, physics, and chemistry and I truly enjoyed working with the high school age group because they had such open minds. When I left school to return to my graduate studies, I missed the students and so I started the Student Scientific Enrichment Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering that I brought to Arizona.

I also created a workshop for the Academy of Neurology in which I taught doctors and scientists "How to Bring Neuroscience into the Classroom." This eventually worked into a K-12 grade program that I conduct here called, "Kids Brains Matter Too," in which I teach children about their brain and how they learn. It is a very interactive program kids seem to enjoy at all ages.

From your work with the next generation of clinicians and researchers, it is clear that you feel that there is a need to bridge the gap between today's researchers and the scientists of tomorrow.

I have a lot of faith in our young generation. While it is much more common to see the bad things that our youth become involved with, one had only to go to the International Science and Engineering Fair (held at Phoenix Civic Plaza last May) to realize what bright young men and women exist in all of our communities, and that they have ideas that just astound me for their level of education.

But are schools keeping up with the technological progress?

In general, I think our schools are trying to prepare that next generation for the era of genomics and proteomics. But there is a real gap in most of our communities' understanding, not because they don't care to know or learn about it, but because we tend to make it sound difficult. As a teacher, it is important to develop the concept and leave all the fancy jargon behind. Most people have absolutely no trouble understanding DNA if it is explained in a conceptual manner rather than a scientific one.

How does the research climate at Barrow differ from the one you left at Sloan-Kettering? How has Barrow changed or remained the same since you arrived?

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was a scientific wealth. There were many good scientists, and research was the driving force that attracted both the academic physician and basic scientist. It was a wonderful place to develop as a new scientist, because it was a survival-of-the-fittest game. No funding, you were out of a job.

When I came to Barrow in 1989, I was the only scientist that did a lot of bench-type research on human cells rather than whole living organisms. I was one of nine principal investigators. We now have 24 principal investigators in the neurosciences and have begun recently to develop other lines of research in cardiology, pulmonology, and infectious diseases. St. Joseph's is developing a true academic medical center despite the fact that it is neither a medical school nor a university.

You have already talked about your experience as a woman choosing between family and medical school in the 1950s. In what ways did the women's liberation movement affect your experience or career path? Do you think your educational experience differs from that of your male peers, or from those of the female undergrads and graduate students that you mentor today?

Women will always have to find the balance in their particular situation between family and professional aspirations. I truly believe you can be anything you want to be, but there are choices you must make, and the timing of those choices is up to you.

I was asked to take a medical leave the first time I became pregnant. I did, and went on to do something else (education), which turned out to be a very positive thing. The first year I returned to Cornell Medical School, I found out I was pregnant again. By then it was the '60s, and we'd advanced enough to permit me to stay in school. Since this was not a first child and I could have my child right across the street from me (residents' wives were always looking for extra funds), I took time off to have Matthew but returned to school immediately.

I think our society still needs to learn to accommodate differing ideas about maternity leave because, if we don't, we will be losing very valuable members of the workforce. I also think men are taking a far greater role in child-raising, which is wonderful to see because I think it is healthier for a child to know that both parents are there for them. I see this in my sons and I am very proud to see them bathe, feed, and diaper the children as much as Mom. However, women still generally are the ones to stay home when there is an illness and very often women choose to defer their advancement on this basis.

So young women today need to determine what is right for them. For some it may be to defer their professional development; for others, it means having the support structure to have a family. But whatever the choices, I think the time spent with children needs to be quality time rather than just being present with them.

Do you see a paradox in the way that scientific research seems to be moving ahead at an ever-faster pace, opening up new vistas, and yet science as an idea and a paradigm seems to be losing ground in the political arena? Do you think this tension will resolve itself or heighten in the coming months and years?

I think we need to be mindful of religious sensitivities, just as we must be mindful of different cultural backgrounds and their assessment of disease and how they wish to handle it. I think there are big misconceptions on what we are actually able to do. Let's take cloning. From the current debate, we are led to believe that we can take a cell from an animal or human and place that cell in a primed enucleated egg and it will develop into an exact copy of the individual. But when we look at identical twins, that's not what we see happen at all. When the egg splits into two separate cells, these two people should be identical in every way because they share the same genetics. And in fact they do share the same genetics, but for only that first cell division when the egg splits into two separate cells. As each of these cells divide to create a new individual we have been designed to change just a little, meaning some of Mom's genetic material switches with Dad's genetic material. We estimate that this random exchange occurs 30 times in a cell.

And so we find identical twins that really do look like mirror images of each other, but if you ask them questions about the first memory they can recall or their favorite taste, you will begin to see differences. Our brain is an amazing organ in which memory is unique to an individual. So as our senses teach our brain about our environment, no two people--even clones--will ever experience exactly the same thing, and that's a fact I would venture to say few people understand. So while I don't want to personally see human cloning, I also do not fear that I can make 10 Einsteins or 10 Hitlers from an individual's cells.

How well do you think scientists are doing in communicating science to the public? And conversely, how is the public doing?

Most people have only the media by which to gain their information, and I think there is an element of sensationalism that accompanies some of these articles. We need to be honest and strive to begin education in our primary schools. It is a matter of presenting the material in such a way that it can be understood. Education assists people in making informed decisions, and it is our responsibility as scientists to see that the community gets that information. Rational people will deal with these subjects rationally if we attempt to give them adequate information.

And while the media is helping to educate the public, we need to be sure it includes more that just an occasional story in the press or a 30-second sound byte from a news release. It needs to be in our schools and delivered throughout our educational process. The children in kindergarten today will be seeing some of these technologies and scientific findings applied as part of our routine health care. Children and adults should feel comfortable about these new technologies and what they might be able to do in alleviating human suffering from disease. The human species was given the ability to think and to understand and perhaps we are meant to understand how something can become abnormal so that we can correct it.

If you were not a neurooncologist, what career would you like to have?

I love speed! It does not matter if I am roller skating or skiing. The faster the better, and cars are my outlet. I have a large family with 54 cousins, and the ones my age were all boys, so I had some excellent teachers about adapting cars for maximum speed. I guess I would like to have tried race car driving!