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A Geneticist Speaks to Doctors
By Hilary Clark, PhD
As a scientist, I occasionally have the opportunity to speak to a variety of audiences and share my research findings. Recently, I had the opportunity to give a seminar at a conference attended by an audience of doctors specializing in the treatment of patients with autoimmune diseases.
My work is focused on uncovering the genetic basis of autoimmune diseases, as you may have read in my previous columns. I give seminars about it on a regular basis within my company to groups of scientists, primarily immunologists and bioinformaticians.
With each audience, I receive welcome critical feedback about the design of the studies, the statistical analysis employed and the relevance to understanding the mechanisms of the immune response. This process of carefully explaining our methods and results, ensures the quality of the science that we do.
But why am I doing this research? Who will ultimately benefit? Yes, it is important that a bioinformatician is satisfied that my results are not due to random chance. Yes, it is important that immunologists find that genetic link to a disease gives them ideas about genes to pursue as drug targets.
But really, it is the patients who may benefit in the future by knowledge of the individual genetic risk factors that may make them particularly suited for one therapeutic treatment over another. Also, new treatment strategies may arise from understanding their disease at the level of genetic abnormalities and the particular disease processes that are affected by those.
So, to speak to the doctors who treat these patients was a welcome opportunity, and I was delightfully surprised to see how rewarding this was. Frankly, realizing who was to be the audience, was, at first, a bit intimidating. I was invited to speak at the last moment and was not sure of the professional backgrounds audience would have.
On arriving at the hotel where the event was to be held, I was given the conference agenda, which included a listing of attendees - rheumatologists, gastroenterologists, dermatologists, neurologists and other doctors specializing in the treatment of autoimmune diseases. My heart skipped a beat when I realized what I would be facing the next day. Had I prepared my talk appropriately? What questions would they ask? Was I hopelessly naïve about the realities of treating autoimmune diseases?
When my turn came and I was introduced, I went to the podium and faced some 70 clinical specialists who treat autoimmune diseases, including lupus, multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease and psoriasis. As I began to present my slides, I turned and looked at their faces. Then I realized I wanted to speak directly to them. I wanted them to see how my ideas about these results were all about how the future of their treatment of patients might become. Yes, these ideas are futuristic and there is no direct benefit in the present. But I was speaking to the people in whose hands I hope the new tools will be placed, and those would be the hands to touch the patients we all want to help in a better way.
After I finished speaking, several questions were asked. I could tell that at least some of the audience had listened carefully to what I said. Some were intimately aware of the kind of research that I was doing, and interested in how my results compared with other findings emerging in the field. It felt very satisfying to engage with them for a moment in discussing the detailed questions that they asked.
For the next several days of the conference, a number of the doctors spoke to me about enjoying hearing about the human genetics I had talked about. They wanted to tell me about their patients and what genes I thought they might genotype to get an insight into their disease. One doctor told me of a patient who has multiple autoimmune diseases. Perhaps there is a common genetic basis underlying all autoimmune diseases?
One doctor, an older man, acknowledged that these new genetic approaches were a bit beyond what he was trained in and could understand very well. He thanked me for doing this research and said, “We need people like you to do this work
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Betty's List ‘Science, If You Dare'
Columnist Hilary Clark, Ph.D.
Hilary Clark, Ph.D., is a scientist at Genentech, Inc., a leading biotechnology company in South San Francisco. She has a joint appointment in the bioinformatics and immunology departments in the research division, and does collaborative research to understand and develop therapies for autoimmune disease.
Dr. Clark received her Ph.D. in Genetics from U.C. Berkeley in 1993 and did post-doctoral research at Harvard Medical School. She has been working in the field of bioinformatics since 1997, first at Genetics Institute in Cambridge, MA, and then at Genentech since 1999.
She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association of Women in Science, (AWIS) and the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG). In 2003, Dr. Clark was appointed Adjunct Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University, where she is an occasional guest lecturer. She has been invited to speak at various universities and conferences.
She holds a US patent for a number of human genes and has published on subjects including the genetics of a cellular adhesion protein in the fruit fly, the function of a DNA binding protein in mouse muscle cells, the cloning of human genes encoding proteins secreted by cells and the identification of genes specifically expressed by immune cells.
Her success in science is attributable in a large part to the mentoring she has sought during her education and career from her professors and other scientists. She has recently co-authored an article in .A Hand Up: Women Mentoring Women in Science. where she discusses the challenges women scientists face in their careers in .A Hand Up: Women Mentoring Women in Science..
Dr. Clark is a member of the Board of Directors of Lyon-Martin Women's Health Services. She has in the past been involved in other organizations, such as the San Francisco Women's Political Committee, the 2003 mayoral campaign of Susan Leal and the Out & Equal club at Genentech. In 1996, she received a Certificate of Recognition from GOAL, an organization of gay police officers in Boston, MA, for participation in the training of police cadets on the treatment of gay and lesbians.
Hilary Clark can be reached at hclark@gene.com
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