Scientist hopes to see medical future -- and improve it
Richard A. Young imagines a health-care system in which, shortly after a baby is born, doctors take a tiny piece of tissue and test its genes to predict the baby's medical future.
"We could explain to you the probability that you'll have breast cancer in your 40s," said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology systems biologist, "or that you'll have heart disease in your 50s, and -- here's the good part -- that before you get there, we can develop therapies to prevent that."
Most scientists working in genetics are focused on identifying what genes are and how they make a body work. Young, who is also affiliated with the Whitehead Institute, does something different. He focuses on all the little "switches" -- or proteins that bind to a gene -- that determine whether someone gets sick or stays healthy.
The technology he created, which he will explain in the journal Science this month, dramatically speeds up the process of figuring out how dozens of switches work across the genome. Before, it would have taken "one person one century to know how one switch worked on one gene," said Young, who talked easily last week about what he has uncovered and the other players who contributed.
The faster speed will enable scientists to see exactly how and where a person's genes malfunction to cause diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and cancer, Young said. And because they'll be able to see this "circuit diagram for a human being," as he calls it, pharmaceutical companies should be able to make drugs that go to the very source of disease and literally turn it off.
"Rick Young is always on the cutting edge," said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an occasional guest speaker in Young's classes. "He's been a leader in this field and it's important to see the transition from yeast as a model system" -- which is what Young used to work with before experimenting with human tissue -- "to potential human diseases."
Colleagues and friends say they're not surprised to find Young at the center of such significant work. It's always been his way to focus hard on a problem, work relentlessly to solve it, and then, when he's got it figured out, spread the praise.
His lab is an energizing place to be, said postdoctoral research fellow Duncan Odom, because Young is driven, but also supportive of everyone else. And because the research has such promise. "I think the work we are doing is going to fundamentally change the way biology is done," he said.
Reared in Pittsburgh, Young, 49, went to an American boarding school in Switzerland while his father worked in Spain for three years for US Steel. He graduated a year early to attend Indiana University and then went off to Yale to study gene expression and RNA for his doctorate. He was recruited in 1984 to run a lab at MIT's Whitehead Institute, which is also where he met his wife, Anna Aldovini, now an assistant professor of pediatrics at Children's Hospital and Harvard University. The couple has a 6-year-old daughter, Sophia, whom they often take skiing, kayaking, canoeing and hiking.
"Rick loves anything that is demanding," Aldovini said. "The more demanding, the more risky and challenging, the more exciting." Which is why he flies small planes, she said, and has three times climbed in the Himalayas. "I think what these things have in common is they require quite a bit of concentration, and that's what he likes. He can focus himself to an extent that I have never seen."
Young's first mentor, Tom Blumenthal, then a biology professor at Indiana University and now chair of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, remembers a student who was both an innovator and a collaborator.
Under Blumenthal's watch, Young authored four articles for premier journals -- quite uncommon for an undergraduate -- because, even then, his work studying the cross-linking of proteins was impressive.
"I had just gotten there in 1973, and he walked into my lab. I thought `Great, I'll give him a try.' And I couldn't believe it. Then, I thought, `If all the undergraduates were like this, Indiana is going to be a great place to work,' " Blumenthal said. "Of course, no undergraduate was like him."
All of this was to be expected for Young's mother, Jane Stockhausen, a retired real estate agent now living in Florida. She likes to tell the story of when her boy, then 8, begged for a camera she didn't have the money to buy. So, he made a proposal to do all housework -- including ironing sheets and napkins -- for $2 a week. Within a few months, he was happily snapping pictures of his cat, Snowball.
"The big thing I used to say about Rick as a child was, he will get what he wants out of life because he won't let you alone until it happens," Stockhausen said of her oldest. "He just works and works, and never quits until the project is done."
