MacArthur grant honors can-do doctor
NEWTON -- Dr. Sue Goldie spent a lonely, rebellious childhood faced with problems too big to solve. She never knew her biological parents or where she was from. Life was tough in her adoptive home. But she found stability by volunteering at shelters, mastering Tae Kwon Do, and excelling at school.
''There's a tremendous power that comes from saying I'll do the best I can do with the resources I have," said the 43-year-old doctor, scientist, and mother, known to some as ''Sergeant Sue" for the strenuous aerobics classes she taught to help pay for medical school.
Last week, Goldie won a $500,000 ''genius grant" from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation. The foundation praised the innovation and creativity of her work, a fusion of public health, mathematical modeling, decision science, and pure medicine aimed at solving seemingly insurmountable public health problems.
In science, as in life, Goldie believes there's always a solution to be found.
So in tackling HIV or cervical cancer -- the most common cause of women's cancer death worldwide -- she creates a kind of public health laboratory in her computer.
Her models mimic the biology, treatment, prevention, and progress of a disease as it passes through a society, whether poor villages in Haiti or major cities in the United States. Then she asks herself not how to save one patient, but how to make the most effective medical choice for an entire society: ''If you can only see a woman once between the ages of 30 and 50, what can you do to help her, given you only have $10?"
To prevent cervical cancer in a poverty-stricken developing country, for instance, her physician's instinct to conduct regular pap smears and pelvic exams isn't feasible. But experimenting with her model showed that a simpler test done once or twice in a woman's lifetime could cut global deaths from cervical cancer by a third. Now, her idea is being used in India, South Africa, Kenya, Peru, and Thailand.
''It's the same way I dealt with my life as a child," she said. ''Even if I can't solve a problem . . . there's never been a time I've been so down I can't do anything. [Adversity] just makes me more passionate and angry."
Goldie, who exudes a frenetic, positive energy, said her intensity comes from her mind, ''which races a mile a minute," and her strong sense of empathy.
Her husband, Dr. Aaron Waxman, a pulmonary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that sense of empathy often goes into overdrive: she'll meet troubled teenagers at the pool, the library or her sons' schools and invite them to her house for mentoring.
But Goldie also has a fierce competitive streak, Waxman said -- even with him. The couple has learned to ski down opposite sides of a mountain. They never take bike rides together. And she can easily pin him against a wall.
Goldie gets 2 to 3 hours of sleep most nights, e-mailing back and forth with people half-way across the world while the rest of her house sleeps, doing charcoal sketches in the attic, thinking of new ways to fund her newest ideas, or pushing herself hard in her basement gym.
The relentless energy, competitive edge, and stubborn will that have been the key to her survival and success don't always lead to shining success, Goldie admits. She's set fire to the kitchen making toast. Early in their relationship, she tried to fool Waxman about her cooking abilities, by squeezing six Lean Cuisine dinners into a pan. And when she first met Waxman, he asked her if she needed any help in a neuroanatomy lab. ''Not from you," she curtly responded.
When someone called her earlier this month and told her to sit down, her first reaction was: ''Oh, no, I got myself into freaking trouble" again.
It was the MacArthur Foundation calling to say she'd won.
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.
Family: Husband, Dr. Aaron Waxman, and sons Jacob, 12, and Matthew, 13
Self-healing: As a child, Goldie found escape in herself. ''No one could take my mind away. Whatever I had in my mind was mine."
Fueling up: Every morning, Goldie nips into a
Staying Up: Last year, ''my three boys" -- her husband and two sons -- presented Goldie with a little table on wheels and a bright headlamp so that ''you can be in bed with dad, but also work," her sons said. The gift has become a family joke, with occasional griping from her husband at 4 a.m. when Goldie squeaks the table out of the way so that she can go downstairs and grab a snack.
Balancing it all: ''I basically never take no for an answer, as a woman, as a physician, or as a scientist."
Empathy runs in the family: ''I'm passionate about pretty much anyone in trouble," Goldie said. Her son Jacob recently gave a power point presentation about Haiti and raised money for a clinic through bake sales, and when Katrina hit, the family began making a list of ways they could help.
