Dedicated to Dad
Budding neuroscientist inspired by paralyzed father
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- It was Nov. 4, 1998. Melanie McNally was in the ninth grade, waiting for her father to pick her up from school. As the special education coordinator in the next town over, Joseph McNally was often able to fetch his only child from school, and he looked forward to the task. It wasn't like him to be late.
An hour later, Melanie's mother drove up, frantic: ''Your father has been in an accident." With those words, the girl's life changed dramatically. Her beloved father, the outdoors nut who taught her to ski, hike, kayak, and rollerblade, was paralyzed from the chin down. It would be five years before he could move back home full time.
''I knew he was in critical condition. But they were flying him to Boston, and I thought that's where they fix people," says McNally, who is now 20 and a senior at Boston College. But even the best medical team could not put Joe McNally back together again. He could not even breathe on his own.
Now Melanie is trying to fix her father.
She's a budding neuroscientist, the recipient of several prestigious grants and fellowships, who carries a full academic load while working in three labs.
''Without trying, he challenges me every day," she says of her father. ''Not everyone gets a chance to live two lives. My dad does. I will never forget the day he spoke to me about this and about how many things he was learning from the new 'perspective' he acquired."
When she and her mother took him for his first outing from the nursing home where he was in rehab, they went straight to the local YMCA, at his request, where he sat in his wheelchair and watched them play tennis. ''All of my best memories are about being active," he says. ''It keeps you in touch with being alive."
''After the accident I had a choice," Melanie says. ''I could either decide nothing much mattered, or I could make something of it." She dove into her academics at Trinity High School and fell in love with biology. She began asking questions about her father's condition. ''It aggravated me -- not only for myself, but for society: Why is my dad's condition irreversible? One question led to another, led to another for me."
Upon graduation, she entered Boston College as a biology major and began focusing on Sandhoff's Disease. ''It's an inherited terminal neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the accumulation of ganglioside lipids due to their blocked catabolism," she says. In plain English, the question that drives her: Why do nerves regenerate in the peripheral nervous system but not in the central nervous system? Joe McNally's injuries were in the central nervous system.
''She comes home all excited, and I don't even know what a peripheral nerve is," says her mother, Heather, an adjunct professor of counseling at Plymouth State University.
Melanie and her parents are sitting in a sunny family room at their home in Manchester. Joe, in his wheelchair, speaks with a ventilator; there are frequent pauses in his sentences. The family cat, Maddy, is curled on his lap, but he cannot feel it.
''It's exciting to see Melanie and share her energy in the work she does," he says. ''She has a lot to say, and we have a lot to listen to." He was 44 when he was paralyzed, a 6-foot, 160-pound athlete who is shown hiking, ski-jumping, and kayaking in family photos throughout the house.
Nowadays, he relies on machines and 24-hour staff for everything. ''Life has changed," he says. ''I don't dance as well." The quip makes his daughter smile. Despite being locked in an uncooperative body, he hasn't lost his sense of humor. With no use of his hands, he is able to maneuver his wheelchair through sipping and puffing into a tube that triggers the chair's switches. He calls himself ''Sip-n-Puff Daddy."
Last year, when Melanie organized a bioethics conference on campus, she asked her father to speak. He began his remarks by listing ''the benefits" of paralysis. Among them: ''I get to shower with new people every day."
His appearance was an important moment for the whole family, who took the stage together at the end. ''I felt, we've made it. We're OK. We've built new lives. We've found new ways to reconnect with each other after such an upheaval," says Melanie. ''And it forced everyone in the audience to stop and see the effects on a whole family and answer the question, 'How would I have reacted if it happened to me?' You touch the heart of everybody."
Gary Strichartz, professor of anesthesiology, pharmacology, and biophysics at Harvard Medical School, agreed to let her work in his lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital. ''I've never met a busier or more important man in my life, and he has spent hours working with me, tutoring me, advising me," she says. In his lab, she is doing electrophysiology experiments, measuring impulses in the peripheral nerves.
Strichartz says McNally has great potential. ''She has all of the tools that if they properly come together will make her a very good scientist," he says. ''She's a real self-starter. She is motivated and independent at a level that few graduate students are. When the work is hard, she works harder. She has a spirit of inquiry."
Professor Daniel Kirschner, her mentor at Boston College, encouraged McNally to apply for a Beckman Scholarship, which awards stipends and research money to 70 students nationwide. He says she is one of the most outstanding students he has encountered. ''She is highly motivated, curious, mature, self-confident, and highly organized, and clearly is learning and mastering as much as she can both in her courses and in the lab." Melanie used part of her grant to present a paper at the Peripheral Nerve Society conference in Italy last summer.
''I was ecstatic," she says. ''All the senior scientists would come up and say, 'Did you try this? Did you try that?' It was exciting; these people are 1,000 times smarter than I am, but they were very patient. They know they have to encourage young scientists to move forward or all the work they've dedicated their lives to will be lost."
McNally has also been named a Goldwater Scholar, the premiere undergraduate fellowship in the sciences. She hopes to pursue a joint medical degree and doctorate in neurology and neuroscience after working for a year or so in a clinical research lab.
Though she says she understands opposing views, she views stem cell research as vital to medical breakthroughs. ''I don't make the argument about where life begins. My argument is that in the US we are throwing away thousands of embryos every day. . . . In a country where IVF [in vitro fertilization] and abortion are legal, to make stem cell research illegal is hypocritical, sad, and, in my opinion, criminal. This is definitely an issue close to my heart, and that's why part of me wants to go to California: There's so much money for it out there."
As she speaks, her father smiles. ''I'm very proud of the person she's become," he says. ''In a way, the accident brought us closer together. We've identified priorities and what matters. We appreciate each day more, and each other. Life is unpredictable. Life happens whether you like it or not, and why not make the best of it?"
To his daughter, Joe McNally is a hero. ''He has shown me that the only way to live life is to find those things that you are passionate about and hold on tight," she says. ''So, for the last seven years, this is what I have tried to do and will continue to try for the rest of my life." 