Dr. Diana Bianchi at Tufts-New England Medical Center spends her free time visiting key sites in the history of genetic research.
(Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)
pediatric researcher diana bianchi | Meeting the Minds
Dr. Diana Bianchi has a little side project. She's writing a travel guide. It's technically about the history of genetics and genomics, but it's really, like much of her work, about the intersections of discovery.
She has visited St. Thomas's Abbey in the Czech Republic, where Gregor Mendel discovered the law of genetic inheritance after he crossed sweet pea plants in the monastery garden. She has had a beer at the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, where, in 1953, two young scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick announced that they had "found the secret of life" after discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. And she has gone looking for the birthplace of modern biotechnology, a deli in Honolulu, where the Cohen-Boyer experiment, which used bacterial plasma to clone large amounts of DNA, was said to have occurred (she determined that it did, in fact, take place in a deli, but the deli is no longer there).
Bianchi, 52, a pediatric researcher at the Floating Hospital for Children and a professor at Tufts Medical School whose work focuses on the intersection between mother and baby, is best known for her 1996 discovery that a child's fetal cells remain in the mother's blood long after a pregnancy, a process known as microchimerism. In 2004, she and a colleague published a paper that demonstrated that those cells were more than a permanent souvenir - they may play a therapeutic role for the mother, traveling to sites of disease or injury where they differentiate into new cells to help combat the problem.
So, Dr. Bianchi, if someone in the future wanted to feature you in a travel guide to the landmarks of genetics and genomics, what place would represent your magnificent intersection? Where would they find the site that crystallizes your contribution to the field?
"That's a good question," she said, as she tilted her wavy blond hair to the side and considered it for the first time. "I need to think about it."
To begin at the beginning, they might look under her childhood bed in Manhattan, N.Y., where she first witnessed the miracle of life as a 4-year-old by watching her cat give birth to a litter of kittens.
"I remember that they were covered in a membrane and there was a lot of blood," she said. With the instinct of a neonatologist, she pulled a sheet off her bed, dried the kittens, and was promptly spanked for bloodying her sheets.
Or they might visit Stanford Medical School, where in 1978 a professor who had a child with Down syndrome charged her with developing a test for the genetic disorder based on the fetal blood cells in the pregnant mother's circulation, a task that sent her on a 30-year career studying the trafficking of cells and nucleic acids between the mother and the fetus.
Should they want the "eureka" stuff, that would be in the microscope room just down the hall from her office at Tufts-New England Medical Center, where she and her team realized that the thyroid removed from a woman contained some male cells, which led to the hypothesis that fetal stem cells from her son had helped to rebuild it. "That," she said, "was an 'Aha' moment."
Tourists love memorabilia, so maybe they would want to get a look at the poem she received, unsolicited, from a mother who had been so touched by reading about her research that she put down in verse how it feels to have a part of her son with her always.
If photos are what they're after, the east wall of Bianchi's office at Tufts-New England Medical Center might make a nice, cryptic snapshot of her life. The plate with the image of the "Chimera of Arezzo" - an Etruscan bronze of an animal with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent - is self-explanatory, as are the photo of Watson and the painting she bought off
"It's his 'I'm In You' album," Bianchi explains. "The chorus is 'I'm in you/ You're in me.' " Aha.
The problem with all of these spots is that they violate the one rule of her travel guide: Everything must be publicly accessible. Labs, hospitals, and Manhattan apartment dwellers don't want tourists traipsing around.
Bianchi, who will be honored by Tufts-NEMC as a "Rising Star" in a large gala Thursday, does have one answer for where the public might look: a spot that is between one place and another, at the intersection of everywhere and nowhere, where it all comes together for her.
"Most of my creative ideas come at 37,000 feet on an airplane," she said after a few moments of considering the initial question. "I find it to be a Zen-like atmosphere. I just put on my headphones, look out the window, and let it all coalesce."
Fact sheet
Hometown: Born in New York; lives in the Charlestown Navy Yard.Education: Graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 with a degree in biology; earned her MD from Stanford University in 1980.
Family: Husband, John Curtis, is a sales manager. They have two sons: Joshua, 27, works at the Hilton at Logan International Airport; Elliott, who turns 21 this week, is a junior at Carnegie Mellon, where he plays on the basketball team and teaches a course in "sneakerology."
Hobbies: Bianchi is a licensed antiques dealer, a voracious reader, loves to bicycle on Cape Cod, and does craftwork with natural fibers.
On her persistence: "She's kept her eye on the ball throughout these many years," said Joe Leigh Simpson, an associate dean at the Florida International University College of Medicine. "There was a time when this field had lost some of its excitement and cachet, but she succeeded because she focused on an area and persisted."
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