The guy who gets things done

Dr. Lee Nadler wants to break down walls in Harvard's medical 'megalopolis.' (Dina Rudick/Globe Staff)

Dr. Lee Nadler has been called a "force of nature." He calls himself a specialist in "getting things done."

He talks fast, the ideas barreling out of his mouth in his Bronx accent. He checks his watch every couple of minutes, if not sooner. He walks fast, too, as, on a recent day, he quickly navigated his way through a maze of corridors inside what he calls the Harvard medical "megalopolis" - from his office at Dana-Farber, through Children's Hospital and Brigham and Women's - to the traditional, and perhaps now metaphorical, center of it all: the main atrium of Harvard Medical School.

Just off the atrium is a small office for the university's Clinical and Translational Science Center, an ambitious effort funded by a five-year, $118 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, that was announced late last month. It is aimed at shortening the time it takes for basic scientific discoveries to be translated into patient care. Nadler is the new director of the center.

It is a big job; there's a lot to get done. But Nadler, who brims with self-confidence, thinks he's the man to do it. He wants to break down the walls between the fiefdoms of the megalopolis, the graduate schools and institutions that, he points out, "run advertisements on the radio trying to steal patients from one another." He wants to get everyone working together, to harness the power of these world-class institutions to make Harvard into the environment for the "breakthrough moments."

"I don't believe any single institution can break the back of a human illness," Nadler said. "But Harvard can."

Nadler had his own breakthrough moment back in the 1970s, when he was sitting in a rowboat with another young doctor and they came up with the idea to use monoclonal antibodies to fight lymphoma. They found collaborators - a doctor they knew here and there, a dentist who knew how to make the antibodies - and, within a year, they had made the antibody in their own lab and tested it successfully in a patient.

"Today," Nadler says, "that would take 10 years. It was the right place at the right time at the right moment. There were no regulatory barriers. The institution was supportive. The lab was supportive. That's the moment I'm trying to create again."

The current system, according to Nadler, works against these collaborative breakthrough moments, discourages risk-taking.

"We have people who give care," Nadler said, fast. "That's well established. That's how you get paid. The other side is the researchers, the people who apply for grants to study, mostly, fundamental processes in cells. Only a small percentage actually study disease, and a much smaller percentage do the studies that diagnose how to treat disease. Why? Because it's hard to get that money, and the career trajectory is much slower. If you work on translational research, you could spend four years on an idea and you're only going to publish a paper if the trial works. If you do basic science, you could publish 10 or 20 papers in that time."

The center is aimed at supporting those people who want to take the science to the patients, or the patients to the science. It is, as Nadler says several times, about "removing barriers."

It is a massive undertaking, but Nadler likes a good fight. His old office had a sign on the door identifying it as a "war room" and a bust of Winston Churchill, his great hero, sitting on the desk. He gets up at 4:30 in the morning and works 100 hours a week and says he doesn't waste a minute. He is, as Red Sox president Larry Lucchino put it, " a bulldozer."

"He will brook no bureaucratic delay or snafu," said Lucchino, who has been a friend since the mid-'80s, when Nadler gave Lucchino a successful bone marrow transplant for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (for which Nadler now takes full credit for the Sox' two World Series titles). "He's a man of historic accomplishment in the medical profession, and he does a great job of conquering bureaucracy. I wouldn't put anything beyond his capabilities."

Nadler describes the center as his third act. Act one, "all about me." Act two, "all about us, taking care of my family." Act three, "all about them," the physicians and researchers he's banking on to make the "major breakthrough."

"This is not about my achievements. This will not go under my byline," he said as his voice took on a very un-Nadler softness. "It's not applause for me. I'm looking forward to the day when I can stand in the audience and applaud when they succeed."

Hometown: Born in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium; lives in Newton.

Education: Studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Queens College, graduating in 1969; earned his MD at Harvard Medical School in 1973.

Family: Nadler has three children from a previous marriage: Eric, 35, is a doctor at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas; Sari, 31, is the head of development at the Allen-Stevenson School in New York; Ruth, 29, is a fashion designer who is starting her own baby clothes business. Nadler has two grandchildren.

Hobbies: "Work, exercise, work, kids, grandchildren. End of hobbies."

Titles: Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; Dean for Clinical and Translational Research at Harvard Medical School; senior vice president for Experimental Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; director for the Center of Clinical and Translational Research at Dana-Farber; chief, division of medical oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital.