1 00:00:04,446 --> 00:00:06,910 JOHN ESSIGMANN: I'm always interested in listening 2 00:00:06,910 --> 00:00:08,980 to JoAnne's lectures, and she talks 3 00:00:08,980 --> 00:00:12,670 about how she got interested in biochemistry 4 00:00:12,670 --> 00:00:14,590 from a background in what I would call 5 00:00:14,590 --> 00:00:17,350 more physical organic chemistry by attending a lecture 6 00:00:17,350 --> 00:00:19,980 and being completely inspired. 7 00:00:19,980 --> 00:00:23,710 And I am a toxicologist by training. 8 00:00:23,710 --> 00:00:26,620 And how did that actually happen. 9 00:00:26,620 --> 00:00:28,840 I have a similarly inspiring story, 10 00:00:28,840 --> 00:00:31,120 so I thought I would tell that. 11 00:00:31,120 --> 00:00:35,980 I went to a lecture about 45 years ago, by a fellow 12 00:00:35,980 --> 00:00:39,010 by the name of [Richard] Evans Schultes. 13 00:00:39,010 --> 00:00:47,150 He was the director of the Herbarium at Harvard-- 14 00:00:47,150 --> 00:00:50,890 and I'd been to it; it was very interesting-- 15 00:00:50,890 --> 00:00:53,410 and a professor there. 16 00:00:53,410 --> 00:00:59,362 And he is arguably the father of the field called ethnobotany. 17 00:00:59,362 --> 00:01:01,570 I went to this talk-- there were only about 10 people 18 00:01:01,570 --> 00:01:04,080 at the talk. 19 00:01:04,080 --> 00:01:08,830 He-- because it was a small talk, he gave it sitting down, 20 00:01:08,830 --> 00:01:12,760 he asked permission to do that, he's a very polite man. 21 00:01:12,760 --> 00:01:15,070 And it was very informal, only a few slides. 22 00:01:15,070 --> 00:01:16,690 And the slides were mainly of him 23 00:01:16,690 --> 00:01:20,110 living with indigenous peoples, Native Americans 24 00:01:20,110 --> 00:01:26,440 in the Southwest, Amazonian native peoples, 25 00:01:26,440 --> 00:01:27,960 very interesting. 26 00:01:27,960 --> 00:01:31,550 And he talked about, for example, he had just graduated, 27 00:01:31,550 --> 00:01:33,430 his undergraduate degree from Harvard. 28 00:01:33,430 --> 00:01:37,760 His parents were eager to have him go to medical school. 29 00:01:37,760 --> 00:01:44,320 He was very interested in botany and in native languages. 30 00:01:44,320 --> 00:01:45,910 So he went to live with the-- 31 00:01:45,910 --> 00:01:48,880 I think it was the Kiowa people in the Midwest-- 32 00:01:48,880 --> 00:01:51,100 I think it was probably Oklahoma. 33 00:01:51,100 --> 00:01:55,420 And he learned about peyote and a lot of other chemicals 34 00:01:55,420 --> 00:01:57,820 that were hallucinogenic. 35 00:01:57,820 --> 00:01:59,530 And he realized, of course, that many 36 00:01:59,530 --> 00:02:02,470 of these kinds of compounds that were used in a lot of rituals, 37 00:02:02,470 --> 00:02:07,630 were also medicines at other concentrations, anesthetics 38 00:02:07,630 --> 00:02:09,190 and so on. 39 00:02:09,190 --> 00:02:11,320 He then went down to South America, 40 00:02:11,320 --> 00:02:12,850 living with various tribes. 41 00:02:12,850 --> 00:02:15,310 He'd be gone for up to a year at a time. 42 00:02:15,310 --> 00:02:18,160 There are wonderful stories, well actually terrible stories, 43 00:02:18,160 --> 00:02:22,510 I guess, about him paddling his canoe 44 00:02:22,510 --> 00:02:25,040 for 40 days with malaria-- 45 00:02:25,040 --> 00:02:28,910 it was terrible-- to get to a hospital, things like that. 46 00:02:28,910 --> 00:02:30,160 But anyway these are stories-- 47 00:02:30,160 --> 00:02:32,950 I was a young scientist at the time-- these 48 00:02:32,950 --> 00:02:35,990 were very influential to me. 49 00:02:35,990 --> 00:02:40,570 And he talked about, I was down in South America and they-- 50 00:02:40,570 --> 00:02:44,860 and I found the plants from which the native people got 51 00:02:44,860 --> 00:02:47,320 their dart and arrow poisons. 52 00:02:47,320 --> 00:02:50,410 And he said, out of that we isolated curare, 53 00:02:50,410 --> 00:02:55,270 and initiated the path toward the clinic of curare 54 00:02:55,270 --> 00:02:57,370 as a muscle relaxant. 55 00:02:57,370 --> 00:02:58,900 He said that it didn't work so well. 56 00:02:58,900 --> 00:03:00,816 I remember this lecture like it was yesterday. 57 00:03:00,816 --> 00:03:04,000 He said that it was the beginning of World War II, 58 00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:07,930 we were cut off from the rubber plantations 59 00:03:07,930 --> 00:03:10,700 in the Philippines and other places. 60 00:03:10,700 --> 00:03:14,590 And since South America had jungles, his form of, 61 00:03:14,590 --> 00:03:16,240 quote unquote "military service," 62 00:03:16,240 --> 00:03:20,050 involved trying to find sources in the jungle of latex that 63 00:03:20,050 --> 00:03:22,360 could be used to make rubber so that we could 64 00:03:22,360 --> 00:03:24,010 have an effective war machine. 65 00:03:24,010 --> 00:03:27,850 So anyway, I went up to this fellow after he gave his talk. 66 00:03:27,850 --> 00:03:30,100 And I said, look, I just got to do this kind of stuff. 67 00:03:30,100 --> 00:03:31,960 This sounds really interesting. 68 00:03:31,960 --> 00:03:33,460 And he said, what's your background? 69 00:03:33,460 --> 00:03:35,854 I said, well, you know, I worked as a chemist. 70 00:03:35,854 --> 00:03:37,270 I was a biology major but I worked 71 00:03:37,270 --> 00:03:40,570 as a chemist at an industrial consulting company 72 00:03:40,570 --> 00:03:42,250 during my undergraduate years. 73 00:03:42,250 --> 00:03:46,340 And he said, oh, you got to go talk with Gerry Wogan at MIT. 74 00:03:46,340 --> 00:03:49,660 He said that he isolates toxins from fungi 75 00:03:49,660 --> 00:03:53,600 that you find out in the jungles of Southeast Asia. 76 00:03:53,600 --> 00:03:56,440 And, so anyway, that's how my career began. 77 00:03:56,440 --> 00:03:59,230 As you know, I got to eventually meet Gerry Wogan 78 00:03:59,230 --> 00:04:01,180 and work with him. 79 00:04:01,180 --> 00:04:05,230 He had already identified this toxin, aflatoxin. 80 00:04:05,230 --> 00:04:07,480 But he needed somebody to figure out how it worked, 81 00:04:07,480 --> 00:04:09,370 and that's how I got my start. 82 00:04:09,370 --> 00:04:13,150 So my interests have been in chemicals from the environment. 83 00:04:13,150 --> 00:04:14,590 It could be a pollutant. 84 00:04:14,590 --> 00:04:16,570 Or it could be a chemical that could 85 00:04:16,570 --> 00:04:18,730 be a precursor to a therapeutically 86 00:04:18,730 --> 00:04:22,690 useful molecule, and how do they interact 87 00:04:22,690 --> 00:04:24,220 with biological systems. 88 00:04:24,220 --> 00:04:27,643 And that's what toxicologists and pharmacologists do.