Of mice and Maine

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If this is Friday, it must be “Tibby” day at The Jackson Laboratory.

And sure enough, around 1 p.m., she arrives in the research lab complex, her wheelchair propelled by a security guard toward the emeritus office where she still has a desk.

Sometimes, she makes the journey herself with a walker, and laboratory staff are treated to the sight of frizzy-headed, stooped Tibby, ever-smiling, inching her way through the long corridors. It may take half an hour for the trip, as she stops and raises her eyes and says hello to everyone she knows.

Elizabeth S. “Tibby” Russell, 87, could find the way in her sleep. An internationally recognized genetics researcher who first came to work at The Jackson Laboratory in 1937, she officially retired in 1978 with laurels aplenty, including membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

But Russell didn’t retreat 22 years ago to her small home on Mt. Desert Island’s Echo Lake.

She’s visited the lab once or twice a week ever since, to attend weekly genetics seminars on Fridays, to lunch with old friends and meet former students. She remains connected to a remarkable career that spans much of the history of modern genetics and all but eight years in the 71-year life of The Jackson Laboratory.

“It’s probably odd to people that I keep coming into seminars,” says Russell. “But that’s what a scientist does. I’m learning what all these young people are interested in!”

True, she often nods off during the talks after eating her brown bag lunch from home. And later, at her desk, she just can’t seem to get started on the appreciation she’s supposed to be writing of the late George Snell, The Jackson Laboratory’s renowned Nobel laureate, for a journal whose name escapes her.

But those who know Russell recognize in this snapshot the essence of their friend: the love for science, the exuberant curiosity, the genuine interest in young people and the work of colleagues, the absent-mindedness, the feisty, determined approach to life, even in a wheelchair after undergoing two hip replacements.

And, yes, napping during lectures and meetings has been a habit for years.

“Oh, Tibby always slept through those things, sometimes snoring quite loudly,” says Jane Barker, a senior staff scientist who started her career with Russell in 1967. “But you know, when she woke up, she’d ask the best question in the room.”

Science has been part of Russell’s life from her birth in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1913. Her father, Aaron Franklin Shull, was a prominent zoologist at the University of Michigan who authored an acclaimed genetics textbook. Her mother, Margaret Buckley, taught college zoology in Iowa before marriage.

Numerous uncles had professional careers in the sciences. “Nature or nurture?” Russell laughs. “I think a bit of both.”

She entered Michigan at age 16, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in zoology in 1933, and became captivated by the infant field of physiological genetics while working on her master’s degree at Columbia University.

One of the leading lights in the discipline was Sewall Wright at the University of Chicago, and Russell spent three “critically important” years there as his graduate student. She earned her Ph.D. in zoology in 1937. Russell’s thesis explored the effect of genes on the pigmentation of guinea pigs.

Through family connections in Ann Arbor, Russell came to know a Harvard-trained geneticist named Clarence Cook Little when he was president of the University of Michigan.

In 1929, Dr. Little – who pioneered the use of inbred mice for human disease research – founded The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor with financing from business friends, including Roscoe B. Jackson of the Hudson Motor Car Co.

Russell was already familiar with “Prexy” Little and his mighty mice when, in 1937, she married William L. Russell, a fellow student at Chicago who had just been hired for a research position at the Bar Harbor lab.

Because of then-existing nepotistic rules, Russell couldn’t join the scientific staff, so she worked for nine years as an unpaid independent researcher.

The couple’s four children – Richard, Jack, James, and Ellen – were born between 1940 and 1946.

“It was a happy place, and a different place from today, very small and informal,” recalls Russell, whose nickname Tibby, bestowed by her husband, immortalizes one in a long succession of family cats.

Russell’s daughter, Ellen Gilmore, a school librarian in Southwest Harbor, remembers calling the lab in the 1950s and asking, simply, for “Mumma”.

The staff consisted of fewer than two dozen employees (now there are more than 1,000) crowded into a single small building. Money was scarce before the advent of the federal grant system, which is now the lifeblood of research institutions.

Scientists and support staff alike were urged by Dr. Little to “live sparsely.” They tended communal gardens and went deep-sea fishing to augment the food supply.

Once a month, an all-lab party was held with “all kinds of special games,” including mouse races, says Russell. She belonged to a women’s softball team called the Lab Lovelies.

There were holiday parties and caroling led by Dr. Snell, whose four sons grew up with the Russell children in downtown Bar Harbor.

Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Russell house were international events, bustling with visiting Russian or Chinese scientists Russell rescued from lonely holidays.

In 1946, Russell was finally appointed a paid member of the scientific staff. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1947.

William Russell departed for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he and his second wife, geneticist Liane Russell, went on to distinguished careers in radiation biology.

Tibby Russell never remarried, and more than 50 years later, quietly says that it was “challenging” raising four children on her own.

Her science can be summarized in two words: “mice” and “blood.” The Jackson Laboratory had been selling inbred mice since the 1930s for extra income, breeding brothers and sisters for generation after generation until all offspring were as alike as identical twins.

Some of the mice carried natural mutations that caused diseases such as cancer and anemia, and some were specially bred to develop those diseases. It was critical to scientists that every so-called copy of every strain be uniform and thoroughly characterized in order to study subtle genetic defects.

Paradoxically, it was the devastating Bar Harbor fire of 1947 that provided Russell with the unexpected opportunity to raise the bar on the genetic quality of these animal models.

The fire destroyed the lab and nearly all of its mouse stocks, forcing the entire staff and their families to temporarily evacuate.

But Dr. Little made the decision to rebuild, and loyal customers around the world began offering “starter” mice of uncertain heritage to help reconstitute the colonies.

Russell accepted the challenge and set about genetically standardizing the various strains in a core of “foundation” stocks on which all future mouse production was based.

She laboriously transferred all known pigmentation mutations onto the workhorse lab mouse, the C57BL/6J or “black 6,” so that their effects – including anemia, sterility, and skeletal defects – could be compared on a common genetic background.

“It was something she did for the good of science, not really for the advancement of her own career,” says Dr. Barker. “But every scientist working with mice today owes her their thanks.”

At the same time, Russell was pursuing pioneering research that defined the field of red blood cell biology and led to the first bone marrow transplant to successfully cure a disease (anemia).

The huge promise of stem cells to treat human disease has its beginnings in the work done in the 1960s by Russell and her lab colleague, Seldon Bernstein, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Toronto.

“Tibby investigated a mouse mutant with defects in reproduction, blood formation, and pigmentation,” says geneticist Willys Silvers, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has known Russell since 1949.

“Here was a single gene that affected all three systems and Tibby became an expert on each of them.”

Russell’s research also included work on the genetics of aging, and the discovery and study of a mouse called “funnyfoot,” one of the first animal models for muscular dystrophy.

Dr. Barker recalls that Russell was “outspoken” in her advocacy of mouse models as a tool to unravel the mysteries of many inherited human diseases at a time when the medical research establishment was often unconvinced and hostile.

“Many scientists, including myself, are wary of going after something outside their areas of expertise,” Dr. Silvers says. “Not Tibby. She was fearless. She had the ability to clearly see a problem she wanted to attack and then design the perfect experiment. It was a gift to every student she ever had to see this approach in action.”

“Tibby’s students” is a category that covers considerable territory: postdoctorals who trained in her lab from 1946 to 1978; undergraduates at the College of the Atlantic, where Russell taught and has been a trustee since its founding in 1972; young women who were encouraged by her example to pursue science careers; and biology students at Cuttington College in Liberia.

Russell taught there in 1987-88 and 1989-90 as part of a program sponsored by the Episcopal Church.

And her students include participants like Willys Silvers, in the lab’s Summer Student Program, which Russell enthusiastically supported from her arrival in 1937.

In those days, the students camped out in tents. Then, as now, they got experience conducting research projects under a sponsoring scientist. At a reunion of summer program alumni this past August, Dr. Silvers paid loving tribute to his mentor and donated $10,000 to a scholarship in her name.

“I like working with young people, that was satisfying,” Russell says.

Her daughter agrees that Russell has always had a special bond with the young. “She’s fairly liberal in her outlook, an entirely accepting, open-minded individual,” says Gilmore. “She didn’t care about the length of someone’s hair. When we were growing up, she pretty much agreed with our political causes.”

Indeed, Russell was a card-carrying member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She gave public talks on the health hazards of carcinogens in the environment, and “How would nuclear explosives in Asia or Europe affect the Maine coast?”

As a Trustee of the University of Maine (1975 to 1983) and an officer of the American Association of University Women, Russell lobbied for more women and minorities in higher education. As a member of the Genetics Society of America – she served as president in 1976 -Russell oversaw publication of an even-handed report on the topic of race and IQ.

The two post-retirement teaching stints in Liberia were prompted by a desire to improve conditions through education in that West African nation and to free up basic science teachers at Cuttington College to pursue research on the rain forest.

In typical perils-of-Tibby fashion, she managed to exit Liberia on one of the last departing commercial flights as a revolution raged in the summer of 1990.

In her many entertaining letters back home, Russell ends a marvelous number of sentences with exclamation points: “It’s time for me to collect stuff together for my Embryology class; we’re studying toads and toad eggs and polliwogs!”

In another she wrote: “I plan to give this a try! Life can really be interesting and challenging, even, or maybe especially, at 77 years!”

And there’s this: “I’m beginning to dream about a future, cooperative Africa with three fine medical schools (East, West, and South Africa), each in a city with a big hospital and efficient clinical training. Plus, spreading out from each of these hospitals, surrounding clinics in the countryside XXXlikeXXX the Chinese `barefoot doctor’ clinics. If they’d just stop the wars and get on with progress!”

Russell ended her active research career just before the molecular biology “revolution” that was fueled by high-powered computers and innovative new techniques that reduced to hours some of the tedious classical procedures that once took weeks, or even months.

She’s never used a computer, but that admission is more politely apologetic than regretful.

Among Russell’s “souvenirs” from Africa was a serious case of malaria. She has also survived a bout with breast cancer, and in recent years, has developed diabetes.

In 1994, her son Richard – a distinguished genetics educator and researcher at the University of Pittsburgh – died at the age of 54 from pancreatic cancer.

But Russell is at peace, and never more so than at The Jackson Laboratory. Her gentle presence and lifelong interest in science is an inspiration to all, to young postdoctorals surprised to see such idealism in one so old, and to the senior scientists, who are reminded by Russell why they got into this business in the first place.

“It’s a very lively field,” Russell says with a smile. “It’s what I always wanted to do.”

Editor’s Note: Luther Young works as a scientific grant writer at The Jackson Laboratory. Between 1987 and 1991, he worked as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, four years of which were spent as that newspaper’s science writer.