Jax and Maine’s potential, in translation

Jackson Lab’s new $1 million microscope – the 4Pi Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope, the only one in the United States – works, roughly, by using two high-resolution lenses to direct light to the same spot, producing a three-dimensional view of some really tiny stretches of genes. The microscope’s unusual power comes from the use of the multiple lenses, which, coincidentally, describes how the funding for this valuable tool came to Bar Harbor.

The high-tech mi-croscope, awarded as Jackson Lab celebrates its 75th year, is not solely the property of the lab, though the instrument will have a prominent place there, including its own separate floor down to bedrock. It will be located in the lab’s Institute for Molecular Biophysics, which is also operated by the University of Maine and the Maine Medical Center Research Institute in Scarborough. The goal of IMB is to study how genes control normal development and disease; a key word there is the unmelodic “interdisciplinary,” which is another way of describing researchers from multiple fields focusing on a single problem.

That means while Jackson Lab provides the expertise in genetics, UMaine researchers contribute their skills in biophysics and engineering and MMCRI offers its talents in molecular and cell biology. “This wouldn’t have happened without collaboration,” said Dr. Rick Woychik, director of Jackson Lab, because federal grants are based on these acts of cooperation. Most of the funding for the microscope came from the National Science Foundation.

But not just collaboration. As the federal government has doubled the level of funding for medical research in the last few years, it has required that the science have practical applications, such as the work anticipated for the microscope. This is called translational research. It brings laboratory findings into clinical work and clinical observations to the laboratory. It should also bring a much larger vision of biomedicine’s possibilities to Maine.

You’re familiar with the general caricature of scientists – white lab coat, smelly experiments in petri dishes, long hours spent alone in a lab mumbling complex strings of thoughts to themselves. Actually, that’s all true. But that’s not all that’s true. Researchers have also become international partners in large projects that have accelerated the pace of discovery and placed them, says MMCRI Director Kenneth Ault, “in the midst of an unbelievable revolution in biology. It’s just moving at breakneck speed.”

The Internet allows for the worldwide collaboration as never before, but even local links weren’t a sure thing here a dozen years ago. Dr. Barbara Knowles, an associate director of Jackson Lab who runs the Institute for Molecular Biophysics, remembers trying to start a relationship between Jackson Lab and UMaine and getting nowhere with either. “They were the only ones producing Ph.D.s in Maine and we had no collaboration,” she said. “I was beside myself.”

That changed a few years ago when Robert Kennedy, a biologist who was then provost and is now acting UMaine president, also understood the opportunity. “We don’t have a med school and we’re not going to be able to afford one,” he said recently. “But working through these partnerships we could easily have the equivalent of a small medical school.”

That is encouraging, but it’s not enough. “That’s where we started in 1975,” counters Dr. Clifford Rosen, referring to a med-school proposal in the Legislature then that Gov. James Longley rejected. Not creating the school “was the biggest mistake we made and we’re still paying for it.” Without a medical school, he says, Bangor, the regional center for health care, lacks the core intellectual resources necessary for patients to get the best care.

Dr. Rosen is director of the Maine Center for Osteoporosis Research at St. Joseph Hospital, chairman of the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review bone panel, adjunct staff scientist at Jackson Lab, a professor of nutrition at UMaine and chairman of other national professional boards. “We have great docs doing great work here and I know we’re all too busy and we’ve got patients, but I think we bring so much more when we bring the [lab] bench to the bedside. It provides insight into basic mechanisms and, for the patient, that’s huge.”

For example, a study he conducted in Greenville showed that in winter women can suffer considerable bone loss. This led to a general federal recommendation of additional vitamin D for women over age 65, but the research also gave him a better understanding of his own patients’ ailments. Another example: On his way through Massachusetts General Hospital the other day, Dr. Rosen says the first thing he noticed was a poster outlining the cellular mechanisms for how fluid leaks into lungs, a condition that makes recovery for many illnesses more difficult. The poster is there because the research is being done there and that creates the intellectual atmosphere needed for improved understanding of disease.

Maine, he says, needs a new medical school (the successful University of New England school emphasizes primary care), and with the Jackson Lab it has a substantial advantage for starting one because the lab is renown for its top-quality science, the mouse has become the premier model for genetic research and the 2,800 strains of Jax mice are in demand around the world. (There are some 750,000 mice at the lab – or not mice but eight-celled embryos chilled in liquid-nitrogen tanks to minus 196 degrees Celsius. Jax mice are cool figuratively and literally.)

“We could easily build a medical school off Jackson Lab,” Dr. Rosen says, pointing to the basic research there, the quality of work and students at UMaine and the clinical work possible at Maine Medical Center. Most important, “everyone is working together without jealousy for once. If we’re going to build our intellectual resources, a medical school is the translational component we need.”

Lawmakers may find Dr. Rosen’s ambitions far-fetched, but who 10 years ago would have predicted the level of cooperation in biomedical science Maine has today? Or, for that matter, who would have guessed 75 years ago that Jackson Lab would become a world center for genetic research? Thinking big while looking at minuscule samples under its microscopes has served Jackson Lab extraordinarily well. Why not take the results of that research and apply it to the clinic of Maine?

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.