This week I dropped by the office of my PI, Dr. Blobe, to ask him some questions about his research, life, and career path. Dr. Blobe went to school at Notre Dame and studied Chemistry with a concentration in Biochemistry. He then went on to receive an M.D./Ph.D. from Duke! One of the things that really caught my interest when I went in to speak with Dr. Blobe before the HHRF program started was the fact that he is an M.D./Ph.D. Since I am interested in potentially pursuing that path myself, I asked him why he chose to do that program. Dr. Blobe told me that he was initially a Ph.D candidate, but his older sister was in medical school and he was told that he did not seem like the stereotypical “lab rat” that only did research. As such, he decided that an M.D./Ph.D. was a good compromise between the world of research and interacting with people.
Dr. Blobe’s lab focuses on a kinase signalling pathway in cells called TGF-B, which I’ve mentioned before functions dichotomously as both a tumor suppressor and tumor promoter, and specifically looks at the role of these pathways in cancer progression. I also asked Dr. Blobe what specifically led him to studying this particular pathway in his lab, and he told me that as a grad student he studied signal transduction. Leading on from this, as a post doc, he learned of TGF-B’s close connection to cancers, and chose to hone in on that as his area of study.
I also wanted to know what caused him to become interested in science in the first place. We’ve heard from several speakers from the Duke faculty in the two weeks that we have been here, and one of the big things I’ve taken away from their talks is that there are so many different ways for people to discover a love for science. Dr. Blobe said that even as early as middle school, he loved doing experiments in science class. Furthermore, he valued the critical thinking and processing necessary to do science, as opposed to blind memorization.
Since I have a personal interest in cancer research, I asked Dr. Blobe what he thought was the most exciting thread being pursued in current cancer research. He answered that it was the idea of being able to study an individual’s cancer and it’s unique mutations, in order to create personalized therapies for each patient. That idea is extremely cool to me, since cancers can be caused by so many different combinations of things going wrong in someone’s genome. Being able to tailor individualized treatments brings us that much closer to more successful chemotherapies in the future.
Finally, I asked Dr. Blobe if he had any funny stories from the lab to share, and he reached up to grab from the top of his bookshelf three flasks that had melted and been fused together. As he explained, he was once working in a lab that had received a new incubator, but no one realized that the machine had an automatic autoclaving feature. As a result, the first night they used it, it killed all their samples and fused their plasticware together. He kept three flasks as a reminder of the incident and to always remember to expect the unexpected.
One of my goals this summer is to get a better handle on what I want to do with my future, particularly in nailing down whether I am interested in pursuing an M.D./Ph.D. myself. That’s not something that could be answered with just one interview, and I didn’t expect to. However, my talk with Dr. Blobe definitely gave me some things to mull over, and helped to reassure me that at the very least, I still think science is the right field for me. That said, I managed to make every mistake possible in pouring gels this week, and infected at least three of my plated cell lines for an experiment. Here’s hoping for some improvement this week…
