Hoping for a cure — and a little respect

At 7 a.m. they get down to business.

His first experiment is purifying DNA samples from cancers for the students to analyze.

Then meetings.

More experiments.

More meetings.

It's hard to wrap your mind around what these scientists do day in and day out. But just when you think the work couldn't be any more challenging, Vogelstein has a really tough assignment for one of his top students. Hareeth Rahjahgopalen has just completed his M.D. and Ph.D, but before his professor signs off on his thesis, he's told he needs to have just a few more balls in the air.

“We knew that he could meet any intellectual challenge. That'd be too easy for him. So we told him he had to beat one of the faculty members at table tennis [who] is a really good table tennis player,” says Vogelstein.

He adds, laughing, “We would have preferred that he lose and stay in the lab.” 

Then it's back to the lab. Such detailed, tedious work requires another outlet. At the end of the day their cafeteria serves up a little jazz. The band's name is Wild Type. It's the scientific term used to describe the normal version of a gene as opposed to one that is mutated.

Meanwhile, Vogelstein's scientific bent seems to be genetic as well. His two sons are studying at Johns Hopkins — one is a budding biomedical engineer; the other is a future neuroscientist.

Because their Dad spends 17 hours a day in the lab, six days a week — Saturdays he takes a break by reading medical journals for 8 to 10 hours — there is a Vogelstein lunch once a week.

Without fail, Vogelstein shows up for this bit of quality time with his family, which is a good thing because at times, he really is the absentminded professor. He says, “I guess [it's] because I'm thinking about what we can do and what we can do better. Last night I forget to pick up Joshua until I got home. But then I remembered when I got in the driveway.  So I just had to drive back and pick him up.  I'm not a good driver.  I often seem to forget whether red means go or stop.”

He is determined, devoted and always searching.

“Whatever you learn today is never the end. It's just the middle or the beginning of something else. I never go home with a sense of completion.  I often go home with a sense of excitement about what we can do tomorrow.  But that's one of the fun things about science — there's always a challenge to think about,” says Vogelstein.

That's what drives Bert Vogelstein. Like countless other scientists, working quietly in their labs with no publicity, with little fanfare and little sleep, all he hopes for is a cure for cancer — and maybe a little respect. 

Vogelstein says, “It would be great if Americans could feel as proud of their scientific establishment as they do of their hockey teams.”

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