Jan. 15, 2003

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The lure of science

By Ruth SoRelle, MPH

The road from high school to graduate studies is difficult for most people, but the barriers faced by some of the students now pursuing doctorates as well as those who have already received them at Baylor College of Medicine might have seemed impossible to the ordinary person. Fortunately, these were not ordinary people. That they succeeded is a tribute to their tenacity and to their abilities. However, many of them credit the system of support at the Houston school with helping them achieve their goals.

Andrew Castillo

Andrew Castillo

Most people would have doubted that Andrew Castillo could follow a straight course from high school in Corpus Christi to a bachelor's degree in genetics at Texas A&M University and now to the graduate work that will earn him a doctorate from Baylor. Reared in a single-parent household, Andrew remembers a normal childhood filled with play and school, which his mother stressed. When he was in the seventh grade, however, his mother was diagnosed with spreading cancer. Despite her illness, Andrew won a full scholarship to A&M, and his mother insisted that he take advantage of it. "My mother raised me to know that education came first," he said.

At A&M, he became part of the Howard Hughes Undergraduate program that encouraged science education and he worked in the laboratory of Rodney Honeycut, PhD, during his entire four years - starting with the menial tasks and gradually taking up scientific duties. "I really liked the environment," he said. His mother died during his freshman year in college, and Andrew assumed the role of mentor and role model for his younger brother.

His work with Honeycut yielded enough data for a poster at an undergraduate research symposium, where he won second place. He represented the undergraduate research sector at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, presenting his research and discussing it with members of the Legislature.

He applied to Baylor because he knew that the school would give him a top-notch education, one that would prepare him for a career in the biomedical sciences. He was accepted, and the 25 year old is now in his fourth year of graduate studies. Here he found Gayle Slaughter, PhD, who heads the Minorities for Excellence in Research and Graduate Education (MERGE) program at Baylor. "She's always there for us," he said.

As part of the program, Slaughter brings other minority scientists to the campus to tell the student how they made it and to encourage them that it is all possible. Classes in grant and scientific paper preparation are important in preparing the young researchers for the futures as are special review sessions on upcoming courses.

"She has laptops so we can write while we are working in the lab. It is a nurturing environment and one we needed right out of college," he said.

As for Andrew's younger brother, he is a junior on a full scholarship at Texas A&M. "My mom did really well," said Castillo.

Anjelica Gonzalez

Anjelica Gonzalez

In undergraduate school, Anjelica Gonzalez majored in bioengineering, but the assumption was that she would go into an agriculture-related field like most of her fellow students at Utah State University. Anjelica, however, was never one to follow the easy or prescribed path.

She learned early the need to prove herself when she moved to a small Nevada community to live with her grandparents and go to high school while her mother worked in Las Vegas. She was the only African-American, and her classmates subjected her to hefty doses of racism until they learned that her other difference was that she was really smart. She ended up as a class officer and a scholarship winner.

While at Utah State, she received a brochure about Baylor College of Medicine's Summer Medical And Research Training Program for undergraduates in the summer between their junior and senior years.

In the SMART program, she worked with the pulmonary system, but that was not her only learning opportunity. Slaughter had begun a preparatory course for the Graduate Record Examination and Anjelica found it very helpful. Her scores went up dramatically. When it came time to go to graduate school, she applied at Baylor and was accepted. "I was surprised they wanted me," she said.

As part of the MERGE program, she participated in many of its activities. "The networking is a big thing," she said. Not only has she made close friends with her classmates, she has found mentors to whom she can take her insecurities and her problems.

MERGE made it possible for her attend national conferences. When she went to the National Minority Research Symposium, she attended all the symposia. At one of those, a speaker generated an idea for the abstracts she chose for her oral examinations. She also attended the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society. "There weren't a lot of women or minorities, " she said. "But you can learn anything you need there."

Today, she spends much of her time at Rice University, working in the bioengineering department under the supervision of Larry McIntyre, PhD, who has a joint appointment at Baylor. There the PhD student is developing a three-dimensional computerized system to track cancer cells. Her system, she hopes, will help researchers better understand better how malignant cells invade tissue and grow. "Once we get the system done, there are a number of things we can do with it," she said.

Eventually, she expects to end up working in industry, not academia. It is likely she will. Anjelica Gonzalez is a determined person who has learned how to get where she wants to go.

Joy Ann Phillips Rohan

Equally adamant about her future is Joy Ann Phillips Rohan, who expects to teach at the high school or undergraduate level when she gets her doctorate. At the same time, she hopes to pursue some of the research she has loved since high school.

Raised in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, Joy Ann's exposure to science began early when her social worker mother put her in a science program after school. "I even had my own microscope," she said.

Accepted to Spelman College in Atlanta, she attended that school's pre-freshman summer science program and pursued internships at Amgen and New York University during her undergraduate studies.

She met Slaughter at the annual symposium of the Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) Program. Later, the young woman was invited to participate in the MERGE program and found a "people atmosphere" she liked. "The student-faculty relationships were important," she said.

The MERGE program has proved important to her because it enabled her to borrow the books she needed for her studies and her research. It also enabled her to meet students who are farther along in their studies than she is. "You say your project is not working, and they say, 'You don't understand what not working is. Come back in two months and tell me it's still not working.'"

A recent trek to a Keystone-sponsored meeting in Taos, N.M., enabled her to meet with established scientists who could give her insights into how to tackle her project.

Most of all, she said, the program gave her new insights into science and the fact that she did not have to spend all her time in a laboratory. "When I first came, I knew I would have my own lab some day," she said. "Now I'm not so sure that's what I want to do. I definitely want to teach, and the heads of laboratories don't do that."

Lynette Burks

Lynnette Burks came to Baylor intent on entering the difficult MD/PhD program. "The day I interviewed, it was 70 degrees (Fahrenheit) outside, and everyone was friendly," she said. Even though the average temperature for much of the year is much higher, she has no regrets about choosing Baylor.

She has already completed the first two years of her medical training and is now in her fourth year of graduate school. Her dream is to practice real "bench to bedside" medicine.

The MERGE program allowed her to become friends with other graduate students who are members of ethnic and racial minorities at the school. "There are a lot of us around," she said.

The MERGE program enabled her to use books from its own resource library. "In graduate school, the books are important because you need to read the background to understand what is happening," she said. It is obvious that she took advantage of the opportunity because she won the John Trenton Award for Academic Achievement. Through the MERGE program, she also had access to a laptop computer that was essential when she was preparing for her qualifying examinations and writing her Merck United Negro College Fund proposal. Only 12 such grants are awarded nationwide, and Burks received one of them, as did her MERGE colleagues Kelvin Moses and Wilmer Roberts. Baylor students received three of the 12 awards, an unprecedented achievement.

She is also a BRASS Scholar. BRASS or Baylor Research Advocates for Student Scientists is a local group that aids students financially. Members of the group also take students under their wings, sponsoring their attendance at community events.

Burks hopes to follow a career in academic medicine as a pediatric geneticist, much in the manner of Sharon Plon, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics and genetics in whose laboratory she currently pursues her work, or Huda Zoghbi, MD, a Baylor professor and physician-researcher from whose lab several significant gene findings have issued.

Within two years, she hopes to have finished her lab work and graduate school. She then has approximately 18 months more of medical school.

"This is the perfect place to do your MD/PhD," she said. "Here, you have the best of both worlds."

Carlos Cantu

Carlos Cantu, PhD, entered the SMART program in the summer after his junior year in college with the hope of finding a direction for his scientific talent.

"I got my feet wet in the field of molecular biology and protein biology that summer," he said. "That was the summer I met Wah Chiu (director of the school's National Center for Macromolecular Imaging) and I learned you could put together physics, mathematics, computer science and biology." He had not finished a year of freshman biology when he came to Baylor, but he went back, finished that course and signed up for more. When it came time for graduate school, he applied to Baylor. "Gayle Slaughter and the SMART program sold me on Baylor," he said.

He did most of his work in the laboratory of Timothy Palzkill, PhD, an associate professor of biochemistry, immunology and microbiology, where his research centered on the biology of specific proteins that are important to understanding the mechanism of antibiotic resistance. However, what he gained at Baylor was more than a knowledge of ways to manipulate molecules and proteins.

Baylor mentors helped him refine his critical thinking. He learned to design experiments that would answer the questions he was asking. Graduate student symposiums and retreats taught him the importance of thinking his science through completely. He learned to write grants.

"The more I think back on it, the better the experience was," he said recently. Baylor gave him more than a hands-on experience with science. It gave him an exposure to a world he might never have seen had he not come to Houston that summer. Today, he has a post-doctoral fellowship at the Scripps Institute in San Diego.

© Copyright 2003 Baylor College of Medicine. All Rights Reserved. MLE.