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The making of a physician-scientist

by Ruth SoRelle, MPH

Sean McGuire, PhD

If you had suggested to college-age Sean McGuire that he would spend his graduate school years working with fruit flies (Drosophila), he would have said you were wrong.

Yet McGuire, who has his PhD from Baylor College of Medicine and just finished his final year of medical school, recently received the Larry Sandler Award, an international distinction named in honor of one of the great pioneers of Drosophila genetics. The award is given annually to the PhD student with most outstanding PhD dissertation. The competition is open to all students using Drosophila as an experimental organism.

That’s right. McGuire spent years in the laboratory with fruit flies.

Make no mistake. McGuire was always fated to be a scientist. His late father, William McGuire, MD, started the prestigious breast cancer research program at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio – a program that moved here in 1999 under the auspices of C. Kent Osborne, MD.

“I saw the brighter side of science through my father,” said McGuire. “I was exposed to a lot of opportunities and became involved in science early.”

In high school, he placed in the well-known Westinghouse National Science Competition and was then selected as an American participant in the Weizmann Institutes Science Program. He received a Milken Foundation Award and an invitation to the 1990 conference of the American Academy of Achievement. He is a National Merit Scholarship award winner.

He received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Harvard University and received a competitive Ford Grant that enabled him to do undergraduate research with Mark Ptashne, PhD. He was co-author of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on “Interactions of a Rel protein with its inhibitor.” By that time, he had already published papers in two other professional journals. He later published two more – one in Human Gene Therapy and another in Biotechniques.

McGuire elected to enter the rigorous MD/PhD program at BCM. In his first year as a graduate student, his standing at the top of his class won him the Anthony R. Means Award for Scholastic Excellence in the BCM department of molecular and cellular biology. He has also received the BCM Graduate School’s John J. Trentin Award for Scholastic Excellence. In 2001, he was lauded for the most outstanding research publication, and in 2002, McGuire received the award for the most outstanding scientific presentation from the molecular and cellular biology department as well as the award for the best oral presentation among his MD/PhD colleagues at the Medical Scientist Training Program symposium. He published two articles in the journal Science during graduate school.

In 2003, he won the Harold Weintraub Graduate Student award for excellence – one of five BCM graduate students who have won the award from the Fred Hutchinson Research Institute in Seattle in as many years.

As his mentor, Ronald Davis, PhD, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at BCM, said, “This award places Sean not only among the top graduate students at Baylor College of Medicine but also among a select few graduate students across the United States. Sean has an insatiable curiosity, fine technical skills, and a clarity of thought that have brought him his successes to date.”

In the laboratory, McGuire used Drosophila to study the molecular and cellular biology of learning. His work lent support to the idea that memories are formed and stored in the mushroom body neurons and retrieving or remembering requires output by the process of synaptic transmission, in which messages are chemically transmitted between neurons at special junctions called synapses.

McGuire also developed a special method for regulating gene expression in both time and space. As Davis said in nominating McGuire for the Sandler award, “He developed a system that the world of Drosophila researchers will be able to use to provide temporal and regional gene expression targeting.”

McGuire is clear about his desire to be a physician-scientist. It is clear, he said, that there needs to be more trained people who can be at the bedside and at the laboratory bench.

“Both are full-time jobs, and it is hard to do both,” he said. Combining that with being a husband to another BCM faculty member, Amy Lynn McGuire, JD, who is part of the Center for Ethics and Health Policy, and the father of two young children.

He described BCM and the department of molecular and cell biology “as a unique place in the sense of collegiality and warmth. It makes people happy and at the same time, you have people who are the best in their fields who are doing the best science all the time. It’s a great environment you want to come to every day. It’s hard to put your finger on. It’s an intangible.”

He plans to concentrate in the field of cancer and translational medicine that takes new treatments to the bedside quickly.

“It is still a devastating disease 30 years after we declared war on it. It would be a meaningful contribution to improve the health and quality of life of such people. It is a challenge to come up with a better solution.”

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