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A Matter of Health

Light in their eyes

by Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H.

Recently, someone asked me how I got into this field and why I stay.

I wish she had asked at the end of the day instead of at the beginning. By the end of the day, I knew. It's the light in their eyes.

That was the day that I trekked from office to laboratory to office again with back-to-back discussions of new research with scientists at Baylor College of Medicine. One of them was involved with drug resistance as well as string theory as it applies to DNA. Another had spent more than 40 years researching aerosolization as it applies to infectious organisms as well as drugs used to treat them and other disease. A third works with transcription factors that could provide important clues about treating cancer and other blood diseases.

They worked in different buildings of BCM and the Texas Medical Center. They probably see one another only rarely, if at all. One was 88 and the others much younger.

Different research, different locations, different interests. One was a woman and two were men. One had been at BCM for most of his adult life. Another had not been here two years.

They shared one thing – the light in their eyes.

That light came from their passion for science, for education and for their own brand of research. They are intensely cerebral people, and they can be as world weary as the rest of us about the world situation, politics and the cost of gasoline. But ask them about what they do, and the words come tumbling out.

How do they maintain that passion? The 88-year-old said it best.

"I want to save lives," he said.

Pondering the question of how he has maintained his enthusiasm, he was honest. "I don't know," he said. "I guess I'm just interested in a lot of things."

In a world where many people have jobs instead of careers and careers instead of passions, I feel honored to be among these people. You can tell who they are. They are rarely the first out the door at 5 p.m. You e-mail them in the evening, and they answer right back. You mention something you read that might influence their research, and they have not only read that but any background material with it.

They are in the lab early and stay late, often coming in on weekends to pursue what is to them their life's meaning. Their biological families are understanding as are their scientific families, who often keep the same hours. Some of them – the graduate and post-doctoral students – carry the torch with them and take it even further. The lineages in science are measured by the laboratories from which people emanate.

Sometimes their discussions are hard to follow because they are so deep into what they do that it is difficult to come back to the level of the lay person. I bring them back because that's what I do – I translate their work to the public.

And when I have a day like the one of the back-to-back interviews, it all comes back. I want to share in their passion, their enthusiasm. And most of all, I revel in the light in their eyes.

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