Solving a Problem You Can't See

We’ve all done it: come home to a dark house and searched to find the light switch. Richard Kornbluth ’66 is looking for a different sort of switch, one that will turn on the body’s immune system to fight tumors and infectious disease. He studies how our body’s T cells (a kind of white blood cell) activate macrophages (in Greek, “big eater”) to fight HIV, AIDS, and cancerous tumors. His HIV vaccine has stimulated an immune response in mice and is now being tested on macaque monkeys through a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Richard has also tested a similar vaccine for malaria—“It’s a DNA vaccine that doesn’t have to be refrigerated. A stable shelf life is crucial for these kinds of vaccines.”—and a vaccine that appears to cure mice of tumors for the rest of their lives. He expects the latter to come to human trials in one or two years.

While his scientific training includes an M.D. from New York Medical College and a Ph.D. in pathology from Columbia Uni-versity, Richard says he learned to be an independent thinker sitting at a Harkness table at Milton. “In A.O. Smith’s English class, I knew I couldn’t get away with giving a trite answer. I had to think for myself. Science is filled with bandwagons and trends that stifle original thought.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn explains how ideas like the sun revolving around the earth were changed, how paradigms shifted. It’s important to be creative in science. You can’t get ahead following the exciting thoughts of others. Often the most exciting ideas are not new, but old.”

For the origin of his work, Richard looks to Nobel laureate Ilya Mechnikov, who discovered the macrophage at the turn of the 19th century. Today, Richard works to take his findings from the laboratory to the real world. “I answer questions that push knowledge ahead; [I do] science based on the idea that you can do good work on problems that are just a few steps away from human application. I often hear scientists say, ‘When we finally understand all the steps in this pathway, we’ll be able to solve this problem.’ But I don’t think we need all the steps, just the key steps that give us a tool to solve the problem.”

But while practicality is paramount for Richard, the pure joy of discovery remains important too. As an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, he cultivates an exploratory mindset in his students. “The basic thrill of science is to ask a question about something that you can’t see or touch but know is real, and get an answer. Often I have high-school students imagine an invisible cave in the blackboard. You can throw a basketball at the board and into the hole and it comes right back. Then take three steps back, throw the ball, and it comes right back. But when you take a step to the left, the ball comes back over your left shoulder. When you take a step to the center, the ball comes back in the center. When you take a step to the right, the ball comes back over your right shoulder. Then the students begin to reason: Maybe the basketball is bouncing against a curved wall in the cave. They have gained knowledge and certainty about something they can’t see. The thrill of science is to work on something that you can’t see, but that you can change. When you get a consistent answer about something you cannot see and then others can duplicate your results, it becomes real for everyone.”

When results are inconclusive, however, all is not lost. Uncertainty, says Richard, is part of the scientific equation. “Students should be comfortable with the fact that there are many things that no one knows, yet some unknown facts are vital and need to be discovered. They should be interested in finding out unknowns. They should be able to cope with complexity, contradictions, and uncertainty. I read an obituary in the New York Times of a man who studied creativity. He found that very creative people are able to keep contradictory ideas in their heads for very long periods of time. Less-creative people are determined to find a solution to a problem; if they can’t decide something quickly, they give up and throw the problem away. But if you stay with it, you will come to see what’s difficult about it. The problem will simplify itself, and you will move closer to finding the answer.”

Caitlin O’Neil ’89

 

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