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Retroviral vectors: from cancer viruses to therapeutic tools.

My father was an electrical engineer, and I loved to tinker with the dismembered parts of electronic equipment that he brought home for me. He liked working on cars, and I learned mechanical skills from him. So it was natural for me to study engineering as an undergraduate, with heavy doses of physics and math. However, during my senior year at Brown University, I took a one-year trip to the Geographic South Pole in Antarctica to study cosmic rays (highenergy particles originating primarily from outside the solar system), and my plans changed. Likely because of the harsh conditions there (10,500-foot altitude equivalent, <1% humidity, outside temperatures dropping below the freezing point of CO2), the long ride there and back on noisy aircraft, or the plain isolation of the site, I recognized the fragility of life and became more interested in biology and medicine. After finishing my engineering and math degrees and spending a few months on an oceanographic ship, and having spent most of my life on the east coast of the United States, I set sail for Stanford University to learn some biology and hopefully enter medical school. Medical school at Stanford turned out not to be an option, but I was able to find work in a lab in the Stanford Pharmacology Department, under the tutelage of a clever postdoc. Things went well and I was accepted into the PhD program in a lab studying cytochrome P450 regulation, which I hoped would lead me into the field of recombinant DNA and the isolation of the various P450 protein and regulatory genes. The work was very interesting, but my advisor wasn’t interested in cloning genes, and so this would have to wait. But while I was there, I took a class in virology run by the Biochemistry Department, and the section on retroviruses got me thinking about their possible use as gene transfer vehicles to treat genetic disease. Interestingly, Richard Mulligan, the other pioneer cited for his work on retroviral vectors, was doing his graduate work on gene transfer in the Biochemistry Department, just down the hall from my lab in pharmacology!