Cyprus born scientist Eleftherios Diamandis was recently awarded for his contribution to medical science. But what kind of person makes a good researcher asks THEO PANAYIDES
I love my job, but it’s not like I’m curing cancer. That holds true, no matter what you do for a living – unless you’re Dr Eleftherios Diamandis, because he really is curing cancer. Not in a dramatic way, and in fact he explicitly warns me against doing what the media always do – pumping up scientific advances, so it sounds like a cure is just around the corner – but he’s still at the cutting edge. His research lab at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto (he’s also a Professor and Head of Department at the University of Toronto) has worked at the problem for 20 years, greatly helped by the mapping of the human genome in the past decade.
But we’re getting slightly ahead of ourselves. Even before the work there’s Eleftherios himself, a 58-year-old with wavy silver hair and calm, canny eyes in a rather narrow face; he was in Cyprus recently to accept the so-called Nemitsas Prize (awarded by the Takis and Louki Nemitsas Foundation) for his contribution to medical science – yet he doesn’t really fit the stereotype of research scientist. When we think of such people, beavering away over test-tubes and Petri dishes, we tend to think of words like ‘absent-minded’ and ‘in his own world’. If I had to describe Eleftherios in a single word, however, that word might be ‘shrewd’. And if I had to add a second word, it might be ‘competitive’ – a word he himself uses more than once in our conversation.
“A lot of people think that researchers are some kind of monks,” he tells me. “But in fact to be a scientist is actually a profession. Like you are a newspaper reporter, I am a trained professional scientist. It’s my job. Though it starts a bit earlier, probably – around 7am – and we usually work longer hours”. Significantly, the passion for research came before the passion for medicine. He studied Chemistry at the University of Athens, then did a PhD – and it was only there, working with biological samples, that he became “fascinated with medicine” and went on to medical school. He might just as easily have ended up a physicist, or an industrial chemist; what drove him wasn’t a particular branch of research, but the concept of research itself. “I always wanted to investigate things. It’s fun, I found it fun.” Medical school was hard, he adds, since he was already married with children – but also “an amazing investment, because having my medical degree gave me a chance to get into hospitals. My salary is much higher than an average PhD scientist as well, which is an extra bonus”. Like I said, a shrewd man.
He no longer has direct contact with patients; “My clinical practice is restricted to directing the laboratories of the hospital where I work”. Does he miss it? Not really, he replies; it’s clear, in this age of “complex science”, that you can’t do everything – and he’d much rather do what he does, which is directing a big research laboratory. He has 25 people working in his lab, 12 of them graduate students doing Masters and Doctorates. The lab has an annual budget of $1.5 million. No absent-minded scientist could survive in this context; Eleftherios is more like the CEO of a small company, getting the best from his ‘employees’ and trying to ensure the ‘company’ shows enough ‘profits’ (i.e. results) to enable it to carry on.
That last part can be challenging – because science isn’t as easily tamed as the world of business. “99 per cent of our job is actually frustration,” he admits, “because most of the experiments we do, and most of the ideas we have, don’t actually work”. Discovering something new, “something genuinely new, that nobody has ever seen”, is a rare and precious moment; it might come once a year, once in five years – maybe never. For Eleftherios and his lab, the big (or biggest) break came in the mid-90s, when he discovered a whole family of genes called Kallikreins – “a big family of enzymes which are implicated in various diseases”. This was huge. There’s now an International Society of Kallikreins, devoted exclusively to studying his discovery, and around 150 labs throughout the world working in this area.
Does he remember the exact moment when he made the discovery? But he shakes his head; research doesn’t really work that way. “The way we discover things is like trying to discover gold under the Earth. Once you hit a vein of gold, and you see it, obviously that’s a revelation – because most of the time when we drill we find copper, or sometimes we find silver, which is not as good. But once you hit gold, and you have the revelation, you then have to create a mine, and find people to dig up the gold and clean the gold”. Only gradually does one realise the enormity of a discovery; he himself spent around 15 years studying Kallikreins, trying to find out what exactly they do.
Every day, his staff carry out experiments. It’s clinical research, working with actual human tissue – not mice, or insects or whatever – and so-called cell lines (“cells that have been derived from humans”). They manipulate DNA, cutting and re-joining to create recombinant DNA.
How on earth do you cut DNA?
There are enzymes, he replies – commercially available enzymes which other scientists have discovered, and won a Nobel Prize for. You mix DNA with the enzymes in test tubes and create (or “culture”) human cells, cancer cells, stimulating them to see how they react. Then you “treat the cells with chemicals that we believe may have anti-cancer activities, [and] see if a certain group of proteins changes with the stimulation”. Mass spectrometry – another Nobel Prize-winning discovery – allows thousands of proteins to be characterised in a cell or fluid.
As implied by the above, science is a global affair nowadays. Every scientist uses the work of other scientists – and is also in competition with them, especially in a ‘hot’ area like cancer research. Eleftherios’ staff of 25 includes a full-time “bioinformatician” whose only job is to scour the huge online databases where all scientists must deposit their data, and retrieve the data that’s useful to the lab. The greatest recent example of global scientific co-operation was the Human Genome Project, which tasked an international body with identifying all 30,000 genes in the human body (a job that was previously done piecemeal, and indeed Eleftherios’ own lab identified 23 new genes before the Project started). Helped by technology which allows “high through-put sequencing of DNA”, this now allows anyone to sequence his or her genomes relatively cheaply – for around $10,000, a far cry from the very first sequencing which cost $1 billion!
Once the price goes down even further (and it will), things are liable to start getting interesting. “People are saying that the sequencing of each individual human genome will be part of a regular check-up,” he explains. Maybe we’ll have our genome sequenced at birth, then carry that sequence on a chip or credit-card – so, for instance, if we develop cancer, the genome can be sequenced again (a kind of ‘Before’ and ‘After’) to find the gene mutations which caused the cancer. Nor does it end there, because sequencing also shows what diseases you may be susceptible to. “If a woman has a mutation of the so-called breast cancer genes, like the BRCA1 or BRCA2, we know that these women have a near-certainty – more than 80 per cent chance – of developing breast cancer in their lifetime”. Knowing your genome sequence allows for preventive measures, like frequent monitoring to catch the cancer at an early stage. “It’s a new revolution that is coming”.
Trouble is, it goes beyond science. Imagine if you carried your genome record with you at all times, showing that you may be susceptible to schizophrenia or depression. Wouldn’t a prospective employer want to see that before giving you a job? Wouldn’t a prospective husband or wife want to check you out before committing? Wouldn’t the temptation to falsify that record be irresistible? Probably; but this is where Dr Eleftherios Diamandis prefers to pull his punches, admitting it’s a “tricky issue” but he’s confident “appropriate legislation” will take care of it. It’s like later on, when I mention another controversial side-effect of our Golden Age of Science – an all-consuming drug culture, where patients are plied with Prozac for depression and Ritalin for hyperactivity while the pharmaceutical companies make billions. “There’s nothing wrong with people making money out of major medical discoveries,” he replies mildly.
An absent-minded scientist might’ve been more ambivalent – but Dr Diamandis is a more robust, more Darwinian type, a strong competitor and believer in the free market. His father was a high achiever – a common labourer who rose to become Mayor of the village of Ayios Athanasios – his two kids are high achievers (his son’s in medical school; his daughter is doing a PhD), and Eleftherios himself is very much a high achiever. He started out doing research in Greece, “but it was second- or third-class” because he didn’t have the funds or equipment – so he shrewdly looked around for a “rich country”, and found Canada. He was recruited by a small company, worked extremely hard and achieved in two years what the company had tried (and failed) to do in 10 years. “People were very impressed with my abilities – and I’m sorry for, you know, praising myself, but that’s how it happened”. The University of Toronto offered him lab space, and the rest is history.
Is it any wonder that he thrives on the North American funding system, which is totally meritocratic? “If you get money, then you can sustain your laboratory,” he says simply. “If you are not able to get money – because your science may not be at that level – and you don’t get funding, then you will lose your laboratory”. Only 10-15 per cent of applicants get funding; he’s been funded for the past 20 years, raising money both from granting agencies and “diagnostic companies” hoping to invest in his research.
Is it any wonder that he loves sports, “just about every sport, and I watch a lot on television”? Is it any wonder that he himself plays tennis almost compulsively, both in Cyprus – which he visits every few months – and in Canada, winter and summer? I remember something else he mentioned, when explaining why research is frustrating: “Nature has done things in a way that you have to fight to understand it”. I suspect Eleftherios Diamandis views even science as a kind of sport – a game of attrition between himself and Nature, probing its mysteries, revealing its secrets slowly, patiently, shrewdly.
‘What talent is needed to be a good research scientist?’ I ask, and he laughs out loud. “I’m asked this question a lot,” he replies. “Unfortunately, a whole group of talents are needed – and one which I don’t think you need, and I’m not one of those, is being a genius. You don’t need that. This is one thing you don’t need, and I want you to print it!
“Some of the talents that people may need is they should be hard workers, they should be task-oriented, highly organised, passionate. They must have a personality to deal with people who have money – this has helped me a lot – and persuade them to bring the money to you. Have to be a good manager, a good mentor to your students, select the right people…” He pauses thoughtfully: “I have seen a lot of youngsters who were geniuses, but they were totally disorganised and could not finish anything. I have seen people who were very clever, but they didn’t have the personality to deal with others, or they couldn’t communicate very well.”
It’s a lot like tennis, says Dr Eleftherios Diamandis. If you have a big serve but no ground-strokes, you won’t win the big games. If you have a killer forehand but a weak backhand, you won’t rise to the top. He himself is a quiet all-rounder who’ll compete for every point and – like all good tennis players – runs on mental strength, never doubting himself or the “complex science” he belongs to. The absent-minded scientist may be more romantic. If and when cancer is defeated, however, you just know it’ll be someone like him – a shrewd, tough-minded CEO type – who’ll be thanking the Nobel committee.
