A Matter of Life and Death. Sue Armstrong

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СКАЧАТЬ company is fully integrated with all the discoveries at Imperial, and I am the chairman of the scientific advisory board. We have a management group who are financiers, and they understand business. And then I run the science. And that’s fascinating, because the science moves from the test tube to something that could become reality. Doing research and writing papers about your discoveries is beautiful, and you become famous. But it’s real life that’s important. In real life, you want to save lives … And to protect your discoveries, and make money to bring it back to the research.

      Tell me about your trust, your charity.

      When I was in hospital, and quite sick after my transplant, I was trying to collect money for the Harefield, and Sir Magdi said, ‘No, set up your own charity, for your own research.’ We started collecting and we supported a lot of research students, and now Imperial College wants to establish a prize for young women, called the Dame Julia Prize. We’re collecting that money to help give the young women a chance.

       Have you experienced barriers as a woman doing science?

      I am very thick skinned, so I didn’t. But lots of people say there are barriers. I do strongly believe we need to nurture women, because they lack confidence. We need to discriminate in favour of them. So giving this prize will help.

      You say you are too thick skinned to have noticed any kind of sexual discrimination. Are you an ambitious person?

      Yes, I’m driven. I am all the time organising and getting into new things. I mean, I will never be fully retired because I will always find other things I want to do.

      You obviously have an extraordinarily busy life and yet you’ve brought up three kids … How did you manage it?

      I have a good husband. And we had an amazing nanny. Danny and I had a rule that we never went away at the same time; one of us would always be here. And when the children were young, we were back home at 6 p.m. So it was a very structured life.

      Golda Meir, when she was the Israeli prime minister, once told an interviewer that as a woman with a high-flying career as well as children you just have to come to terms with the fact that you will always feel guilty about something. Do you agree?

      Oh yes, completely horrible! My son reminded us … Now he denies this story, but he was such a difficult person when he was a teenager. [said with an indulgent smile] He said, ‘I’m writing a play to say goodbye to school; will you come?’ We were so proud: the great genius writing a play, acting in it and staging it … Somebody said, ‘I don’t think you should come.’ And we said, ‘What d’you mean? Of course we’ll come – all the family! Nanny and all her family too.’ We were in the front row, and the story was about a disturbed child, who is disturbed because his parents are academics and flying all over the place, and he commits suicide in the middle of the stage because his parents forgot his birthday. We never forgot his birthday! We said, ‘We’re going to get out every single photo album with pictures of him blowing out candles at his birthday.’ And then we couldn’t find the damn albums. [we both laugh]

      It’s hard dealing with teenagers. I could have killed them all. [laughs] They’re lovely now, absolutely wonderful.

      And what about your Argentinian family? You say your grandparents came from Eastern Europe – under what circumstances?

      You know, a lot of people emigrated at the turn of the century from Russia and Poland and places. I think it was just chance where they ended up. We grew up thinking of ourselves as completely Argentinian. But now we have been here much longer than we were in Argentina and the children are more English than Argentinian.

      My family were lovely middle-class types. A very friendly, Jewish family. My mother was very intellectual; my father was a lawyer and then a judge. They were never practising Jews, so I don’t know when our Jewish faith stopped meaning anything. We know it as our roots, that’s all. My husband comes from a very similar background, but not wealthy at all. His father had a great intellect.

       And how did your families fare during the dictatorships?

      It was very hard. Daniel’s brother, my brother-in-law, is one of the ‘disappeared’. It was the mid-1970s. He was taken away in front of his father. They said, ‘If he has done nothing he will come back.’ He had done nothing, but he never came back. They most probably threw him in the Atlantic, and they never recovered the body. I think when he was taken away it virtually killed his father – he died some years later, but I think he died of a broken heart.

      Culturally, as Latin Americans, how did you find working with people here?

      Everything is so civilised here, and the culture… I mean we’re spoilt here; it’s amazing.

      Finally, Dame Julia, what specifically are you working on at the moment?

      Right, the biggest challenge at the moment … There is lots of research being done all over the place on cultured cells two-dimensionally in a Petri dish. But we are three-dimensional beings, so therefore we need to learn how we can culture in three dimensions – because the cells talk to each other, and talk to the surrounding tissue.

      This is another area where we have strong collaboration with engineers, because we need to grow the cells in what is called a ‘bioreactor’. The best example of a bioreactor is the womb. The development of the baby in the womb is controlled by all these natural signals in the three-dimensional environment. We need to grow the cells in this kind of way, and people can’t do that at the moment, so that’s what the challenge is. Not mine alone, but for everyone working in this field.

       As far as you’re concerned, is this the future?

      I think regenerative medicine – in my unbiased opinion – will rewrite the books of medicine. Of course! I mean, that’s where we should be going.

       ‘CHILDREN ARE NOT JUST LITTLE ADULTS’

      Miguel Reyes-Múgica

      Chief of Pathology and Head of Laboratories, Children’s Hospital, Pittsburgh; Professor of Pathology and Marjory K. Harmer Chair in Pediatric Pathology, University of Pittsburgh

      Miguel Reyes-Múgica grew up in relative privilege in a small town in Mexico, where both his parents were doctors. As a child he would accompany his father on visits to patients in rich and poor homes, and his experiences kindled in him a strong social conscience and a desire to follow in his parents’ footsteps. At medical school in Mexico City he fell under the spell of Dr Ruy Pérez-Tamayo, one of Latin America’s leading intellectuals. ‘He was professor of pathology, and when I took that course in my second year I immediately knew I was going to be a pathologist. I wanted to be just like him in many respects,’ he says.

      Another big influence on his career was the earthquake of 1985 that levelled much of Mexico City and killed many of his colleagues. When the general hospital where he was about to start work was threatened with demolition, he went instead to the National Institute of Pediatrics, one of the largest and busiest paediatric hospitals in Latin America. It was a time when paediatric pathology was gaining recognition as a vital specialisation in its own right.

      Reyes-Múgica went to the United States in 1990 for a year’s research, but for personal reasons never returned to work in Mexico. He went СКАЧАТЬ