Experience bridges divide between the lab and real people

Sunday, October 26, 2003

A lot of things, Seth Blumberg says, just aren't as important as fretting, hard-driving people - i.e., a lot of people at a prestigious university - may think. Having dropped out of the California Institute of Technology to get treated for cancer at 19, he's more aware of that fact than most people. Nine years ago he watched his life nearly fall apart, then reassembled it, with an altered sense of life's essentials.

The food is great! He tells anyone who ever complains about cafeteria fare. In the first weeks after his treatment ended - weeks Blumberg calls the most amazing in his life - "each meal was just like a victory."

He's built a string of victories since. But he hasn't gotten over feeling lucky to be alive, to be tinkering with DNA molecules in a University of Michigan lab, continuing with his cancer in full remission.

Blumberg is halfway through the U-M's combined M.D./Ph.D. program, an academic marathon that intimidates many graduate students. He is lively, intense - but not the competitive guy, super-focused on math and science, that he once was.

"Now I'm easier on myself," he says. "I enjoy just taking each day as it comes."

Those days are busy this fall. Blumberg got tapped to give three Saturday Morning Physics lectures this November, an honor unusual for a physics student who has not yet completed a doctorate. The popular lectures typically attract 200 to 300 people who want to understand the latest discoveries and insights into how the universe works.

Two weeks ago, he flew to Los Angeles as a VIP guest to bicycle one leg in the Tour of Hope, a national cross-country tour led by cyclist Lance Armstrong to raise funds for cancer research.

Life turned upside-down

Born in England, to South African parents, Blumberg grew up in California, where he was keen on math and science in school. He was diagnosed with cancer during his junior year at Cal Tech. "It was a real shock. I was 19. I didn't think I would be sick."

His back hurt, he was tired, his mood was low. But he put aside thinking he had a medical problem. He'd always been one to focus on whatever he was doing.

Looking back on that summer before he finally saw a doctor, he realizes there were distracting stresses in his life: His parents were going through a separation, for one thing. He blamed the back pain on the time he helped his dad paint his deck. He remembers he had so much trouble sleeping prone that he dragged his mattress to sleep at an angle on the stairs. "I was just very naive," he says.

When he finally went to a doctor, he learned he had Hodgkin's lymphoma.

"It's a good cancer to get," he says. "But the key is to catch it early." His had advanced to a dangerous stage, and he had other complicating factors. His doctors told him that people in his situation had a 65 percent cure rate, lower than the rate for uncomplicated lymphoma caught early. The news shocked him.

"I've always had such an optimistic outlook. When I was diagnosed, I thought, 'I'm going to die."' But his doctor told him otherwise, and even said having cancer was something he could learn from. "I was so relieved to have hope," Blumberg says.

He dropped out of his classes at Cal Tech, where he had focused on math and physics - "very much your classic nerd," he says. He spent much of the next year, from September 1994 till the following spring, undergoing 12 weeks of chemotherapy using an experimental combination of drugs, and then nine weeks of radiation treatments.

There were lots of gadgets and lasers involved, but he didn't think much about the science of CAT scans and bombarding cells with radiation then - something he will talk about in his first lecture.

"I was very focused on just kind of getting through treatment," he says. "I was very lucky. I tolerated treatments very well."

To him, the grueling chemotherapy felt like a welcome rescue: "The disease had progressed to the point where it was about to kill me."

A scary turning point

He got the green light to go back to normal activities after he completed treatment March 20, 1995, though he had to be on guard for a possible recurrence. He went back to Cal Tech to finish. It was tough to sink back into the college routine.

When he wanted to tell friends how cancer had changed him, he was disappointed. "They didn't want to hear it," he says. "It was really tough to deal with that, and to watch people fight, and a lot of energy go into trivialities."

Then in his senior year, he had a scare: Some lymph nodes were enlarged. He would need to undergo a biopsy. That was his toughest time yet emotionally, he says. "At that point, I felt I had so much to lose."

He had to get his December finals out of the way before the biopsy. "I just pushed through," he says. "You deal with it. I did fine that semester."

The biopsy found no recurrence. But Blumberg says he had learned an important lesson. When he had gone back in school, "I put too much pressure on myself to make maximum use of my second chance in life. I didn't take time to enjoy life. ... After that scare, I definitely stepped back."

So after graduating, he took a year off before going to grad school, working for a California company making medical devices.

He felt attracted to M.D./Ph.D. programs that would let him pursue both his long-standing interests in math and physics and a new interest: medicine.

"When I was sick, the purpose of my work became more important than the process," he says. "I wanted to help other people in the same way people helped me."

He applied to the M.D./Ph.D. program at U-M. He was turned down, though he was admitted separately to both the medical school and the Ph.D. physics program. He opted for physics, with the goal of getting accepted later to the combined program (which he did).

Blumberg decided not to attend MIT, where he'd also been accepted, because U-M felt like a place he could enjoy without being in a pressure cooker. "It's a place that really fosters interdisciplinary work," he says.

In 2001 he finished two years of medical school. There he was dismayed at times that many students seemed too focused on getting ahead personally, and not enough on caring about patients. His first year, he considered quitting medicine. Now he's committed to completing the next two years, which involve clinical rounds. For now, Blumberg is immersed in the physics world, doing research for his dissertation on the mechanics of protein mediated loop formation.

Blumberg did find compatible friends in the medical community. He and other medical students founded the International Hunger Project two years ago. It raised funds for a medicinal plant nursery project in Nepal. In memory of a friend he had met in cancer treatment, he also put together a team of medical students and cancer survivors who collected stuffed animals and distributed them to area hospitals and social agencies.

He's also been a counselor at camps for children coping with illness and is training for a fund-raising marathon sponsored by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. He says the service projects help him keep his life in perspective.

Picked for lecture series

U-M physics professor David Gerdes recruited Blumberg to give the Saturday Morning Physics lectures based on the high praise of Jens-Christian Meiners, who heads the lab where Blumberg works. When Blumberg proposed a very technical talk on his research, Gerdes sent him back to the drawing board.

Blumberg thought some more about his work, which could tell medical researchers why and when cell regulation goes awry and causes disease. He thought of the amazing physics involved in radiation and chemotherapy treatments, in the advanced diagnostic machines that had helped save his life. He thought about the physics of the body's heart and lungs, getting vital molecules to cells.

"What's the connection? I realized it was my cancer experience," he says. He tried out the idea of linking science and his personal experience on Gerdes.

Gerdes, like many people in the department, hadn't known the young Ph.D. student was a cancer survivor. He quickly gave Blumberg the go-ahead.

"It immediately struck me as just a wonderful thing," says Gerdes.

"The successful Saturday Morning Physics talks are ones that tell a compelling story. Everybody has experiences with cancer through a loved one or friend."

Meiners' single-molecule biophysics lab gets funds from the National Institutes of Health and NASA to explore the physical principles at work in the activities of DNA inside cells. Strands of DNA, constantly moving, form loops, a phenomenon under intense study in the lab. Looping plays a role in regulating the activity of genes. Gene regulation has gone awry in many diseases, including cancer. Though scientists know quite a bit about the chemistry involved in looping, they don't know nearly as much about how physical forces may impede or cause looping, says Blumberg.

Several Ph.D. students and post-doctoral researchers work in the lab, using lasers and other devices to understand how DNA molecules behave in organisms on Earth. NASA is interested because the methods could also be used to detect possible life, in the form of RNA, on Mars.

Meiners, who directs the lab, says he values Blumberg's excellent grounding in physics. Blumberg is highly regarded by his coworkers, he adds. "He is in a way more mature than many students of his age ... I see in him a much broader interest in people, not just in the science.

"Seth is always the one who thinks most about where the actual medical applications of our work lie." In basic research, Meiners says, "You often lose sight of what the ultimate implications of your research might be."

Meiners knows that Blumberg is undecided about what career he'll pursue once he completes his dual degrees.

"I can perfectly see him as a medical research scientist," Meiners says.

"With his people skills, I can see him as an excellent physician."

Reporter Anne Rueter can be reached at (734) 994-6759 or arueter@annarbornews.com