Professor Mike Stratton
How I Got Into… cancer genetics
As a teenager I was keenly interested in biology. For example, I was fascinated by the then novel notion that mitochondria were ancient infectious microorganisms with which we were all now living in cooperative and peaceful harmony, and wooed my future wife with tales of such extraordinary phenomena. I was excited by the notion of doing biological experiments to reveal such marvels. Indeed, I entered medicine thinking that medical practice would naturally and inevitably entail asking intriguing questions about human biology and disease. And in some senses it is like that. However, during much of the period I spent as a junior doctor I felt frustrated at the distance there existed from thinking about the mysteries of normality and disease.
I became a histopathologist because I wished to get closer to those core questions. As a pathologist one mostly spends time looking down the microscope at diseased tissues. Peering into this hidden world provides you with profound and powerful insights into the ways disease is generated. You see order and disorder. Indeed, although there is considerable ugliness there is sometimes awful beauty in the way cells conspire to orchestrate life-threatening conditions. Pathology was certainly inspiring and thought-provoking. Nevertheless, it was still at arm's length from the real action.
As a pathologist, about half the samples I was asked to look at were from tumours of various types. At the time we already knew that all cancers arose from a single cell that was behaving badly, with loss of normal growth control, because of abnormalities in its DNA. As a young doctor straining to do research, encountering the diverse patterns of abnormal cell proliferation in cancer down the microscope almost inevitably drove me to speculate on the invisible abnormalities in the DNA within those blue cancer cell nuclei that were responsible for all this. I could not imagine a more direct search for fundamental biological insight than this endeavour. At this time, in 1984, the revolution in recombinant DNA technology was having major impact and I moved to the Institute of Cancer Research to do a PhD using this technology to explore the genetics of cancer.
I was hooked on cancer genetics from that point. After my PhD I went back to medicine for two years to qualify as a consultant histopathologist, but subsequently returned to the ICR to begin work on the genetics of breast cancer susceptibility.
It has become of almost mystical fascination to me that you can look down a microscope and see the misbehaving cells of a tumour, and then delve into their nuclei to pick out, from the thousands of millions of bases of DNA, the few that are mutated and cause the abnormal proliferation.
I still occasionally look down a microscope and make a stab at diagnosing the type of cancer present, but obviously would not seriously trust my judgement on this anymore. I no longer practise as a pathologist but I have a huge amount of respect for those who do. When one has looked down a microscope every day for years those images of a private, subterranean world become second nature, and they remain with me.
Professor Stratton is Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and co-leader of the Cancer Genome Project.
This article is part of the online content for ‘Big Picture: Careers From Biology’ and originally appeared in ‘Wellcome News 66’. Find out more about the ‘Big Picture’ series.
Image: Professor Mike Stratton. Credit: Wellcome Images.