Profile
Carl Nathan, MD
A member of the Rita Allen Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Committee and a former Rita Allen Foundation Scholar. Chairman of the department of microbiology and immunology, the R.A. Rees Pritchett Professor of Microbiology, and the director of the Abby and Howard P. Milstein Program in Chemical Biology of Infectious Diseases at Weill Cornell Medical College.
As part of a series of profiles illuminating our Rita Allen Foundation Scholars, their careers, accomplishments and aspirations, Dr. Nathan recently shared some of his thoughts with Rita Allen Foundation President and Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth Christopherson.
Ms. Christopherson: Can you tell us what influenced your decision to pursue a career in science and about your role models?
Dr. Nathan: The directions we take in life are very much influenced by the people we meet. My first summer job was yard work and mowing my neighbor’s grass. When I was given the task of weeding her flower bed, I was not well-versed in the differences between what should go and what should stay, and so I pulled up everything. We became lifelong friends, but my father realized that I needed a different summer job. He introduced me to one of his college friends, the late Lester Grant, MD, DPhil, who addicted me to science when he hired me as an assistant animal handler at New York University (NYU) Medical Center the summer after my freshman year in high school. I worked for Lester for 5 summers. Washing rabbit cages let me learn research from the bottom up. Lester loved students and excelled at communicating his enthusiasm for learning and for science. He introduced us to the NYU greats, including Lewis Thomas, and ignited my interest in medicine.
After leaving NYU, during my oncology fellowship at Yale, I realized that despite my love for both clinical medicine and research, I was in the wrong specialty to combine them, given that I needed quiet moments to think every once and a while. That is when I decided to go all research.
At Rockefeller, Zanvil Cohn taught me to think across disciplinary boundaries. It was an inspiration and an education to work in the same unit as Ralph Steinman and Sam Silverstein and to talk things over with Rene Dubos. When I had the privilege of joining the editorial board of the Journal of Experimental Medicine as an assistant professor, I watched great people at work, including Cohn, Steinman, Henry Kunkel and Tony Cerami.
Ms. Christopherson: Because you are an integral part of the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars selection process, would you elaborate on the qualities that you feel stand out among today’s candidates and some of the challenges they encounter?
Dr. Nathan: It is the high caliber of the outstanding people who apply to be Scholars, especially in a society that sometimes seems to devalue knowledge and resent brilliance.
What concerns me most when I serve on the selection panel is if we try to choose by relying on past evidence of productivity, such as publications. I would not have made the cut as a Scholar if the decision had rested on what I had published.
Ms. Christopherson: Would you highlight for us some differences you feel today’s Rita Allen Foundation Scholars face compared to when you received your award?
Dr. Nathan: Let me instead emphasize something that remains the same. The special value of Rita Allen Foundation support was and remains flexibility. With National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants it is difficult to deviate from original outlines as grants are increasingly treated as contracts with set timelines and deliverables. Major game-changing findings result when we entrust researchers with the freedom to explore.
I have been fascinated for a long time by the ability of the immune system to destroy any tissue that the body thinks is infected, and I wanted to find out how to train that power against metastatic cancer. This attracted me to tumor immunology. In the late 1970’s I chaired the Tumor Immunology Committee at NIH, but I became frustrated with the pace of the field at the time.
I reasoned that to learn the rules and tools used by the immune system to kill, it would be profitable to study immunity in the setting that provided for its evolutionary selection-- infectious disease. I turned to host-pathogen relationships as a detour in my commitment to tumor immunology. None of this was contemplated in my NIH grants.
The Rita Allen funding permitted me the latitude to investigate leprosy. That work ultimately led to discoveries that advanced our understanding of tuberculosis. Along the way we identified specific regulatory and biochemical mechanisms of cell killing and resistance that are broadly applicable, including to cancer. The cytokines and enzymes whose properties we discovered underly a great deal of cell signaling relevant not only to infectious disease and cancer but to much of medical physiology. I could not have launched this decades-long line of inquiry without the flexibility of the Rita Allen award.
Ms. Christopherson: In thinking about the future, what are some of the issues that are priorities for you?
Dr. Nathan: I’ve become deeply concerned about inadequate antibiotic research and development, and hope our work is illustrating new ways to approach the problem. I am equally concerned about inadequate access of poor people around the world to the drugs we do have and they should have.
Dr. Nathan was recently elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his excellence in scientific research. Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the United States.
Dr. Nathan was named the 2009 recipient of the distinguished Robert Koch Award. The prize, endowed with €100,000 by the Robert Koch Foundation in Germany, cites Dr. Nathan's groundbreaking research work into the mechanisms of antibacterial infection defense.
Dr. Nathan received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. He joined the Weill Cornell faculty in 1985 and was elected to the Institute of Medicine, another branch of the National Academies, in 1998.
As a member of the Rita Allen Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee, Dr. Nathan participates in the review of candidates and selection of Rita Allen Foundation Scholars.
The Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program concentrates on young leaders in bio-medical research who are advancing our understanding of the human condition. Through our Scholars, we embrace innovative research with above average risk and groundbreaking possibilities. We are proud of the over 100 Scholars, including a Nobel Laureate, who have received our financial assistance.