Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/686754
t m c » p u l s e | j u n e 2 0 1 6 11 piqued my interest in bench research. I was fortunate to be given an intern- ship in a laboratory to explore this idea of being a research scientist more in depth. At the time, it was possible to continue your medical studies while working in a lab, and I considered this opportunity such a privilege that I stayed on until I completed my medical degree and clinical training in emer- gency medicine. After I completed my residency, I decided to come to the United States to sort out where I wanted to go with my career, working as a Fogarty Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). One of my mentors in medical school had trained at the NIH, and he had been very encouraging about what an inter- esting time it was because there were many physicians and physician- scientists who had gone there to avoid the draft for Vietnam. This influx of M.D.s, who were choosing civil service as research scientists, were doing pioneering work and really pushing the medical sciences to new hori- zons. The opportunities I found here cemented my decision to apply my medical training to the sciences and focus on medical research. Q | How was the transition from Italy to the United States, culturally speaking? Were there challenges after being trained in Italy and then moving directly to the NIH? A | Well, I was somewhat surprised to come here and realize that my studies in British English had not quite pre- pared me to speak 'American,' but I was able to come up to speed with regard to the language quickly. More than feeling challenged by the transition, I would say I actually felt more overwhelmed, but in a very positive way. It was incred- ible for me to see how welcoming this nation was. In fact, this has been my impression throughout my career: how welcoming the country, and in partic- ular the scientific community, is of for- eign nationals from every corner of the globe. Religion, accent, culture—they are all welcomed and embraced. The international presence and integration in this country and in our scientific communities is such a striking contrast to what is going on right now in other parts of the world, and it's something I have always respected about the U.S. Just in my little lab at the NIH, I shared a bay with a scientist from New Zealand, one from France, an American, and me from Italy—it was a very excit- ing atmosphere. Another astonishing aspect of mov- ing to the U.S., for me, was the immense resources of the NIH. You really felt the obligation to do something impactful because you had no excuses to not do well. And then the culture, the environ- ment at that time, was such that there were Nobel Prize winners just walking around campus. From that standpoint, it was actually rather overpowering, but inspiring at the same time. Q | You have had a very unique career path that has traversed both industry and academia. A | Yes, after spending my first eight years in the United States, I decided to accept an offer in Heidelberg, Germany, at a very prestigious center, the European Microbiology Laboratory. My family and I stayed there for about four years. Toward the end of the third year I went to London to give a talk, and my former advisor from a laboratory in New York was also there. He mentioned that he'd been approached by a venture capital group about the idea of starting a company. I had no idea what the com- pany would be, but I was intrigued by the premise, which was to start thinking about curing cancer by blocking the cell division cycle. I engaged in multi- ple discussions with this team, and we put together a plan and started to really think about an entry point and how the company would be shaped at the time. There was, of course, tremendous inter- est in the eukaryotic cell division cycle at the time, but the vast majority of labs were using model organisms like yeast, sea urchins or clams—organisms where the spawning cycles were very fast—for their research. The community of scientists using mammalian cells to explore cell division was actually quite small at the time, so the only way to get a company focused on designing drugs to target the cell cycle was to find an individual who could drive this kind of research. My wife and I had discussed the fact that we wanted to go back to America, and the sooner the better, so when they offered me this opportunity, I have to admit I jumped pretty quickly. I didn't really over-analyze it, and I would say that I have acted similarly at other decision points throughout my career, finding great excitement in new opportunities and being quick to seize them. After my first four years with this company, Mitotix, I realized that the environment was limiting to some extent because all four of our major projects had been partnered with large pharma, and the focus had really shifted to later-stage drug discovery and devel- opment and further away from inno- vation, which was really my passion. Fortunately, right as I was feeling the urge to move on, I was presented with another opportunity with the opening of the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. This was an opportunity to go back to Italy after many years, and that's what we did. We kept the children in the American system by putting them into the American schools in Milan, and we spent the next 10 years there. Because Milan was yet another international city, we were part of an international community there, too, and that was incredibly exciting. And then from an Italian perspective—Italy is so different, we felt like we were learning about a region that we never interacted with before. So people, culture, habits, food—it was completely strange to us. In Milan, they eat a lot of rice, but in the south and in Naples, you only eat rice if you're sick. We eat pasta. So we learned to eat risotto, and we discovered all of these beautiful things and this won- derful food. Also, Milan is so central, you can drive to Switzerland, you can drive to France, to Austria. Because it's a commercial city, it's full of interesting people, and we made a lot of friends through the American school. There were some journalists and people like us who had been traveling the world and wanted to keep their children in the American system, so it was really enriching for the children and they made some of their best friends there. The doctors here are incredibly generous in volunteering hours to talk about science and talk about solutions for the patients and to engage in collaborative eorts. And outside of these walls as well, we find colleagues to be generous with their time and knowledge. I haven't seen this anywhere else.