Bridging Boundaries
By Brittani Sonnenberg
When a proposed change to the Swiss constitution threatened to end all transgenic research in the country, Ivan Maillard and his fellow graduate students at the University of Lausanne "took science to the streets," as he put it—to defend their research methods to the general public.
"We made posters, invited interest groups into the labs and served them cookies and coffee," he said. "We made our case ten people at a time. It forced the scientific community to come down from the ivory tower." The same strategy is possible for dealing with the public's current mistrust regarding stem cell research, Maillard believes. "When people understand the facts the fear factor goes way down."
Never losing sight of the people science is working to save has been a common theme in Maillard's path as a physician-scientist. In medical school in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Maillard also grew up, he fell in love in working with patients.
"They have always been my source of inspiration, my reality check," he said. During his last year of medical school, Maillard worked in a hospital in Cameroon, where two physicians and one surgeon were in charge of 400 beds. "I had a lot of autonomy," he said. "One thing that struck me the most were the kids with measles, a disease that we consider mostly eradicated in the West but which kills 2 million children a year." This "lit a fire" in Maillard to do significant research on host-virus interactions.
He spent the next four years doing a PhD at the University of Lausanne, working in a lab that studied a mouse virus causing breast cancer, trying to understand how this virus took advantage of the mouse immune system to serve its own interests. His plans to continue research with infectious diseases took an unexpected turn during a long rotation in a cancer unit.
"I completely fell in love with taking care of cancer patients," he said. "When people face very serious diseases you can do a lot but you also end up losing the battle a fair amount. That's a huge scientific challenge. And even if you're not able to cure them with medicine, you can be very helpful as a human being." Inside the cancer center, Maillard said, reality is not as dark people outside it assume. "There are successes on many fronts. Even when you get very attached to patients, you learn how to deal with death. As a physician, the barrier between you and the patient falls. You are there on the inside, building a relationship of trust, whether you are discussing good news or bad news. People don't wear masks, because they're facing hard situations."
Maillard went on to complete a fellowship and a post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also served as an instructor and a physician in Hematology-Oncology. His subsequent move to the LSI's Center for Stem Cell Biology was inspired, he said, by the center's excellent environment for cross fertilizing ideas from different angles. Maillard is currently researching blood-forming stem cells in mice, and the rules that govern the cells' behavior. He is particularly interested in studying the Notch pathway, an ancient pathway conserved in flies and worms that is also essential to humans, from the time that our body first forms in the womb until later in adult life assisting organ regulation.
Maillard is still working as a physician, but only about ten percent of the time. "I strongly feel that when you're organizing your career as a physician-scientist you always have to make some compromises, and that it's better to do things sequentially instead of doing them in parallel," he explained.
The challenge of being a physician-scientist, according to Maillard, is to be taken seriously by both physicians and scientists. "There's a stereotype among physicians that scientists are too specialized, that they don't care about the medical relevance of the findings in their labs. But that's absolutely not true. Lots of scientists are working directly on extremely important insights into disease mechanisms. It's also an aspect of basic science that you have to explore things even if you don't know where you're headed."
Scientists, on the other hand, consider doctors too superficial, with multiple ideas that they don't know how to translate into reality. The underlying disparity, according to Maillard, has more to do with language: "It's like there are two separate worlds, and neither one can understand each other very well."
Maillard hopes to bridge this gap by continuing to keep up with both clinical and research skills, which allow him "a stereoscopic view of the field." Outside of work, Maillard spends time with his wife, a pediatrician, and his two daughters, nine and six, who Maillard reports love coming into the lab and doing experiments with water. A professional flutist until his third year of medical school, Maillard's most recent performance took place in his neighbor's living room. The neighbor, a retired Ann Arbor Symphony musician, invited Maillard to join her and others in a production of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. "That was amazing," said Maillard.
Maillard does not consider his artistic side to operate in opposition to his scientific side. The best scientists, he said, combine academic rigor with leaps of faith.
"Scientific research is not a linear process, like engineering," he said. "If you want to be good you also have to be a little bit crazy. This will allow you to challenge existing dogmas and eventually come to the truth."
