All-American Boy Evolves Into World-Class Scientist

Steven Alan Frank was barely 13 when a book on Sigmund Freud piqued his curiousity about the behavior patterns and forces that shape the lives of creatures great and small.

Later, as a senior majoring in literature at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1978, Frank was seeking something more when he stumbled on a course by renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Alexander. It offered a new window to the world around him and sparked a passion that has vaulted the now 32-year-old UC Irvine scientist to the top ranks of young American scholars.

One of two UCI researchers to win Presidential Young Investigator Awards this spring from the National Science Foundation, Frank is “one of the best young theoretical and behavioral biologists in the United States,” said Richard MacMillen, chairman of UCI’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, which itself is rapidly becoming one of the finest brain trusts in the field.

The prestigious NSF grant, given each year to about 200 of the nation’s most promising young scientists, provides up to $100,000 a year for five years. Add to that a $350,000 federal grant that Frank got from the National Institutes of Health and it spells freedom.

Freedom to buy costly computer equipment and to bring aboard collaborators for his wide-ranging studies into the evolution of disease, the role played by sex ratios among offspring in natural selection and adaptation.

“I now have the freedom to say (to fellow researchers), ‘Would you come for a few months to work with me?’ and I can cover their expenses,” said the bearded, slightly built professor, who bristles with raw energy.

“If I think people at Oxford (University in England) are working on something that relates to what I’m doing, I can go over and visit for a few weeks. I don’t have to write a grant and wait for six months to a year for an answer.”

But he downplays the Presidential Young Investigator Award, only one of numerous honors he has piled up in recent years.

“Certainly it’s pleasing to be recognized . . . for what I’m doing,” Frank said carefully in his sparsely decorated ninth-floor office overlooking the parched hills on UCI’s southern flank. “It also makes it a little bit easier to approach people when you need something.”

Born in 1957, Steven Frank was, by most accounts, an all-American kid who played sports and had lots of friends. The boy nicknamed “Beaver” excelled in school in Rochester, N.Y., with little apparent effort. He scored a perfect 800 on the mathematics part of the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

For all the straight A’s and high test scores, “Steve never did much of anything in the way of homework that we saw,” recalled his mother, Marilyn Frank, 58, a fund-raising consultant and former executive director of an affiliate of the American Kidney Foundation.

He was always an avid reader, though. It was Irving Stone’s fictional biography of Freud that first sparked his interest in psychology and behavior. But by the time he reached the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the son of a university professor and medical doctor decided that fiction reached closer to the heart of things.

As a literature major, though, Frank said he found himself drifting. He hadn’t taken a single college mathematics or science course, yet in his senior year decided that perhaps the sciences would be more satisfying. Anthropology, geology or biology seemed attractive.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Alexander intervened. Two weeks into Alexander’s fall course in natural selection and evolution, Frank followed a friend’s suggestion to check out the class.

“I immediately fell in love with evolutionary biology,” said Frank, a shy grin flashing across his face at the memory. “I really did feel almost instantly that I had a sense of looking at the world. . . . He (Alexander) was particularly good at taking difficult concepts (about evolution) and making them interesting.”

From that moment forward, Frank set and followed a methodical course of study and scientific inquiry, building on his native ability in mathematics and science.

He earned two master’s degrees--one in zoology and a second in statistics that he decided to pick up at the University of Florida in Gainesville. A doctoral program at the University of Michigan came next, and brought him in contact with some of the most prominent scholars in evolutionary biology and population genetics. At Michigan, there was William D. Hamilton, now at Oxford University in England, whose research into the changing birth ratios of male and female offspring in some animals foreshadowed Frank’s own.

During this period, Frank wrote several research papers that were published, some of which caught the eye of Robert K. Colwell, a respected evolutionary ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was asked to review the work.

“I’d never heard of this guy, but I was duly impressed with his creativity and cleverness, and I told the editors so,” recalled Colwell, who, along with eminent evolutionary biologist Montgomery W. Slatkin, sponsored Frank for UC Berkeley’s prestigious Miller postdoctoral fellowship in 1987, an award given to only seven scholars each year across a range of disciplines.

“He (Frank) has a way of taking a very complicated situation and finding the common denominator between them,” said Colwell, who is now at the University of Connecticut. “That’s why we nominated him for the Miller fellowship at Berkeley. We thought he was going to be somebody. And we were right.”

What Frank does extraordinarily well, said Colwell and Frank’s colleagues at UCI, is to combine experimental information collected in field studies with mathematical modeling on high-powered computers.

In man and most animals with backbones, the ratio of boy to girl babies is almost evenly divided, with some interesting exceptions. In many insect species, however, females far outnumber males. One such insect is a type of wasp that has developed a symbiotic relationship with certain types of fig trees.

Frank, who has done extensive experimental and theoretical work on fig wasps, has contributed greatly to understanding the ecological situations that may make a mother fig wasp vary the ratio of male to female offspring she produces.

“What he is able to do is look at a complicated mess of theories, models and data, and . . . come up with a simple way of simplifying (them),” Colwell said. “In doing so, he can extend (the research) to things we didn’t realize were connected.”

Frank, who arrived at UCI last August, is now focused mainly on the evolution of disease.

Thanks to meteoric advances in molecular biology in the last decade, it is now possible to identify genes that cause a plant to be resistant to a disease, as well as the building blocks of the infecting agent itself. With specially tailored computer programs, Frank hopes to understand and predict how disease ebbs and flows among vast populations over time.

A graph on his computer screen illustrates how a particular ailment swept through patches of corn, then subsided as resistant plants survived to dominate the field. Over time, though, a swirl of black dots resembling a swarm of locusts tumbles on the computer screen to show how the plants grow less resistant in succeeding generations and once against become targets for a new outbreak.

This, Frank explains, is how disease occurs historically.

“Think about it like the weather, with storms that hit here and there,” he said. With disease, too, “there is quite a bit of movement over space and time. . . . Epidemics flare. . . . My research focuses on how to understand this over time.”

His research on how strains of corn resist and succumb to illness has only indirect application to human disease. But the National Institutes of Health grant, which supports this research, is indicative that evolutionary genetics is viewed as a way to understand the fundamental mechanisms of diseases and the genes that help repel them, Frank said.

His colleagues in UCI’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, which has more than tripled in size and rapidly grown in stature in the last five years, are delighted for him.

“We’re extremely proud that Steve Frank got one of those (NSF) awards because he really is one of the outstanding theoreticians in evolutionary biology,” said Richard E. Lenski, who himself was honored as a presidential young investigator a few years earlier.

The NSF grant, created in 1983 to help boost research funding for the youngest scientists, provides $25,000 annually for five years. It will also match up to $37,000 a year in private dollars or equipment the researcher is able to attract. Frank has his eye on one prominent firm that he hopes will help him build his computer arsenal.

For now, he is concentrating on his research and developing the first course he will teach at UCI, which will be for advanced students this fall.

A former baseball fanatic who played religiously with his elder brother when weather permitted, Frank now spends at least 10 hours a day on his work, said his wife, Robin Bush, a population geneticist who has an unsalaried research position at UCI.

“He was always working,” Colwell said of Frank’s days at the Berkeley laboratory they shared. “You can see the wheels turning when he’s working away.”

Bush, 34, a fellow Michigan graduate student, met Frank again when both were postdoctoral fellows at Berkeley. It was there that they fell in love. Last July, they were married near Niagara Falls.

The couple just bought a house in the University Hills area of campus and they share it with a cat called Batman and the inhabitants of a newly acquired aquarium. Besides occasional walks, both spend most of their waking hours consumed with their respective projects. That often includes weekends.

“For Steve, I think what he really likes to do is . . . his research,” she said. “If you ask him, ‘What do you want to do today?’ he’ll say he wants to go to work.”