Medical Inventor Searches for Cures
As a kid, he wanted to be an inventor, and his parents wanted him to be a doctor. He went to Columbia and became the doctor, but was frustrated by the urgent pace of emergency-room trauma care.
There just wasn’t much time to study, to consider, to wonder.
So today, with his medical degree, Dr. Dennis Carson is the inventor--finding ways, through biotechnology, to save lives through new medicines.
Already, he may have cured a particular type of leukemia.
Now he’s working on arthritis.
“The difference between a medical scientist and a physician is that our rewards may not come for 10 or 20 years, and after a lot of disappointments,” said Carson, 44, a scientist at UC San Diego’s School of Medicine whose voice is as soft as his handshake.
Indeed, it was 14 years ago that Carson, who specializes in immunology, began searching for the chemical link between Severe Combined Immuno Deficiency (SCID)--the disease perhaps best known as the Bubble Boy Syndrome--and leukemia. People with SCID have no antibody-producing white blood cells; people with leukemia have white cells gone amok.
Carson wondered whether someone could be cured of leukemia by taking him or her to the brink of the Bubble Boy Syndrome.
This year, in what could be the culmination of Carson’s research, trials and proofs, the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation will ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve a new drug called 2-CdA--a compound that has shown remarkable success in treating people suffering from the relatively rare hairy-cell leukemia. Many have so far enjoyed
total remission, and it’s just a matter of waiting it out for five years or so to decide whether, in fact, the new medicine can be declared an actual cure.
The drug is being tested on people with other kinds of leukemia as well, and Scripps researchers are testing derivatives of 2-CdA to see what benefits they may offer.
Carson worked for Scripps while researching 2-CdA; now, thanks to a $2-million grant from a Swiss pharmaceutical company, he’s head of organized research at the Institute for Research on Aging, a new, 50-person lab at UCSD that is trying to find a cure for arthritis.
If it wasn’t arthritis, Carson would go after something else.
Science has been a part of his life as far back as he can remember. In Queens, N.Y., when he was 8 years old and bringing home jars of scummy pound water so he could study organisms under a microscope. At the science fairs back at Stuyvenson High School. Constructing the homemade rockets he used to send flying over the rooftops, their signature pfffffft startling the neighbors.
And all those hours spent over textbooks.
“I wanted to be an inventor, but my parents said there would be more opportunities if I had an M.D., even if I wanted to apply it elsewhere,” Carson said. “I decided there was logic to that. Today, physicians who are trained as basic research scientists are rare.
“I love research. For most doctors, if a patient has A, you give them B. But the doctor can’t tell you how B works on A. I wanted to know that. I wanted to know why a disease develops, and what’s the best way to treat it.
“It’s like how some people give food to the needy, or donate to St. Vincent de Paul. Others say, let’s find out the root causes for poverty and plan for the next generation.
“But it’s hard to find public support to find the root causes of poverty. The same goes for medical research,” he said.
Carson is part research romanticist. He has a special fondness for a crayon drawing of Don Quixote that is tacked in his office, and likes to explain that “creative science is like going after a bunch of windmills.”
But he is a realist as well, and knows the drudgery and disappointments of medical research.
“Four out of five days you go home with a negative feeling, because nothing worked. (My wife) Sandy’s father was a scientist, so she understands. And that helps, especially when I wake up in the middle of the night and run back to the laboratory to try something different.”
To escape from his research, Carson jogs three times a week around his home in Del Mar. On weekends, he bicycles with his children. Friday nights are family night, typically spent around Grandmother’s pie and the piano.
But it’s all just a temporary respite from his journey to discover all he can about the human body.
“The work never stops. The goal is always 10 years away, and if something doesn’t work along the way, the goal is delayed that much longer,” he said.
“It’s easy to waste time in science. It has to do with concentration, to absorb a lot of material and to bring it all together. It’s a huge brain tease. Scientists are solving puzzles.”
Why aren’t there more M.D.s in the ranks of research scientists?
“It’s a tremendous financial burden,” Carson said. “They’ve already lost four years (for medical school), and now that they’re finally out, they’re in debt and not making any money. They’ll make less than half the income, compared to their doctor friends in the clinics. I’ve made (financial) loans to doctors in the lab. They’ll make from $19,000 to $35,000 a year. And they won’t get the praise of patients, the gratification of being at their bedsides, saving their lives.
“What I get, though, is the praise of my colleagues when I publish a paper and someone writes me a letter.
“2-CdA? That’s the first drug I’ve been gratified by. Now I’m pursuing others. It’s risky. But there’s always another carrot. Will I ever be satisfied? Probably not. It’s frustrating.
“You won’t see any more 18th-Century Renaissance men,” he said. “With today’s specialization, it’s impossible for one person to master all the fields necessary to conquer disease.”
Carson notes all of the people who, to one degree or another, helped develop and test 2-CdA.
“Almost everything in science is based on something that someone else did, and you make an improvement on it, and you go to someone else who’s an expert in that field, and they work on it some more,” he said.
“That’s the whole power of America’s biochemistry establishment. It’s a group achievement,” Carson said. “Still, one person can make a significant contribution through just one experiment.”
