“Revolutionary Science Comes from Unexpected Angles”

The federal government has terminated numerous federally funded grants and contracts to Harvard and is scaling back investments in scientific and medical research across the country. In this series, Harvard Medical School scientists discuss how these actions are affecting their research and their labs.

I study how proteins in the cell reach their destinations, how they’re exported, and how they are degraded. While my work is driven mostly by curiosity, there are many diseases where these processes can go wrong. 

For example, we are studying how proteins are imported into peroxisomes — these are organelles present in nearly every human cell. If peroxisomes don’t form correctly, this leads to devastating diseases. The most serious one is called Zellweger syndrome. That’s a disease where children usually die within two years of birth. We have another project that looks into how organelles are shaped, and there is a condition related to organelle formation called hereditary spastic paraplegia, in which the lower extremities become weaker and develop spasticity. It’s a neurodegenerative disease, and it happens much later in life.

What we do is basic, curiosity-driven research. I think that truly revolutionary science comes from unexpected angles. We are working on clarifying basic processes and then maybe somebody, possibly but not necessarily me, would find this has a very important application. Take radioactivity — Marie Curie didn’t think about medical applications, but we use it all the time now in the clinic in various ways. There are many other examples. Ozempic, the diabetes and weight-loss medication, came out of curiosity-driven research on the physiology of gut hormones. The possibility that these discoveries could one day inform drug development was there, but it was not the immediate goal. Basic research is important because we, as humans, are driven by curiosity. Why else are we working on sending people to Mars? The thirst for knowledge is built into humankind.

When we are trying to find the truth, to decipher the problems of nature, we put politics aside.

It was clear for me from a very early age that I would become a scientist. My father was a biochemist. My mother was a pediatrician, so ours was a scientific family.

My family’s story is very relevant to what’s happening today. My mother was born in Cameroon, which was a German colony at the time. She grew up in Hamburg, Germany, and being half-Jewish, she fled the Nazis. She immigrated to the United States and had to do some of her medical training over again. She eventually ended up at Johns Hopkins, where she trained with a very famous pediatrician, Edwards Park. She then went to Cincinnati. My father was born in what is today Ukraine. His father was a businessman in Odessa and the family left because of the Bolsheviks. My father grew up in Vienna. He went on to do a fellowship in Cincinnati, and that’s where my parents met and where two of my siblings and I were born. A younger sister was born later in Vienna.

In the 1950s, during the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, my father was blacklisted and left the United States. He eventually took a position in East Germany, which was more or less the only option he had. He became the head of the Biochemical Society of East Germany. My mother became the first professor of neonatology in all of Germany. I grew up in East Germany and returned to the United States in 1995. Marc Kirschner, then chair of the department of cell biology, recruited me. I’m eternally grateful to him that he did.

All of us — my dad, my mother, and eventually me — were foreigners, immigrants, who came to the United States to do research and to contribute to science in this country. My father invented the first blood-preservation medium, and I can say that my group has contributed important discoveries to my field. My family is just one example of many immigrants who came from Europe and elsewhere to contribute to U.S. science. American science would not be where it is without them.

The United States has been scientific heaven for me. I am proud of the field-leading work from my group, and I have trained a lot of people — I have eighty-five former trainees who are now all over the world in academia and industry. Science has always been international. When we are trying to find the truth, to decipher the problems of nature, we put politics aside. To say, for political reasons, that international students cannot come anymore, that’s just ridiculous and self-defeating. It will have a chilling effect on students and postdocs who want to come here. In the long run, if we can’t recruit people from other countries, we will not be able to attract the best talent. U.S. science has relied on an influx of scientists from abroad, and I feel like the damage has already been done and will only get worse. After the Second World War, many new medicines were created in the United States or at least their scientific foundations were made here. Before the war, it was Germany, but Germany lost everything by chasing away all the Jewish people. I think that’s an important lesson.

I look around, among my colleagues, and so many of them are foreigners who came here and substantially moved science forward. Now, this may come to an end. This is a big, big concern for me. It is an illusion that American students and postdocs could fill the void, as many of these young people choose other professions. Science is a tough vocation. You need obsessive dedication and a certain degree of idealism. We work long hours and never stop thinking about our projects. U.S. science has been always at the forefront because we’ve had the best people from all over the world, concentrated here at a relatively small number of universities. Now, U.S. science is at risk of losing it all.

Tom Rapoport is the Don W. Fawcett Professor of Cell Biology at HMS.