Expert Spotlight: Lillie Cohn

At a very young age, Lillie Cohn developed a passion for animals – dead animals.

 While her friends played on swing sets or chased soccer balls across the playground, Lillie scoured her surroundings for creatures to dissect, and the bigger the specimen the better.

This week on You’re the Expert, researcher Lillie Cohn described how her early passion for dead animals biology led her to immunotherapy, a field that doesn’t involve much dissection but does involve a whole lot of blood.

At its most basic level, immunotherapy is using what we already know about the immune system to help our bodies fight off infectious diseases. Some diseases, like the flu, can be fought using vaccines. Other diseases, like cancer or malaria, are trickier to combat because in these cases the immune system doesn’t always recognize which cells are friendly and which cells are causing problems.

As a graduate fellow in the Nussenzweig Laboratory for Molecular Immunology at Rockefeller University, Lillie’s job is to train immune cells – in her case, dendritic cells – to recognize and kill problem-causing cells before they do harm. In other words, immunotherapy is basically molecular counterterrorism, and she’s Carrie Mathison in a lab coat.

Lillie’s got immunotherapy in her blood (literally), which may explain the childhood fascination with decaying rodents and small birds. Lillie’s grandfather, Zanvil A. Cohn, was a professor at Rockefeller University when he and Dr. Ralph M. Steinman discovered a new type of cell – the dendritic cell – in 1970, a discovery that would earn Steinman the Nobel Prize in Medicine 18 years after Cohn’s death and three days after his own. Lillie’s interest in the subject was fostered while working in the labs of these two scientific giants.

 -Lydia Dallett, Production Associate

To hear more about bloodletting and why immunotherapists never wear their lab coats to parties, listen to the full You’re the Expert segment with immunology researcher Lillie Cohn here. 

For a much more thorough and probably more accurate description of the work Lillie’s lab is conducting on dendritic cell biology as it pertains to diseases and vaccines, check out Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology’s current research page here.

Also, in case you enjoy listening to British women talk about science, check out this awesome animated video on how immunotherapy is being used to fight cancer:

 Dendritic cell-based immunotherapy is just one of several ways researchers are manipulating the immune system to fight off diseases. Another popular area of study is allergy immunotherapy. Unlike most allergy treatments, such as antihistamines like Benadryl or Allegra, immunotherapy treats both the symptoms of an allergy and its cause by retraining the immune system to stop reacting violently when it comes into contact with peanut butter or pollen. For a riveting story on one researcher’s fight to get oral immunotherapy studies funded – and the families with at-risk children counting on her – read Melanie Thernstrom’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “The Allergy Buster.” 

Expert Spotlight: Dr. Peg Riley

We're confident that Dr. Margaret "Peg" Riley, a professor at UMass Amherst, will be victorious in the Battle of the Bug.

She has 25 years of experience studying microbial defense systems, the techniques that microbes, which constitute 9 out of 10 cells in the human body, employ to kill bacteria. Dr. Riley has trained a generation of specialists and speaks about deadly bacterial pathogens as if they were cuddly golden retriever puppies placed in stockings at Christmas. Her favorite bacteria is E-coli, which she claims has gotten “a bad rap through NPR” and is not to be feared, but revered.  We're glad that we've got Dr. Riley in our corner, wielding her microscope, when it comes to fighting the war on superbugs.

Much like ground wars are often fought to defend or shift social, political, or economic paradigms, the ultimate goal of Dr. Riley’s teaching and advocacy is to shift the way the world views the reigning paradigm of antibiotics.  In nature, microbes produce “narrow spectrum” defense systems. In other words, they only kill bacteria that are directly threatening their lives. But when we treat pathogenic bacteria in our own bodies, hospitals generally rely on “broad spectrum antibiotics” to neutralize all possible infections. Unfortunately, bacteria tend to develop resistance to broad spectrum drugs and become superbugs, or totally drug resistant pathogens. Dr. Riley wants to shift dominant medical thinking from one that contributes to the creation of these superbugs, to antibiotic treatment that emulates the targeted elimination approach microbes use in nature. 

Will Dr. Riley defeat the superbugs and save us all from the proliferation of totally drug resistant pathogens? Wash your hands thoroughly and tune into "Microbial Defense Systems" to find out.

- Lee Stephenson, Production Associate

Read more about Dr. Riley and her research here: http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/about/directories/faculty/margaret-riley

Expert Spotlight: John Overholt

 “I’ll take ‘Obscure 19th century book binding terminology for 800, Alex.”

This week on You’re the Expert, Early Modern Book scholar and former Jeopardy champion, John Overholt, discusses his life as the curator of Early Modern Books at the Harvard’s Houghton Library. Though an alarmingly large number of the You’re the Expert live studio audience guessed John spends his day sniffing the yellowing pages of rare books, Mr. Overholt was able to clarify that is not the primary function of his role at Harvard. In fact, he assured us that he does little to no sniffing whatsoever. It’s not good for book preservation, nor is it good for the preservation of his future as library employee. 

Mr. Overholt does study everything from the aesthetic aspects of crafting and creating the book itself, to the actual content printed on the pages. And sometimes, he even studies books where the design of the book itself is meant to overtly reflect the content within; for example, a book about the human soul made from human skin.  In this case, it would be entirely appropriate to judge a book by its all too literal cover.

And let us not forget Mr. Overholt’s role as book acquirer and defender. A large portion of his time as curator is spent finding and acquiring new books to add to the extensive Harvard archives, and waging bidding wars against other universities of comparable endowment size for rare books. Speaking of wars, imagine an apocalyptic scenario in which alien overlords came down from planet Zurg on a single minded quest to eliminate all original papyrus-printed copies of Hogwarts: A History.  There you will find John, defending the integrity of the written word with machine guns and grenades a blazin’. But since there is no NSA sanctioned knowledge of such an attack, John mostly just defends us against the dual evils of humidity and mold.

In a time when books are available online at the touch of a button, it’s hard to imagine an era in which early modern craftsmen poured hours into the delicate work of book binding, and labored meticulously over the flourishes in their handwriting. But lest we forget, John Overholt is here, to provide us digital age peons the Trebeck approved answer for 800 points: “What is Whip Stitching, Alex?” 

- Lee Stephenson, Production Associate

For more on John Overholt, check out his very active twitter account @john_overholt, or the blog he maintains on the Houghton Library website: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/houghton/