Here Is a Human Being (17 page)

In 2001, a month before 9/11, President Bush banned all federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
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In the 2004 presidential election, stem cell funding became a major issue. Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve agitated for public support.
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Molecular biologists, too, stormed their state legislatures, which began allocating billions for homegrown embryonic stem cell (ESC) research programs.
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Sherley was not among those lobbying for ESC funding, however. On the contrary: the son of a Baptist minister, James believed that embryonic stem cell research resulted in the destruction of human life. “Like thousands of other multicellular organisms on this planet,” he told
Celebrate Life
in 2007, “human beings start life as a single-cell embryo, the product of the union of a complete human genome and the programming cytoplasm of a human egg. This union occurs at fertilization… . I challenge the promoters of human embryonic stem cell research to justify why another human embryonic life is less worthy than their own… .” He would work only on adult cells.
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Given the tenor of the debate and what was at stake in the early 2000s, it seems unlikely that his position on stem cells could have won Sherley many friends in Biological Engineering at MIT. He wouldn’t venture a guess as to how important his stance was in the decision to deny him tenure and in the ensuing kerfuffle; he would say only that he would be naïve to think that it didn’t play a role.
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In September 2006, more than a year after his tenure decision, Sherley won the prestigious Pioneer Award from NIH for his work on adult stem cells. The $2.5 million award supports “exceptionally creative scientists who take highly innovative approaches.” That year just thirteen were granted.
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But this development neither bolstered his case for tenure nor otherwise improved his position in the eyes of the university. In subsequent months relations between MIT and Sherley deteriorated. In December 2006, he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper in which he said, “I will either see the provost
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resign and my hard-earned tenure granted at MIT, or I will die defiantly right outside his office.”
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He refused to communicate with the provost, who he said mishandled the grievance process.
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On February 5, after two bowls of Chex cereal, James Sherley began a hunger strike and a vigil outside the offices of MIT’s top administrators. His doctor, who helped him prepare and visited him throughout, said, “I hope you survive this.” He responded: “Well, if I don’t you’ll be the first to know.”
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The following day, a letter from a group of MIT professors, led by leftist linguist Noam Chomsky, wrote to the campus paper on Sherley’s behalf questioning the integrity of the grievance process. George Church was among the signatories.
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After twelve days and twenty pounds, Sherley called it off. The provost said there could be no mediation while a hunger strike was going on. With the help of some emissaries, Sherley and MIT released concurrent statements. MIT “deeply regret[ted]” that Sherley’s experiences led to his fast. His protest “focused attention on the effects that race may play” in the career trajectories of minority faculty. MIT said it would “continue to work toward resolution of our differences with Professor Sherley.” For his part, Sherley said he was breaking his fast “in celebration of the attention that has been brought to bear on issues of equity, diversity and justice at MIT” and elsewhere. He also said that his demands were “still on the table.”
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It soon became obvious that those demands would not be met. At the end of March his colleagues in Biological Engineering released a statement saying that the tenure process was a “fair and honest” one; it suggested Sherley’s publication record was not up to snuff and noted that MIT could not consider work Sherley had performed prior to coming to MIT.
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After an exploratory process looking for tenure opportunities across campus, the provost made it clear that tenure was off the table in any department at MIT and that Sherley’s appointment would end on June 30.
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A colleague representing Sherley characterized the provost’s proposal for mediation as a “notice of eviction.”
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By then Sherley had long since stopped communicating with the provost. In May the provost released a statement saying that MIT had never agreed to review Sherley’s tenure case again, or to conduct any review of his allegations about the grievance process.
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June 30 was a Saturday. When Sherley tried to gain access to his lab on the following day, he found that his keys no longer worked. He emailed the president of MIT, worried for the viability of his cell lines and mice.
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The provost told the campus newspaper that Sherley had declined earlier opportunities to avail himself of university assistance. Consequently, MIT had decommissioned Sherley’s lab in accord with “all applicable rules and regulations.”
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My first encounter with James was at the pseudo-vegan PGP barbecue at George’s house just weeks after James had been locked out of his lab.
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We stood at the bottom of the stairs in George’s artsy and plantsy Brookline bungalow and talked quietly over beer; James still seemed shaken by all that had happened. He paused frequently to push his glasses up his nose. He was not a skinny man; during his hunger strike the Harvard newspaper, among others, had ridiculed his weight (and his cause) and suggested that a hunger strike would be good for his health.
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But if I were expecting an angry, militant black dude, I was to be disappointed. James spoke with passion about his cause, regret about what the ordeal had done to his family and friends, and anguish about the time it had taken from his science. He also laughed easily and told me he was relishing the time at home with his kids while he looked for a new job.
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When we met in a Brookline coffee shop the following spring, he was less preoccupied, though he assured me he was not at peace. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with whom he had filed a discrimination suit, had not found in his favor;
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this discouraged him. And he was still angry with some of his allies, who he felt did not call out the MIT provost with sufficient vigor. He blamed himself for the same lack of will: by not resuming his hunger strike, he said, he felt he had let MIT off the hook (although he admitted that his decision also spared his wife and eleven-year-old daughter further anguish; his daughter was especially concerned that her father really would “die defiantly”).
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By the second PGP gathering his professional life had begun to settle. He was now a senior scientist at Boston Biomedical Research Institute in Watertown. The director was already familiar with James’s science. But did BBRI flinch at his stance on ESCs or his MIT baggage? “There was one question during my interview: ‘How do you feel about ESC research at BBRI?’ My response was truthful: I’m not going to get in the way of any programs that involve ESC. But I’m also not going to participate in them. I will continue to be an outspoken advocate on this topic, but I’ve never interfered with anybody’s research.”
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Did James Sherley deserve tenure? I have no idea. Most junior faculty at MIT
don’t
get tenure; this, after all, is why it’s MIT, a truly elite institution. Had he won the Pioneer Award two years earlier, before the decision and the subsequent escalation, perhaps things might have gone differently for James. And it’s not hard to see how he might have hurt his own cause with his demonstrativeness, his high-profile martyrdom, and his pointed and often public accusations. But my guess is we will never know because I suspect the process was doomed from the beginning by miscommunication and a lack of transparency on the university’s part.

In January 2010, MIT published a comprehensive study of racial diversity among its faculty
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(disclosure: my brother Josh is an economist at MIT and was on the committee that crunched the numbers for this report). While the Sherley incident was mentioned just once in the 156-page report, I found it hard to believe it was not a major impetus for MIT’s decision to reflect upon its own minority hiring and promotion track record. Among the findings: 74 percent of Caucasian assistant professors were promoted to associate professor without tenure (a crucial step on the path to tenure), while only 55 percent of black and Hispanic assistant professors were promoted to associate—a statistically significant difference. Of course, only 6 percent of MIT’s faculty was black or Hispanic to begin with (a fraction comparable to Harvard and Stanford).

Perhaps future African American scientists—and those who make the tenure decisions affecting them—will benefit both from the report and from the Sherley episode itself. That might be the best we could hope for.

After the tenure drama and the hunger strike and the protests, George hesitated to ask James to participate in the PGP. Not because he shied away from controversy (he would not be George Church if he did that), but because he couldn’t imagine his friend and collaborator would want to undertake yet another high-risk, high-profile controversial venture. He was wrong.

“I kept wondering, ‘Why isn’t George asking me about this?’ “ said James. “When he finally did I was like, ‘What took you so long?’ I’m interested in being fair in disclosure and thinking about how to build research programs that can actually be responsive to the needs of participants in the study.”
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Eventually James and I got around to discussing our genomes, and the aggrieved academic instantly morphed into the awestruck nerd. James was not terribly interested in genes per se (cell biologists often operate at a higher, more systemic altitude than molecular biologists).
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At one point during the initial PGP meeting he said he doubted he would even look at his own genome, though he later backed off from that statement. But he said he was much more curious about his “origins of replication,” the sequences where DNA initiates the process by which it copies itself; there is some controversy about where they can be found in the genome.
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James’s real passion was stem cells. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells. We all begin existence as embryonic stem cells. They are valuable because their fate has not yet been determined; they have not committed to becoming neurons or T cells or muscle cells or melanocytes. Their value in medicine, so far largely unrealized outside of leukemias, is that they have the potential to become almost any type of cell (for this reason they are referred to as pluripotent). They could become brain cells in a Parkinson’s patient or pancreatic islet cells in a diabetic. If we want to get the greatest number of stem cells with the broadest range of possible fates, embryonic stem cells are ideal. But many, like James, are not comfortable with destroying them because they see them as human life. These scientists have therefore focused on reprogramming
adult
cells: taking a skin cell, for example, and “dedifferentiating” it back to a stem cell state where anything, or many things, are still possible. This is called induced pluripotency: taking a differentiated cell and turning the clock back so that it behaves like a stem cell.
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Sherley’s lab had helped figure out how to do this and how to get these cells to divide in culture so that they generated a renewable supply of themselves.
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The problem was that so far it was a terribly inefficient process. Making it more efficient was one of his and George’s goals.

James was excited about stem cells for other reasons. One was the biology they might teach us. Another was their potential predictive value. “Cancers may be stem cell diseases. Asthma, too. Multiple sclerosis may be a stem cell disease. Changes in the genome of undifferentiated cells may predict [health outcomes] because those are the cells that are constantly renewing.”
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By the time we reach the fetal stage (the ninth week of pregnancy), our developmental potential has been written into most of our cells. “If you could only make one gene expression pattern in a person’s life and see which genes are turned on and off, the fetal period would be the time to do it.”
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Different genes are turned on and off at different levels at different times in different types of differentiated cells; this is reflected in the different levels of RNA one finds for the same gene in different cell types at different stages of human development. This is what makes a neuron a neuron and not a hair follicle. James and George wanted to conduct an “organ recital"—that is, they wanted to measure gene expression in each of the 200+ different types of cells in the human body.
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For blood, hair, and umbilical cord, that was pretty easy. Buccal cells could be scraped from the inside of the cheek with no problems. Skin biopsies hurt but were tolerable. But once you got into muscle and liver biopsies, to say nothing of brain tissue, then access became a real issue. So why even bother? Because if we really wanted to understand human beings at the molecular level, organ recitals were a necessity. “We’re more than our genes,” explained James. “We’re the
expression
of our genes. Looking at differences in expression is going to be much more informative than genotype.”
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It was 1:30
p.m.
; we had been sitting in the coffee shop for more than two hours. Outside we could still see our breath; we had to step over the snowbanks to cross the street but the sun was shining brightly in Brookline. As we walked to James’s car, I asked whether he thought the PGP could really make a difference. Wasn’t personal genomics a luxury? “Listen, there are lots of other needs in society. Should we be spending this money on building houses for people? I don’t know. I certainly think and worry about it. But as a scientist I feel that knowledge shared is the best thing we can have. What
should
we be gathering knowledge about? Understanding how we work, how we function, how we grow up and smile—that will be difficult to do. But it’s hard to argue that that isn’t important somehow.”
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