When we make breakthroughs in Boston, they help patients not only at Dana-Farber, but also at Blank Children’s Hospital and around the world.
Claire Brown | Des Moines Register Opinion
Claire Brown was born and raised in Iowa, where her family has lived for generations. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a B.A. in biology and political science, and she is an HST MD student.
From growing soybeans in fifth grade to learning how geodes form in eighth grade, my appetite for scientific learning has always been voracious. But I didn’t start to view myself as a scientist until high school. Sitting in 10th-grade biology, I listened to my teacher, Tina Loyd, explain how a mutation in just one of the 3 billion pieces of DNA that compose a human’s genetic makeup could cause cancer.
I was enthralled by the idea that these tiny, molecular-level modifications could yield such massive, tangible effects on a person. I knew that I wanted to not just study these systems, but to engineer them with the goal of improving human life.
Mrs. Loyd inspired me to foster my growing passion for the sciences. After graduating from Waukee High School in 2018, I studied biology at Brown University, then spent two years conducting full-time research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). At the NCI, I worked to discover new antibodies, which are proteins that act as “molecular flags” for the immune system, helping it detect and destroy threats like cancer. These antibodies are also medically useful: they can diagnose pancreatic cancer and treat pediatric brain tumors. Discovering new antibodies could improve existing tools and lead to entirely new therapies.
I have always believed in the science that I do. It has the potential to save lives. For me, solving biomedical problems in the lab is a gratifying and worthwhile mission, but I want to take it a step further. I want to not just build these cutting-edge therapeutics, but also to implement them as a doctor. To pursue this mission, I started in the Harvard/MIT M.D.-Ph.D. dual-degree program in June of 2024. A month before moving to Boston, I received a poignant reminder of the significance and urgency of the work I do in the lab every day.
I was diagnosed with cancer.
In the whirlwind weeks leading up to the start of my program, I underwent a battery of diagnostic tests, followed by two surgeries. A couple weeks later, I moved to Boston. My first two months of medical school were split between anatomy lab, the lecture hall, the library, and Massachusetts General Hospital, where I went before class each day for 33 rounds of radiation.
I got lucky: My surgeries went well, my course of radiation therapy was uncomplicated, and I’m now in remission. But there are a lot of patients who aren’t so lucky. My own experiences — and those of the patients around me — renewed my conviction to make an impact in the field of cancer therapeutics. Now more than ever, I feel the importance of doing science.
This summer, I will return to the lab before starting my second year of medical school in September. Each day, I take the elevator to the sixth floor of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Pediatric Oncology Research Division, where I am engineering cell-based therapies to treat cancer. Like me, many of my classmates will spend the summer in Boston. They study what causes allergies, build computational models to predict seizures, and invent new treatments for heart disease.
One of the things that drew me — and many of my classmates — to research was the fact that it isn’t done in a silo. When we make breakthroughs in Boston, they help patients not only at Dana-Farber, but also at Blank Children’s Hospital and around the world. This is how we have always practiced science: Harvard and its affiliate institutions (Dana-Farber, Massachusetts General, and others) have pioneered many “firsts” in the past century, but none have remained sequestered in Boston.
Harvard labs and hospitals have driven breakthroughs like insulin-based management of diabetes, diagnostic uses of MRI (magnetic resonance imagining), and accomplishment of remission in pediatric acute leukemia and metastatic melanoma. What’s amazing isn’t that these advances came from Harvard; it’s that they are now widespread. Every day, kids with acute leukemia are treated and achieve remission at the Stead Family Children’s Hospital in Iowa City. Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines is equipped with MRI technology, and insulin is a near-universal presence in healthcare institutions across Iowa.
When researchers at Harvard make discoveries, we share them with the world.
Scientists, physicians, and students at Harvard spend all day, every day, thinking about how we can collectively take better care of the people around us. But the work we do here is only accomplished with the support of the public and the financial backing of federal institutions like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Federal funding cuts have stalled important research seeking to combat antibiotic resistance, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and breast cancer — and that’s just at Harvard.
This doesn’t even begin to capture the broader picture of what defunding science means for human health, clinical trials, and the economy on a national scale. Even within Iowa, termination of federal grants at institutions like the University of Iowa endangers not only the future of biomedical research, but also the survival of Iowan jobs and the stability of the statewide economy. Whether at Harvard or UI, research is driven by people and meant to serve the public — it is deeply human work.
I feel an immense sense of privilege to be part of the Harvard research community. It is not an exaggeration to say that my classmates will be the scientists who change the world, rewriting the ways we think about diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease. But more than that, they will also be incredibly compassionate, thoughtful physicians. I know this because I see how hard they work in class all day, and how they choose to work in the lab all night. I know this because I experienced their caring firsthand while going through my own treatments.
I care about the funding of science, medicine, and education not just as a scientist and future physician, but as a patient myself. Every day that we don’t fund researchers like my classmates and me is a day that we stay further from beating cancer and many other diseases. We need to keep funding research. We need to keep advocating for it, and we need to keep talking about why it matters. Science saved my life, and I want to use it to help others. It is my aspiration that one day the treatments I engineer in the lab will change the lives of patients like me — whether they are receiving treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital or Iowa Methodist Medical Center.
*Originally published in the Des Moines Register.