A Mind for Science
When Michelle Monje ’98 arrived at Vassar in 1994, she was assigned to biology professor Kate Susman as her pre-major advisor. “I thought I might try to go the pre-med route, but I didn’t think I would be successful at that. In high school, I had been much stronger in the humanities and in English. When I met with Kate that first week, I told her I was thinking about taking biology, but I wasn’t really sure. I said, ‘I don’t think I really have a mind for science.’”
Susman interrupted her and said, “Where did you hear that?” From her high school biology teacher. “I had gone to this teacher for help because I just didn’t understand it. I had been so good at science my whole life. I’d taken all sorts of extra science classes for gifted children, and I had been dissecting things and going to special science camps since I was seven. And suddenly I hit high school, and I was doing terribly in biology. So I went to him to ask what I should do to study differently or better, and he said, ‘Oh, sweetheart, don’t worry about it. It’s the rare woman who has the mind for science.’ And that just sort of set up the way that I approached science in high school.”
Susman got “very angry,” Monje recalls. “She said, ‘Well—you had a bad teacher. I want you to sign up for biology, and I want you to come to me, and we’ll talk about study strategies.’ So Kate was really influential, even before I started doing research with her. She really changed the course of my life.”
Wonder what he’d think if he happened to come across Monje’s research, “Irradiation induces neural precursor-cell dysfunction,” published in the August 2002 issue of Nature Medicine. Or if she sent him a copy of her MD/PhD diplomas from Stanford. Or the announcement of her residency in neurology at Harvard/Mass General Hospital/Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Monje worked with Susman through most of her Vassar career. “Kate is an amazing mentor and a first-rate scientist. She was just so wonderful to me that first semester that I started reading about the research she was doing. I thought she was doing really cool stuff, so I talked to her about doing research with her. She said she didn’t usually have first-year students in her lab, but she invited me to come to lab meetings and gave me some reading to do. So the first year, I was just sort of a hanger-on at the lab, but then I worked with her my entire sophomore year.”
At the end of that year, Susman went on sabbatical , and Monje did her first URSI summer with biology professor William Straus. “We went to a lab up in Maine and did a biochemistry project, and it was great. But when Kate came back, I went back to her lab because I really cared the most about that project.” She did URSI with Kate the summer after her junior year and also did her senior thesis with her.
“We were studying the mechanisms of cell death following experimental stroke. Specifically, I was studying the degree to which free radical production in the neuron and in the neuronal environment contributes to cell death. Talk about the linearity between my URSI project and now—I’m on the stroke service right now at Mass General, and last night I was up all night trying to get medicine to patients who had just had acute strokes, because time is brain. Because of the work that people like Kate have done, we understand a lot more about why that’s true and what factors we need to think about as clinicians when we’re treating acute stroke.”
At Stanford, Monje did exactly what a program like URSI and a mentorship like Susman’s train a young scientist to do—think critically and independently about complicated questions. The caption in the story about her in Stanford Medicine Magazine (“Brain Teaser,” by Amy Adams, Spring 2004) reads, “Graduate student Michelle Monje saw that conventional wisdom about radiation-induced brain damage fell short.”
“I got really interested in the cognitive decline that happens after people get treated for a brain tumor, especially children,” says Monje. “There’s this terrible trade-off we have to make in medicine sometimes where the treatment creates a problem that isn’t as bad as the illness, but almost, and this is one of those situations. When you are forced to use radiation to treat a tumor and the patient lives—which is the goal—almost invariably there is some degree of progressive decline in the person’s ability to learn and remember. And it’s particularly poignant in children who, a couple of years after radiation exposure, start having trouble in school, and then end up in special education, and in some cases end up institutionalized. It’s a horrible, horrible syndrome that’s aggressive and debilitating and never plateaus.”
The conventional wisdom attributed this cognitive decline to radiation-induced damage to blood vessels and injury to the cells surrounding the neurons. “But it didn’t quite make sense,” she says. “I kept seeing kids in clinic who have this memory difficulty and this inability to learn new things, but their brains looked fantastic on the MRI scan. They didn’t have obvious vascular damage, they didn’t have obvious white matter damage, so something else was going on.”
She joined the lab of Theo Palmer, a neural stem cell scientist, and they began to look at how radiation affects new neuron formation and how that affects memory function over time. “Along with colleagues at UC-San Francisco who were also curious about how radiation damaged the brain, Monje and Palmer have zeroed in on one phenomenon that seems at fault in preventing the brain from healing: radiation-induced inflammation,” writes Amy Adams in Stanford Medicine Magazine. “Their work has since spawned projects investigating the role of inflammation in other brain disorders and will head back to the clinic this year as part of a trial in kids receiving radiation treatment for cancer.”
The clinical trials began over the summer, giving pediatric oncology patients an anti-inflammatory along with radiation treatment and then monitoring the results using functional MRIs. “But a lot of things go to trial and don’t work,” says Monje. “I’ll feel good when the trials show some effect.”
While Monje clearly has a superb mind for science, being a woman and a scientist does pose challenges. “There was a moment when I told my thesis committee that I thought the project was going really well and it’d be done in time to defend it the following year. And they said, ‘You’re right—it is going well. But. It would be so good for your career if you spent an extra year or two,’ and they started talking about this add-on project they wanted me to do. I just sat there looking at them, these men and one woman, knowing that after my PhD, I still had at least a four-year residency ahead of me. So I said, ‘Look, I’m a female mammal. Let me explain the math. I’m 27 years old. I’ve got to be done with my 36-hour shifts by the time I’m in my early 30s or I can’t have kids.’ I had to say no. I can’t do everything.”
Maybe not everything, but almost.