Message from the Dean
Lifeline – June, 2006
The Other Life Sciences: Food for thought
Circadian rhythms, evolutionary bioinformatics, enzyme structure and function, HMG-CoA synthase, retroposon replication, and protein misfolding (to name but a few) are not the typical topics of discussion when considering Life Sciences research initiatives. But, they should be.
Somewhere in the discussion of Kansas City as a participant in the Life Sciences research arena we may have lost sight of the scope of Life Sciences research. Or perhaps to the casual observer, fed only on newspaper and business journal reports, Life Sciences research is nothing more than an investment strategy. Granted, there is nothing inherently wrong with reaping reward from financial investment, but when was the intellectual pursuit exchanged for improvement of the corporate bottom line? Or is discovery for discovery sake too idealistic to be revived from its apparent grave?
Although the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake is often a hard sell for the general public since it does not always lead to immediate life-changing discoveries, but more often than not, the study of basic biological systems does lead to tangible advancement that improves the quality of life.
Perhaps no one explained to the Kansas City Community that by studying the life cycle of retroposons - small mobile genetic elements within the chromosomes of the lowly single-celled bakers yeast - that we may just find a cure for HIV infection and thus AIDS, or that the discovery of misfolded proteins attempting to escape the cells’ Golgi apparatus may in fact trigger the cause of Parkinson’s Disease, or that by studying the active site of a seemingly obscure bacterial enzyme involved in the biosynthesis of fats we will likely discover new therapeutic targets to combat antibiotic resistance in life-threatening bacterial pathogens.
Who would have ever thought that ongoing Life Sciences research right here at UMKC would have such profound and tangible outcomes?
When asked to rally behind an effort to advance the Life Sciences, the citizens of Kansas City need to know that support for the “Basic” Life Sciences is the key to everything else that follows. Without embracing this simple and irrefutable fact we will continually chase the latest trends in search of elusive financial gain.
Lawrence A. Dreyfus
Dean
