A Grinnell College Authors and Artists Podcast Episode
Marshall Poe ’84 chatted with Charvann Bailey, assistant professor of biology. They discussed her route to a doctorate in biology, the struggles of post-docking and bench science, and her decision to teach at a liberal arts college. And they talked about her work trying to find new therapies to treat lung cancer.
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe, and you're listening to an episode of Grinnell College's Authors and Artists Podcast. Today, I'm very pleased to say we have Charvann Bailey on the show. Charvann is an assistant professor of biology at Grinnell. I audited a lot of biology classes when I was at Grinnell. I graduated in 1984 and I became fascinated with it. Some of your predecessors were actually my teachers, Charvann. But anyway, welcome to the show. We're glad to have you here.
Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
Absolutely. My pleasure. Could you begin by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Sure, sure, sure. Well, I grew up on the East Coast. I'm from Silver Spring, Maryland, which is a suburb outside of DC. I went to college in Frederick, Maryland. It's called Hood College. At the time, it was a women's college, although it went co-ed about 20 years ago. I graduated with a BA in biochemistry, and then I decided that I needed to take a break because I was tired of school.
Good idea.
My brain needed a break. During college, I kind of figured out I wanted to do research and I wanted to get a PhD, but I wasn't really sure that that's what I wanted to do. I guess even then, I knew that getting a doctorate was a daunting task and it was a serious thing. Since I didn't know what I wanted to do and I didn't have a driver's license at the time, I ended up moving down to Alabama to live with my dad because it was easier to get a driver's license there in Alabama. And that also gave me some time to figure out what I wanted to do. The original plan was to take off one year, and then one year turned into almost four years. The first job I got out of college was I was a histology technician.
I knew just what that is.
I hated every minute of that job, but I decided to stay there for a year because I needed something to put on my resume. It was like my first job out of college. After that job was over, I quit and I moved down to Alabama to figure out my life. I was living with my dad. I ended up working for my uncle and my dad actually. My uncle is a high risk OB/GYN and at the time, my dad was the office manager. I worked at that office for almost three years. I did a lot of things. I mostly did check in, check out, answered the phone, scheduled appointments.
Sometimes I would go in the rooms with the patients if they were short on people. I think one time they had me working up patients. I did a lot of things. That process, that time allowed me to just really think about what I really wanted to do as a career. Because my dad said, "Anybody can get a job, but what you want as a career." 20 year old me didn't understand, but years later, I get it, dad. I do.
Shout out to dad.
Yes. Hold on. I lost track, sorry.
You're about to enter your PhD program, I'm betting.
Yeah. So then I decided to apply for PhD programs. One of the schools I decided to apply to and got into was Meharry Medical College. Meharry Medical College is a historically Black college and university in Nashville, Tennessee. I applied to that program because my uncle and his two children, the same uncle that I worked for, he went to Meharry Medical College and literally his degree was staring in my face as I was checking out patients. I was like, why didn't I check that out? I didn't know they had a PhD program. I looked online. They had a PhD program. I liked the type of research that they were doing. I applied and I got in. Yay!
Yay!
In most PhD programs, the first thing that happens is in addition to coursework, you do three rotations in your first year. And then after your first year, you decide what lab you want to join. It just so happened that most of the labs that I was interested in doing rotations in were in cancer research. The first rotation that I did ended up being the lab that I joined my PhD in. At the time, he had started this new project in breast cancer. My PhD advisor is not trained in cancer biology. He is actually trained in microbiology and immunology. When I joined the lab, he had just published a paper about breast cancer.
I wanted to work on that project. He hired a postdoc at the same time that I joined the lab. He basically trained me. What I ended up working on was I did breast cancer research. What I did was I studied a more aggressive breast cancer called triple-negative breast cancer. I'm a hardcore molecular biologist, so I basically delineated the mechanism by which a transcriptional repressor called SLUG induces motility in triple-negative breast cancer cells.
Got it.
That is what I did my PhD on. During my PhD, I got an opportunity to be a TA for the molecular biology course that my advisor teaches to the first years. While I was getting my PhD, I found that, wow, I really loved interacting with the students, more so than I did doing my actual research. And then people were telling me that I was really good at teaching and it's something that I really enjoyed.
I have to pause you. I can already tell you're really good at teaching. Go ahead.
When I graduated, I defended my dissertation. It took me a little longer to finish it. On average, it takes about five to seven years. It took me almost seven years to finish my PhD. And then after that, I decided... Gosh. I knew that I didn't want to do research at a research intensive institution, because I saw what my advisor went through. I'm like, I don't know, chasing after grants and writing grants all day.
That is what they do all day, people that run labs. They're grant producing machines. I have a friend who's a bench scientist and that's pretty much all he does is write grants.
Yeah, exactly. That's not my idea of not my of fun. But I really enjoyed teaching, but I didn't know how I could pursue that. At the time, I wasn't aware of many programs that can give me the opportunity to do more teaching. I did a traditional postdoc. What I did differently when I entered my postdoc is that I was really clear and very specific, rather aggressive about what I wanted to do after my postdoc. I was not shy in telling anybody that I was not about to spend five to six years doing nobody's postdoc. I'm not doing that.
Because on average, at least in the biological sciences, if you want to be at a high ranking R1 institution, then on average, you're doing five to six years of a postdoc because you need time to get high impact factor publications and the grants and all the stuff that's going to get you to the next level. I wasn't on that track because I'm like, I'm not doing that for five or six years. I got onto the training grant at my institution. I did my postdoc at an institution called The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was there for three years, which is how long the training grant was for that supplied my salary.
I was really interested in teaching. Again, I was not shy about telling anybody about that fact. The fact that I was really vocal about what I wanted to do as my career, people started telling me about teaching opportunities. While I was there, I got a chance to participate in a program that basically teaches you how to teach. I was like, "Wow! There's programs that do that? That's amazing. Woo!" In that program, I learned how to write what a teaching philosophy was and how to write that, because I was about to go on the job market, I had no clue what any of that stuff was.
Right. You were a bench scientist.
Yeah. What else? And then my last few months as a postdoc, I got my first teaching gig at Ursinus College, which is another small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. I was teaching one lab section to freshman biology students. I did that for my last few months as a postdoc. I loved that. At the same time, I was also applying for jobs and writing up this paper that I needed to submit. I have my one publication in my postdoc. Side note about research stuff, my paper got accepted for publication for my postdoc with no revisions.
Wow! Hey, I've never had that happen.
Which never happens, ever. It was like, "You need to spell this word correctly." Anyways, after three years, I was applying for all these jobs to get teaching positions and I ended up getting a visiting faculty position at Vassar College. That one year position turned into a two year position. Let me tell you, Marshall, man, that experience just completely changed the trajectory of...
How so?
My career trajectory. After I finished my PhD and my postdoc, that's like 10 plus years of doing research nonstop. I was burnt out, I was tired. I'm like, I'm not doing this features business. This sucks. I can't do anymore. I went to Vassar. And even though I am a graduate of a small liberal arts college, I had no clue. After 10 years of being in research intensive environments, I had no clue that there was a place where you can go and you can teach and interact with students and have this very close relationship with them. You're still expected to do research, but you're not expected to do it at this breakneck pace. There's still pressure and it's stressful, but it's a different kind of stress from being at a R1 institution.
I've been at both and I noticed what you're talking about.
I was like, wow, I had no clue that this type of institution existed. I spent the first year at Vassar teaching... They hired me to teach biochemistry and molecular biology. I did that for two years. While I was doing that, I was unsure of whether or not I wanted to pursue a 10 year track position. Because again, that was not my goal to do any type of research. I just wanted to teach. Leave me alone. I just wanted to teach. Right before I think my last year at Vassar, I decided I was going to pursue a 10 year track position, and of course, I needed a research plan.
Most people, when they craft a research plan, when they go out on their own, they base their independent work off of what they did as a postdoc. Well, my track was different. The labs that I was in as a postdoc, I wasn't an expert in that area, and then the type of research that would have... If I had based my research off of what I did as a postdoc, that type of research couldn't feasibly be done.
There was a kind of mismatch. You couldn't do it.
At a smaller liberal arts college, because it costs money, resources.
It costs a lot of money.
Right. I know that small liberal arts colleges don't have, right? I decided to base my research off of what I did as a PhD, because I knew that like the back of my hand. I still do 10 years later. I mean, I dedicated almost seven years of my life to it. I decided to base my initial research interest at Cornell off of what I did in my PhD. That initial project actually was... I told you before, my PhD was based off of delineating the mechanism by how SLUG makes the cells move more frequently.
Yeah, motility.
Motility, high motility. But this time, I was interested in chemotherapeutic resistance, because there had been some correlation between the high expression levels of SLUG and resistance to chemotherapy, but nobody had really outlined the mechanism of how that happened. That was my overall project that I was going to work on. That's what got me the job at Grinnell.
So then you applied for jobs and you got a job at Grinnell.
Yeah. Applied for jobs. They called me for the phone interview and they're so excited. They were like, 'We're so excited. We want you to come out for a campus visit." Then I started to freak out, because this was November 2016. I started to freak out. I knew where Grinnell was. I can do Google Maps. But it didn't really dawn on me, dude, this is Iowa. This is rural Iowa. I don't know anything about Iowa. Are there black people in Iowa? Am I going to be safe traveling to the middle of nowhere as a single Black female?
I had all these questions in my head. But I calmed myself down and I was like, all right, just give it the chance. Go with an open mind. I've never lived in a small town before. I went to the interview campus visit and absolutely I loved it. I didn't know anything about the town, but I'm just talking about my interactions with my future colleagues and the conversations.
Iowa Nice. That's what they call it, Iowa Nice.
Yeah, it was great. I totally loved it. I can see myself, I would fit in right with the department and stuff like that, because that's important to me as well. As far as the community, I had no clue, because again, I didn't see much of the community. But I'm a fairly adaptable person, as I am told by many people.
I'm sure you are. Let me ask this, you mentioned that at least two of the things that professors have to do are teaching and research. How do you balance teaching and research at a place like Grinnell, which is pretty far off the map? And though they do have money to fund research, where do you actually do your research? How has it worked?
I have a research lab. I have my research lab space at the college, and they gave me a fairly decent startup.
These things cost money. I think people need to know that. It ain't free. It's not go to the library and read some books.
Especially molecular biology. I mean, research is expensive, but molecular biology is one of the most expensive areas of biology to buy things in. It's ridiculous.
I had a friend actually... Sorry to interrupt. I had a friend who did something like this and he would go buy equipment on eBay.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Because it was cheaper.
No, that's true. That's true. There this young woman, she's amazing. My lab would not function without her. Please don't retire. Carolyn Bosse. Shout out to Carolyn Bosse. She's amazing, and she helped me. She knows where all the deals are for supplies and stuff.
This is the thing that my friend said is that you have a budget and you can't exceed the budget, so you've got to go find all the stuff.
Yeah, you got to go find all the stuff. Before I came, I made a spreadsheet of all of the supplies that I needed, and I tried to look for cheaper things online. But the thing is, is that the institution has relationships with vendors where they can get discounted prices. They sign in using their special passwords so the prices that they see are going to be slightly different from what I see by just going on the website.
Right, right. The college helped you build this lab, so you can actually do your research in the middle of Iowa. That's pretty cool.
Yeah, because I have my own lab, my model system is so culture, which is also expensive because the cells are finicky, and the incubator. All of that stuff.
That's good. That's good.
They have what I need so I can do my research.
Let's talk a little bit about your research. You study non-small cell lung cancer. I think people know what lung cancer is.
Yes. Yes.
They do. It's a deadly cancer. Just by way of preface to orient people, and tell me if any of this is wrong, you're essentially developing chemotherapies. And as I understand it, one of the problems with chemotherapies is they're not well targeted.
Well, I'm not developing chemotherapies per se develop. I don't know if the right word is development, but I am working on trying to develop, I guess, better combination therapies with which to treat this type of cancer. And then on top of that, okay, so once we find out this combination works, well, how is it working? What's the mechanism?
Yeah, the mechanism, that's an important word. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that my understanding of chemotherapy is that it's not generally well targeted, or at least it hasn't been. Essentially when you give someone chemotherapy, you kill the cells that you want to kill, but you also kill a lot of other cells and this makes people very sick. The kind of end goal is to produce therapies that just target cancer cells, in this case, non-small lung cancer cells. Is that right? Can we drill down into a little bit exactly how this is done? Can you talk a little bit about what you're actually working on that kills these cells and how it targets the cells? Maybe that's a no.
I can answer one part of your question. I'm still working on the general mechanism of how it actually kills the cells. We have some ideas, but we haven't done the experiments to either prove or disprove.
But we already know that it does, so you're really working on the... I like this word, mechanism, like the chemical mechanism by which the cell croaks.
I already know that the agent... The type of targeted therapy that I'm working with is called sirtinol. Sirtinol is an enzyme inhibitor, and it inhibits a body of enzymes called sirtuins. There's seven sirtuins in mammals and sirtinols inhibits SIRTS 1 and 2, both of which are... One study showed that both of these enzymes are overexpressed in non-small cancer cells as opposed to the normal cells. What I've shown already is that sirtinol is toxic to some of these non-small cell cancer cell lines that I'm working with. It's toxic at 24 hours. That's what we have shown. The general area of cancer biology that my collaborator is working at the University of Iowa is called readouts biology.
There are some literature out there that suggests that sirtinol kills the cells through a redox-mediated mechanism, but nobody knows the specifics of it. All the experiments are just very general in nature and, frankly, I think the proof is very weak. Right now I'm trying to figure out how is sirtinol killing the cells as a single agent, and then I'm also seeing if it works in combination with pharmacological ascorbate, which is essentially a type of agent that I think is currently used in some clinical trials to treat lung cancer in combination with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
I was going to say, let me take just a step back. Essentially what you're trying to do, and this is going to be very crude, is you're trying to defeat defenses that certain cells have that been evolved over hundreds of millions of years and are very common so that you can kill them because this inhibits the production of something that might kill a cell. And so then the cell itself, its defenses is being defeated by sirtinol, then it dies.
Yes, that's part of it.
Well, can I just interrupt for a second? One of the things I remember from some biology is cells have tons of defensive mechanisms.
Yes.
Tons. One of the things that they'll do very commonly is kill themselves. If something goes wrong in replication at any number of like six times, the cell will just die.
Yeah, apoptosis.
Yeah, right. They just croak because this one isn't right. Cells have all these defensive mechanisms, including cancer cells. They have them too.
Cancer cells have even more defense.
Oh great.
I say they don't die, they multiply.
Yeah, right, because cancer is essentially the uncontrolled reproduction of a certain kind of cell. The on switch is always on.
Yeah, it's always on. It's more complex than that.
Oh, I'm sure it is.
Yes. For simplistic terms, that is the general definition of cancer. Speaking of cell growth, the research that I've done so far not only shows that sirtinol is actually cytotoxic to these cells, but it also reduces the cell number.
It reduces replication.
Yes, it reduces...
That's a trick.
Something is happening there. Right now we're trying to figure out how sirtinol induces oxidative stress in the cell.
Again, I remember this also from biology and other things, is that at some point, biology becomes chemistry. It seems like in your research, you're down to the chemical level. You got to know a lot of chemistry here to do it.
You got to know a lot of chemistry. Now, my research has kind of switched from molecular biology to more cell biology, chemistry, and biochemistry.
Right, because this is absolutely essential. I really love the sort of mechanism because literally the set of steps that leads to cell death and you're trying to figure that out on a chemical level.
Yes.
That sounds hard.
I wouldn't say on a chemical level, more on a cellular and a biochemical level.
I see. We talked about targeting before. How do you target sirtinol toward cancer cells versus healthy cells? Is that part of your research? How does that happen?
Actually the way to do that is to do an experiment, which I plan to do. The way to do that in a dish, like testing cells in a dish, is you would basically take... I've already treated cancer cells in a dish with sirtinol and gotten the dose-response curve for that, meaning like...
We should probably say that you have to buy these cancer cells. They're like a line item in... There are cancer cell providers.
Yes. There are several repositories that exist around the world and in this country that you can buy these cancer cells.
You bought the cancer cells and you got them in a dish.
Yeah. You get them in a dish and you basically feed them. They require growth factors and media, which contains metabolites so that they can function. You have to take care of them. They're like babies, right? You can't just leave and be like, "I'm going on vacation for two weeks," and expect...
I know about this because my kids are doing slime molds. Keep slime alive.
I'm sorry, I forgot the question.
Well, the question is basically how do you show that sirtinol has a preference for or can be targeted to cancer cells versus healthy cells?
That is an easy question. That is a simple experiment actually. The way to do that is that you would basically buy normal lung cancer cells. The fancy name for normal lung cells are called human bronchial epithelial cells, also known as HBEpC, if you don't feel like saying that every single time.
Yeah, I don't.
You would basically treat HBEpCs with sirtinol and you would treat the cancer cells with sirtinol. After you get the results and do the dose-response curve, if sirtinol specifically targets cancer cells and not the normal cells, then you should see... Then, for example, at higher doses, as you increase the dose, as you expose the normal cells to higher doses of drug, you should expect to see minimal amounts of killing, as opposed to cancer cells that are treated with the drug. As you increase the dose, you expect to see a gradual decline.
You haven't done this experiment yet, so you can't give us the...
I have not done this experiment yet. I actually did do it, but apparently I did it incorrectly.
Well, that's the other thing about experimental sciences is that there's a lot of places where you can make a mistake.
That aspect will make me more sympathetic to my students when I get back. I made all these mistakes during my sabbatical, and I've been doing this for...
I'm 100% behind this, because intellectual humility is if you don't have it, you're sunk.
There's been a lot of that happening in the past few years.
Yeah, you and me both. The steps toward a therapy, you're doing what I think I would call it, correct me if I'm wrong, basic science.
Yes. I'm doing basic science.
Right, basic science. And so then your findings will be handed off to therapeutic companies? Exactly what is the set of steps from basic science to a therapy?
First of all, let me preface this by saying that I am not a translational scientist, so what I'm about to tell you is based...
Is that what they're called, translational sciences?
Yeah, like translational research or clinical research. I am not that type of scientist. What I'm about to tell you is based on limited knowledge of that area of science.
See, more intellectual humility, that speaks very well of you. I like that.
But a general standpoint within academia, I can only talk about stuff within academia, the first step would be, okay, we're doing the work in cells. Does it work? Is this therapy effective in cells?
In the dish.
In the dish. And then the next step would be, okay, well, does this affect happen in mice?
Mice. You can buy mice online too.
Yeah. The interesting thing about doing mouse studies is that if you combine your basic research and you have mouse studies, you can get into a higher impact factor journal.
I see.
And then after you do that, then you got to go through the steps to get it into... There's lots of red tape and stuff you got to go through to get it to actually clinical trials and people.
A lot of us were familiar with this from the COVID experience. We learned all about clinical trials and such.
I'm just doing very basic.
At what point are you completely forgotten in all of this? You did the basic science, but at some point, it's like your name just disappears.
Right. Well, I don't know. My collaborator, he does have collaborations with clinical scientists or people who are doing research in the clinic.
I see what you're saying. Yes. It sounds like very interesting work in the sense that you can't call up your granddad and say, "I cured cancer," which would be fun. But you can say, "I'm working on curing cancer." You can say that.
I'm working on making better treatments for cancer therapies.
Yeah, I see. All right. Well, thank you very much for explaining that very clearly actually. I think I understand all of it. I could actually tell someone what you do, I think. Let me ask you this. You said earlier in our wonderful conversation, which I'm enjoying very much, that at some point in the PhD track or on the postdoc, you decided you didn't want to devote your entire life to grant writing and you wanted to teach. How do you teaching at Grinnell?
I like it. I like it a lot. I've learned a lot not only about the subject matter that I'm teaching, because I talk about it all the time, but I also have learned a lot about teaching pedagogy and how to relay the information to my students in a way that they can understand it. I've been at Grinnell for five years and I've grown a lot as a teacher. Just being able to also learn from my colleagues and stuff like that.
I mean, I think one of the things that people don't appreciate, or maybe they do appreciate, I don't know, but when you come out of a PhD program or a postdoc, you're so focused on your very narrow research and then they throw you into a classroom and say, "Teach biology 101."
Right.
You forgot biology. What? I got to go back and relearn all that stuff.
Right. I think that was a challenge, right?
Yeah, I found it to be a great challenge. I was very narrowly focused, and then all of a sudden, I had to teach these survey classes and it was difficult.
I think the one class that I struggled with the most was... Gosh, what was that class? The intro course that they teach at Cornell, the intro to biology course, is all about the process of science and teaching first years how to do science. It was a challenge for me because no one ever walked me through how to write a paper. All these skills that I'm literally standing up in front of the class telling them how to do, I learned just by doing.
On the job. You learned on the job.
It was a challenge for me to figure out how I was going to relay information to students that I'd never been taught myself.
You never articulated yourself. You just knew how to do it. It's like trying to explain someone how to ride a bicycle without riding a bicycle. Oh, here's what you do. You get on the bicycle, then you put your foot on the pedal. This doesn't make any sense. It's hard to explain to someone how to ride a bicycle. You have to show them how to ride the bicycle.
Right.
That's how you learned.
I really enjoy teaching at Grinnell. One of the things that I liked about especially teaching the upper level course, because I teach molecular biology, we are encouraged to incorporate our research into the upper level courses. If a student takes molecular biology with me, it may be different if they take it with another one of my colleagues.
I had exactly the same experience at Grinnell when I was there. My mentor was a guy named Dan Kaiser. I don't know if you ever met him. He was in the history department, and he studied the history of Russian law. As I advanced, he had me doing the history of Russian law. I mean, he was doing active research and I was helping him do this. I thought it was just great. I was really like, oh look, I'm contributing.
I wasn't curing cancer, but I was learning something about Russian law. I think that's one of the aspects of Grinnell, in particular, is that as you advance through the curriculum and you become a second, third, fourth year, you get to actually help the professors with their research. And that's very rewarding.
I'm working with a student right now and he's been very helpful thus far.
What do you tell your student? I'm very interested in this, and it may be kind of an unfair question. My understanding is, is that careers in the bench sciences are extraordinarily hard. You've got to be kind of insane to even try one, because I mean, really... Again, I have this friend who has a lab and he's like, "It's just so hard and most people don't make it."
It is.
What do you tell your students about this?
You mean if they want to go into research?
Yeah.
I mean, they ask questions, I tell them the truth. I'm like, if you want to go into academia, it's a challenging career and sometimes you don't get what you want. I know plenty of people who are super postdocs and they have these extraordinary resumes and all that type of stuff and they don't have position. It's so competitive.
This is what I'm talking about is that it's really very hard. In a weird sense, science is sort of underfunded in that way. Although it is the case that the NIH and stuff have bazillions of dollars, it still doesn't seem to be enough.
I think the market is so saturated with postdocs, right? They all want to go into academia and there's a very limited amount of positions available.
Yeah, no, that's exactly my understanding as well. Here's another question, is it possible, for example, when you finished your post-op, could you have gone into industry? Could you have gone and worked for a pharmaceutical company or something like that? Are there such opportunities?
Yeah.
Are there plenty of jobs there for people?
In industry?
Yeah.
I don't know. I honestly have no idea, but it would seem to me that a pharmaceutical company would want somebody like you.
I think there are plenty of opportunities in industry. I don't know how competitive it is. But I think to get into industry, it's one of those catch 22 like, "Oh, you need a PhD, plus experience," but you can't really get a foot in the door unless you have experience, but you need the job to get experience.
Right.
I mean, that is the issue.
That's the deal. Yeah, that is the deal. But as I say, I just have one friend who runs a lab and he doesn't do very much, but write grants. He doesn't get to do any of the research himself. He has all these postdocs who do it, and he's very worried about his postdocs, what they're going to do.
At that point, you are truly a manager of people, projects, and money. I will say that that is what I do to a certain extent, but it's on a smaller scale. I manage people in my lab and in the classroom, but I also manage money and projects in my lab. My salary is basically secure.
Well, that's good for you. That's great. Well, it's been absolutely fascinating talking to you. I learned a ton. I think I can say with great confidence that Grinnell is very lucky to have you, and I'm sure you are actually a great teacher. Let me tell everybody that this has been the Grinnell College Authors and Artists Podcast and I hope that you tune in next time. Thanks very much.
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