The creation of a freeway in Los Angeles put Michael Bell on the road to his career choice. When Bell was about 12 years old, construction near his home cut through rocks that contained a treasure for him: fossil fish.

“I formed a relationship with the Natural History Museum in LA County and started bringing fossils [to them],” Bell recalled. “I had friends who would do it for a week or two and then they’d had enough. I did it endlessly. In a way, that’s how my career started.”

Indeed, that career led him to Stony Brook University, where he arrived in 1978 and is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Bell was co-editor of “The Evolutionary Biology of the Threespine Stickleback” in 1994 with Susan A. Foster.

Recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science elected Bell as a Ffellow. Bell said he appreciated the “broader recognition of his work.”

Those who have collaborated with him said Bell is a leader and an exceptional scientist.

Bell’s “contribution to the field has been enormous,” explained Windsor Aguirre, a former graduate student who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at DePaul University who still works with Bell. “Many of the most important papers in the field have been made possible or greatly enhanced [by Bell’s efforts],” he said.

From those early days, Bell has focused on the threespine stickleback, a fish that used to be considerably more prevalent at Flax Pond in Old Field and in the Great South Bay.

This particular fish, whose three sharp spines on the top of its body prevent some predators from swallowing it, appeals to scientists for a host of reasons —  from the variation it exhibits within and among populations to its relatively small size and ease of maintaining in a lab.

Bell has focused on establishing the relationship between traits and environmental factors. These fish can live in the sea ­— where they contend with the usual saltwater dilemma, where the concentration of salt is higher than in body fluids — and in freshwater, where salt is lower than in their body fluids.

Like salmon, they breed in brackish water (water that’s in between fresh and salty) and freshwater. The population of fish that evolve in freshwater can continue to survive despite having marine ancestors.

Indeed, the evolution, through mutations, of these fish is so rapid that they defy Charles Darwin. Coming up with the theory of natural selection when he studied the many unique birds in the Galapagos Islands 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, Darwin believed that evolution occurred on an almost imperceptibly slow time scale.

“Darwin underestimated the potential for rapid evolution,” Bell said. “He believed evolution is slow.” Sticklebacks have traits that evolve at high rates.

Bell has studied stickleback fossils in Nevada and California and modern stickleback in California and Alaska.

He has often studied the armor plates of stickleback, which have a marine and a freshwater version. In the ocean, the freshwater version would theoretically occur only once in about 10,000 young sticklebacks, because it’s a disadvantage to that individual. However, in a different environment, the fish with the freshwater armor plating becomes the natural selection superstar.

In an experiment in Cheney Lake in Anchorage, Alaska, Bell released sea-run stickleback. A year later, none of the fish had the freshwater plates, while fewer than 1 percent had them two years later. Six years after the experiment began, however, one in five fish had these plates.

“When you put the fish in freshwater, it evolves,” he said.

A resident of Stony Brook, Bell chose to live close enough to the university to walk to work. That, he said, was by design because he moved in during the gas crisis in the 1970s and didn’t want to wait in line for gas or struggle to get to work.

Bell and his wife Cynthia Blair travel to farms out east, shop and visit vineyards. Bell enjoys wandering through stores, especially for craft objects, which Blair also likes and makes herself. She designed a pillow of Bell, surrounded by swimming sticklebacks.

After four decades of research, Bell remains as inspired to find fossils and gather evidence about these rapidly evolving and adaptive fish as he was when he was a teenager.

“I won’t ever really retire,” said Bell, although he does expect to cut back so that he can travel with his wife. He appreciates being able to visit the shore of a lake in Alaska and “see what comes up in traps. It’s all still fun — making samples of modern and fossil stickleback, getting results that mean something scientifically and standing in front of a class and explaining biology to them.”

Aguirre, who described Bell as a “great” mentor, suggested that Bell and the stickleback are inextricably intertwined. “The threespine stickleback is truly one of evolutionary biology’s supermodels and [Bell] has played a critical role in bringing the species to the attention of the broader scientific community and the general public.”

It’s a dream team tackling a nightmare scenario. While colorectal and pancreatic cancers are killers across different races, they are considerably worse for African Americans.

African Americans with colorectal cancer are about 40 percent more likely to die from it compared to those from other racial groups, according to recent data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program. The incidence of pancreatic cancer in African Americans is also 31 to 65 percent higher than in other racial groups.

A Stony Brook University research team led by Ellen Li, a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, is trying to understand the causes of these variations and, in the process, hopes to provide the kinds of clinical benefits that would help everyone.

“We think there are multiple factors,” Li said. Scientists at Stony Brook, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and SUNY Downstate Health Disparities Center are creating one of “the most comprehensive data sets” that people can analyze.

The team includes Jennie Williams, an associate professor in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine, Joel Saltz, the chair of Bioinformatics at Stony Brook, Richard McCombie, director of the Stanley Institute for Cognitive Genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, David Tuveson, the director of the Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Research Laboratory at CSHL and several other researchers at  Downstate.

Williams said she began reading up on the response to cancer treatment by various groups in 2004. She understood that African Americans don’t respond to numerous chemotherapy prevention agents and some treatments for colon cancer. “They either don’t respond or they become resistant to chemotherapy,” she said.

When Williams started looking into this in 2008, she focused on microRNAs, which bind to messenger RNA and suppress translation. MicroRNAs are noncoding regulatory RNAs. The dysregulation of these important sequences result in the silencing of tumor suppressor proteins and the overexpression of oncogenes.

Her biggest finding was that the expression of tumor suppressor proteins inversely correlated with the overexpression of a microRNA called miR-182. This microRNA, she said, was significantly higher in tumor samples from African Americans.

With a molecular target and a potential mechanism, Williams thought she was well on her way to digging in. She ran into a significant stumbling block, however. “To do cancer chemotherapeutic studies, you need cell lines to work with,” she said.

Williams went to several companies to find colon cancer cell lines and asked, specifically, for those from African American patients. She found that the only cell lines labeled with race were those from Caucasians.

“To study chemoresponse, one needs a broad spectrum of cell lines,” Williams said.

She started generating cell lines in her lab, with three from African Americans and two from Hispanic patients, as well as some from Caucasians.

While Williams said she loves living in Stony Brook, she has found the lack of diversity among the patient population limiting in addressing cancer racial disparity. With Li’s help, she partnered with Downstate, where 75 percent of the patient population is African American.

She hopes to generate 10 African American, 10 Hispanic American and 10 Caucasian cell lines. Stony Brook and Downstate will collaborate to exchange ideas and personnel.

Williams said part of the challenge in gathering tissue samples from the African American population comes from a history of worrisome interactions with scientists.

Many African Americans have heard of the Tuskegee Institute study of African American men who came to the institute with syphilis between 1932 and 1972 but were not treated with penicillin, even after the drug became an effective and standard treatment in 1947. When the public became aware of the study, it ended and the government established strict informed consent rules about participating in scientific research.

Li said in their study on racial disparities in gastrointestinal cancers, selected staff certified in human research de-identifies everything so no one knows who each participant is. The data collection is a labor-intensive work, Li said, that is designed to provide greater insight into what might be causing these differences.

In terms of explaining the differences, Li and Williams believe it is both “genetic and epigenetic.”

In Africa, colon cancer is rare compared to its occurrence in the United States, Williams said, which suggests that diet and lifestyle contribute to the disease and its progression.

Raised in Savannah, Georgia, Williams said she was always interested in what made things change, from the tadpole in the pond to insects and birds that flew. While her parents didn’t attend college, that wasn’t an option for her: “It was never if” she went to college, “but when.”

Li, who is married to Stony Brook President Sam Stanley and has four children, said health insurance is one of numerous problems that affect individual populations. Numerous other factors could play a role in explaining the racial disparities in cancer outcomes.

Diabetes, which occurs at a higher rate in African Americans, increases the risk of colon cancer, Li said. It is unclear how much the incidence of diabetes in the African American population may contribute to the disparity, Li said.

Countless forks in the road lead to the creatures that swim, crawl, walk, and fly around the Earth. Some of these moments have a significant effect on the fate of the individual, taking it from the early stages when it’s filled with potential into a bone, a muscle or a brain cell.

In some cases, the process goes off track. The signals, pathways and processes take a different turn, sometimes because of a change in a gene or a protein.

Linda Van Aelst, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, explores how changes in intracellular signaling involving enzymes called small GTPases can lead to disease. She and her team of six graduate students and postdoctoral researchers focus on Ras and Rho GTPases and their regulators, which control cellular growth and the kinds of changes that lead to the shapes of cells, organs or tissues.

Alterations in the genes involved with these enzymes can lead to a range of diseases. “Mutations have been linked to cancer-related processes, including metastasis, as well as to neurodevelopmental and neurological disorders,” Van Aelst said.

Bo Li, an associate professor at CSHL, suggested that Van Aelst, who provides guidance and direction as his mentor, is a leader at the 125-year old research facility.

Van Aelst is “well known for her innovative work on signaling molecules in the cell, including Ras and Rho,” Li said. Her work is “really innovative.”

Van Aelst studies these enzymes by taking what she described as a “bottom up” approach, exploring their development and their role in cellular and developmental processes in the context of the brain. She explores how any perturbation can affect behavior and, once she sees a change, looks for differences in the circuitry development.

Van Aelst looks at the process from the beginning, with the genes, through the protein network. She has sought to understand how some changes lead to metastatic cancer that spreads to a single organ, while others spread generally throughout the body.

Because she is exploring mutations at a basic level, Van Aelst can get involved in a range of diseases and abnormalities, from epilepsy to schizophrenia to mental retardation to cancer.

“Clinicians send me information and want to see if maybe I can use the tools in different mutations in my research” to understand what might be happening with some of their patients, Van Aelst said.

She also gets calls from the parents and family members of patients, who would like to know if a cure is available for a genetic condition linked to something she’s studied.

Van Aelst knows she needs to be “cautious” because she doesn’t want to give false hope at a time when the research may not have pointed the way towards a specific therapy.

With any clinical trials, she has to “make it clear that the findings are not yet mature enough for further development,” she said.

While she’s conducting basic research to understand the process and mechanisms involved, Van Aelst is aware and eager to help an audience desperate for more information and, down the road, a novel treatment.

She does “see the urgency. It’s important that the patients and the family of the patients and the scientists communicate and it is clear what we understand, what can be done, and how far we can do it.”

Van Aelst hasn’t become involved in a therapeutic study yet, but she has reached the point where she knows aberrations in some processes. She hopes to get engaged in the near future in the next step.

“We don’t have something now in hand, but we have several hints” from cellular processes and proteins, she said.

Earlier this year, Van Aelst and her lab published results in the journal Cell Reports in which they found two proteins that provide a critical role in creating the structure of something in the nervous system called a chandelier cell.

Named for the way axonal arbors branch out, these chandelier cells play an important role in affecting neurons nearby. Their size and structure give them the ability to affect the function of other nerves, either turning them on or off, depending on the signal.

Changes in chandelier cell cartridges and/ or function have been reported in disease states such as epilepsy and schizophrenia, she said.

Van Aelst helped provide an important piece of information about these cells by uncovering the important role two proteins play in their structure.

When the function of proteins called DOCK7 and ErbB4 were disrupted, the chandelier cells have fewer branches or boutons. She discovered that DOCK7 triggers the activity of ErbB4.

Van Aelst’s research on chandelier cells “offers insight into how diseases like epilepsy might occur,” Li said.

Now a resident of Oyster Bay, Van Aelst grew up in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium and was originally interested in archeology and history.

In biology, however, she was intrigued by how “one gene talks to other genes. How does it work? What does it signal? How does it control this or that function?”