Even when most electronics aren’t functioning or are in sleep mode, they consume power. Leaving an inactive laptop long enough without charging it causes the battery to drain.

That’s not the case, however, with a developing technology called spintronics. Researchers are developing ways to use the spin of particles to operate DVR devices, smart phones and space technologies.

“The hope with spintronics is that you save the state and you won’t consume energy,” explained Javier Pulecio, a research associate in physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “When you turn it on, it’s instantly on. It has everything saved in its current position.” It is, Pulecio explained, like a refrigerator magnet, which stays magnetized.

Spintronic technology is still in the early stages of development, said Pulecio, with some significant fundamental hurdles to overcome before it will have widespread application in consumer electronics. One of the challenges is figuring out how to transport an electron’s spin over a longer distance, enabling it to become a useful carrier of a signal.

If scientists put an electron with a particular spin through a copper wire, the approximate distance the spin will stay polarized (or in the same state it was in when it entered the wire) is about 2 nanometers. In a normal conductor, the electron scatters, which causes the spin to change state or “flip.”

For perspective, an inch is 25,400,000 nanometers. The distance for that signal is “really tiny,” Pulecio said. “Current transistor technology is much larger than that.”

One possible solution is graphene, which is pure, two-dimensional carbon that is one atom thick. Graphene enables an electron to stay polarized for longer distances — microns instead of nanometers. It allows electrons to move without scattering, an activity known as ballistic transport.

Pulecio recently led a team that published a paper in Nature Communications that described how they created nanodevices with magnetic vortices in them. The configuration of the vortex is like a hurricane. It has a core, like the eye of a storm, with a circular magnetization around the center, like the clouds circling the eye.

He used two discs of different thicknesses but similar diameter on top of one another. This created orbits of spinning electrons of different sizes.

Even though the two discs had orbits that wanted to move differently, they synchronized through strong interactions to create a new orbit size during the motion. The electrons from the disc with the smaller-sized orbit were pulled out to an orbit that was closer to the larger one.

Pulecio’s mentor Dario Arena, a physicist in the photon sciences directorate at BNL, described the results in this experiment as “very promising.”

While Pulecio is still “quite young by the standards in the field,” Arena said “colleagues from other institutions have commented on how impressed they are with his results.”

Pulecio is studying other magnetic quasiparticles, such as skyrmions, which could lead to a reduction of the energy necessary to excite them by six orders of magnitude (or by a million times). He is interested in trying to bridge the fundamental science to its application. He hopes to contribute to creating smaller, more energy-efficient devices.

Arena explained that spintronics has current applications.

“Spintronics is not an abstract curiosity in the lab,” Arena said. “It is the foundation underpinning our advanced hard drives on computers. Even as more and more personal computers are moving toward solid-state hard drives, magnetic hard disk drives are finding an even more important application in cloud-based services such as Netflix, Dropbox, iCloud and many others.”

Arena said spintronic devices are marketed by companies such as Freescale, a spinoff of Motorola. While it isn’t currently used in consumer electronics, spintronics has found application in “harsh” environments where traditional semiconductor memory may have deficiencies, he said.

A resident of Wading River, Pulecio and his wife Alexandra, who is a science educator at BNL, welcomed a son, Xavier John, to their family eight months ago.

Born in Chicago and raised in Tampa, Fla., Pulecio said he enjoys mountain biking and fishing in and around Long Island. Pulecio’s mother Catalina, who grew up in Colombia, came to the United States because she saw greater opportunities for her family.

She didn’t speak English well when she arrived and made considerable sacrifices, he said. For his siblings and him, it was never a question of if they were going to college, but when and where.

Pulecio said he appreciates the opportunities he has at BNL. “My group leader Yimei Zhu and mentor Dario Arena have provided me with amazing support and guidance,” he said. “Our ability to understand, alter and control material at the atomic level makes this a truly exciting time to be a scientist.”

The scent of a skunk, the familiar face of a friend, or the sound of shattering glass become part of a code that makes each of these stimuli familiar and recognizable almost immediately with each subsequent experience.

Glenn Turner, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, explores how one of the research world’s favorite test subjects, the fruit fly, develops a memory for smells.

“We can use a bunch of different techniques to understand how neurons in a memory center respond to different smells,” he said. “One of the things we found is that those neurons have really specific responses.”

Neurons, or the wiring cells that carry signals and affect everything from telling muscles to move to processing thoughts or activities, have such a highly specific signature that Turner can “easily tell the difference between when a fly smells a grapefruit and when it smells a lime.”

There is not, however, a universal signal in the brain of every fly, rat, monkey, or dolphin for certain senses. Each creature has a unique response to a sensory cue.

Turner said this is akin to a human’s response to the odor of durian, a fruit that smells like sweat socks. To those people who eat the fruit, the smell is appealing because they like the taste. Many people, however, react to the scent in the same way they would if they walked into an airless locker room after an overtime basketball game.

Thomas Clandinin, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine, who has known Turner for over two decades, described Turner’s work as “highly innovative.” Turner is “widely credited with being one of the people who made it possible to monitor neural activity in the fly, an approach that has really revolutionized fly neuroscience.”

Clandinin credits Turner with being “very good at teaching people how to use his approaches, magnifying the community impact.”
Recently, Turner conducted experiments in which he looked at the patterns of activity in the memory center of the fly’s brain to see if he could tell the difference between the neural signature of bananas and of apples. The goal was to see if the patterns were stimulus-specific so that they could account for the accuracy with which flies form memories.

The perceptual whole is “greater than the sum of the parts,” Turner said.

Fluorescence microscopy makes a protein in a cell increase in brightness whenever it is active. He used that technique to express individual neurons in a region of the fly’s brain called the mushroom body, to see what components of a smell cause the fly to react and interpret that smell.

“We were able to show that different individual synaptic sites have different tuning properties,” Turner said. “The only time the mushroom body signaled to its downstream partners was when several inputs were active at the same time.”

Flies have several input sites that are waiting for a smell to come along that they can process and understand. If the majority of the parts of a smell are consistent, the fly will process the chemicals in the air as that scent. If not, however, the fly may not react.

Another step in his research, he said, could be to determine what neurological changes occur in response to some learned connection. If, for example, a fly often smells the noxious fumes of paint thinner when he eats, he might process that signal in a way that’s different from a fly that is looking for a more conventional smell in the search for food.

One of the reasons the fly is an appealing subject for these studies is that there are mutant versions that don’t form memories. By studying these mutants, researchers like Turner can compare the neurological circuit of a fly that recognizes the smell of a banana from one that can’t.

Turner and his wife Lorraine Lew, a nutritionist who works at a renal dialysis clinic, got married last November. Turner enjoys hiking behind the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory library and biking.

As for his research, Turner hopes his basic understanding of the way a fly interprets the information around it will have applications to other creatures.

“I would hope that one day, we will get a more concrete understanding of learning and memory,” he said.

He creates materials that build themselves. By attaching parts that will connect in a specific way, he can build something that could be useful in fields ranging from harvesting energy, to advancing medical technology to offering clearer views in basic research.

Oleg Gang, a group leader in soft and bio-nanomaterials at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory, is at the forefront of a field where the materials he’s trying to construct are about 1/1000th the width of a human hair.
At incredibly small scales, matter behaves in ways that are different from the world of apples falling from trees, cars slowing down on snowy roads, or baseballs flying over fences. Going from atoms to molecules to nanoparticles to large objects causes matter to change its properties due to the collective effects between atoms and the relative surface contribution, Gang explained.

Gang has been using something from another area of science for these self-assembled materials: DNA. The genetic blueprint that determines whether a cell becomes a part of a snail, a snake or a salmon has matching base pairs that make it a good candidate for construction. By attaching these DNA shells to small objects, Gang can encourage the pieces to come together on their own, as combinations of base pairs seek each other out, the way puzzle pieces floating in a dish might if they had a sequence of attachments that lined up in a specific order.

Extending the puzzle analogy, Gang has been able to put together two-dimensional structures. One of the many challenges facing him and others at Brookhaven, Harvard, Northwestern and a handful of other groups with similar research goals is figuring out how to generate three-dimensional structures.

Gang’s colleagues describe him as an innovator.

“The concepts he and a small number of other groups are pursuing represent an entirely new approach to constructing materials,” said Charles Black, a group leader in materials synthesis and characterization at the CFN. Gang is considered “an excellent scientist, making breakthrough discoveries while remaining careful in his work and sure of his scientific claims.”

Gang, who has several patents awarded with others pending, studies the basics of these self-assembly processes, hoping to understand more about how to build structures with more complex architecture.
He also takes requests from other scientists, who are looking to improve on existing products or who want to tap into his expertise to refine a product they already use.

He started his work with gold, but has now expanded to other classes of nanoparticles, including magnetic, catalytic, fluorescent and metallic.

Gang said he has helped improve various properties through self assembly. A few years ago, he said, he raised the light-emitting ability of a nanoparticle by a factor of five. That, he said, might prove useful in biodetection.

He also published results where he improved the ability of a detector to find the chirality, or spin, of particles, by a factor of 100.
Gang is developing research that will enable the structures he creates to transform to something else.

“A structure is the result of a particular interaction,” he said. “As soon as we change how the particles interact — they are not happy and are trying to find another configuration — they will change into something different.”

Gang said he benefits from working at the 7-year-old Center for Functional Nanomaterials, where he can not only work with a team of faculty fluent in the world of nanoscience, but where he can also collect additional information at the National Synchrotron Light Source and from electron microscopes.

Science, Gang said, often benefits by imitating nature. A plane, for example, isn’t a bird, although both can fly.

Gang believes his work is not at the early Leonardo DaVinci stage of flight, but is rather closer to the Wright Brothers, where he and other scientists can lift the plane off the ground, but can’t fly it yet.

Gang, who grew up in the western part of the Ukraine and then moved to Israel, now lives in Setauket with his wife, Alina, who works for a biodetection company in Medford. The couple’s 19-year-old daughter, Danielle is studying creative writing at SUNY Potsdam. They also have a 15-year-old son, Gabriel.

As for his work, Gang is excited about the prospects for contributing to science and society.

“We’re in a situation where many types of things become possible,” he said.

It starts with a question and a possible explanation. From there, the leader tests to see whether he or she was right. If the initial information suggests the original possibility was accurate, the leader runs several other tests to confirm the result.

Scientists and researchers follow that formula to crack nature’s code. They tend to get excited when, for example, they find a certain gene appears to be involved in a particular disease. Researchers can be as disappointed as little league ballplayers after losing a close game if they find no such connection.

Jesse Gillis, an assistant professor of computational genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, however, thinks many of those so-called negative results can be as constructive as finding positive ones. “Negative results are so valuable,” he said. Negative results help scientists understand all the available information and not just the usual suspects, especially in genetic disorders.

Often, tests for the role of key genes in diseases come up with some candidates almost every time, like P53, he said. P53 is a tumor suppressor gene, which means that, when it functions correctly, it prevents cells from developing into potentially deadly tumors. When other genes have some connection to a disease, they are often related to a gene like P53.

The interpretation of results is dominated by genes for which scientists already have considerable amounts of information. The interpretation of what is going on with numerous genes tends to be dominated by several important genes.

Gillis works in a field of computational biology in which researchers are looking for combinations of genes, RNA, and proteins that all could play a role in a disease. He studies a scientific field called “guilt by association,” in which combinations of mutations, signals, or defects might increase the likelihood of developing a complicated disorder, in which people with similar symptoms have a range of genetic differences.

He uses guilt by association to understand the combination of mutations which might increase the likelihood of developing a disorder like schizophrenia or autism.

Gillis hopes to be able to look closely into what these genes have in common to “be able to say when we have false positives.” In his opinion, attempts to give comprehensive lists of the genes causing complex disorders could produce false positives that could be as high as 50 percent. He says there is something of a specificity problem, where the overlaps among genes that might have a connection to schizophrenia are not specific enough.

Before he came to CSHL, Gillis conducted post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Paul Pavlidis, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia. Gillis impressed his former lab director. Gillis is “super-smart, serious and [a] skeptical scientist who is not afraid to question deep assumptions in our field,” Pavlidis offered.

Gillis said the notion of guilt by association is an older idea. Scaling that up to apply it to expressing a disease goes back to around the turn of the millennium, when scientists started applying computational principals to these data ranges.

Where Gillis hopes to make a difference is finding something meaningful to say based on the data, instead of echoing other findings.

Gillis, who grew up in Toronto, said he “always liked messy data.” He was not as excited by the typical experiment where scientists tested one hypothesis and the results either worked or they didn’t. He enjoyed studying data-driven discovery, where he could look at a combination of data that was diverse and potentially challenging to understand and interpret.

Gillis’s scientific curiosity is, in part, a product of his childhood environment. His father is a math professor, while his mother started her doctorate in developmental psychology by watching him play as a child.

Most of his American experiences have been on Long Island. He has been so busy setting up his lab — he arrived a year and a half ago — that he hasn’t had many opportunities to pursue his penchant for sailing.

Gillis hopes to have more data to work with in the coming years. “If I say genes are likely to have a property x or this set of genes is likely to have a property x, it matters how prevalent that property is,” he said. “If a gene is always important” then finding it has a role in a disease doesn’t “validate the reason it’s important in this context.”

The negative result might tell scientists more because “the gene not showing up is the more unusual finding.”

Their world stretches from the treetops of Madagascar to the rain forests of Brazil to the salmon feeding grounds of bears in Alaska.

They study a wide range of animals, at the same time that they dedicate their work to the survival of species with uncertain futures.

Russell Mittermeier, Carl Safina, and Patricia Wright not only share a connection to Stony Brook University and to conservation, but they are also three of six finalists for the biennial Indianapolis Prize, considered the top award for the world’s conservationists. The award, which is administered by the Indianapolis Zoo, considers conservation candidates from all over the world. The winner, who will receive the Eli Lilly Medal and a $250,000 prize, will be announced on May 13.

“I am very proud of these outstanding members of our faculty,” SBU President Stanley said through an emailed statement to the Times Beacon Record Newspapers.

The three finalists recently attended an Earth Day tweet-up at the Student Activity Center at Stony Brook, where they shared their views on the prize, on conservation, and on the Long Island ecosystem. It was the first-ever Tweet-Up for the University. Members of the school, including Stanley and representatives from the Indianapolis Zoo, attended the discussion.

“Having three of the six finalists from Stony Brook speaks to the institution’s tradition of academic excellence and commitment to field work that positively impacts genuine conservation,” Rob Shumaker, the vice president of Conservation & Life Sciences at the Indianapolis Zoo, said after the meeting.

On the positive side, the tweeting trio talked of a comeback for a bird of national symbolic importance that hasn’t nested on Long Island since Dwight Eisenhower was president.

“Here on Long Island, for the first time in 60 years, we have a nesting pair of bald eagles,” said Safina. The head of the Blue Ocean Institute, Safina has written six books on threats facing the world’s habitats.

One of the strongest pieces of advice each of the Stony Brook finalists offered is to see animals in their natural habitat.

“Once you get out there, you’re connected for life,” Mittermeier, a leading field biologist who is also the president of Conservation International, told a combination of about 200 people in attendance at the SAC and those gathered in a virtual crowd through Twitter.

“Visiting places is not a trivial part of the fight for wildlife conservation,” Safina echoed.

Indeed, in 2012, Stony Brook inaugurated a new research, education and conservation building on the boundary of Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar called NamanaBe Hall. Stanley attended the inauguration, along with dignitaries from Madagascar.

The university president agreed that the experience of seeing these animals in the wild brings a new perspective.

“Observing [creatures] in their natural habitat brings a completely new level of awareness and appreciation for them and it is an extraordinary experience,” Stanley said.

Wright, who has studied lemurs for over a quarter of a century, was recently featured in an Imax movie narrated by Morgan Freeman called “Island of Lemurs: Madagascar.” The film, which Wright has seen 16 times and includes footage of lemurs on that island, shows the interactions of lemur social groups. Back in her office after the tweet up, Wright shared a chart that tracks how one female lemur leader lost her role in a “hostile takeover,” only to assume the same position with another group.

Wright, who helped establish Ranomafana National Park in 1991, calls the lemurs “her family,” along with her daughter and her well-traveled graduate students who have been to Madagascar and Peru.

Mittermeier, meanwhile, discussed how conservation groups are looking to turn the 2016 Olympic spotlight for host city Rio de Janeiro on some of Brazil’s conservation efforts.

Conservation International is joining other groups to suggest that the mascot could either be the muriqui or the golden lion tamarin. The muriqui, which weighs between 10 and 20 pounds, is an endangered monkey that is found only in the Atlantic coast forests of Brazil. Mittermeier also is urging the Olympics to use the tamarin, a monkey with reddish brown hair around its head and face that is considered a conservation success story, as an image on gold medals.

While he won’t likely be making an appearance in Brazil, Stony Brook’s own mascot Wolfie prowled around the ballroom during the Earth Day Tweet-Up.

Stony Brook officials said they were pleased with their first-ever tweet up and are interested in hosting this type of event again. The talented trio said it would be an honor to win the prize and that it underscores the appreciation for the value of their work.

As for why conservation is important, Safina explained, “it’s about trying to be human without ruining the world.”

Wright said she felt she “couldn’t be a person if she let all these animals go extinct.”

Ivan Iossifov is using computer programs to try to understand the genetic piece of the autism puzzle. An assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Iossifov is comparing the genome of people with autism with the sequences from their unaffected siblings.

Iossifov explores areas of the genome where mutations might increase the risk of autism. He is searching for a “list of genes that, when you take it, can lead to autism directly or can increase the risk of a child being autistic,” he said. “Some genes are frequently mutated in autism.”

He can approach this mission by looking at “every nucleotide in each parent and each sibling,” he said. “We can zoom in on very particular genes.”

Historically, he said, genetic technology first allowed scientists to look for large-scale copy-number events, where a sequence of DNA might be repeated more frequently for one group of people than for another. As genetic sequencing has matured, however, he has been able to focus on nucleotide-level genetic variants, such as single base-pair substitutions.

“The new-generation sequencing technology becomes cheaper and faster amazingly quickly,” he said. “That does allow us to perform research that was unfeasible even five years ago.”

Iossifov said the research he’s conducting may help doctors and scientists understand some of the genetic components of autism. So far, his research shows that early genetic-based diagnosis is difficult. He estimates that he needs about ten times more genetic data in families before genetic-based diagnoses can become useful. While he said he is not an expert in autism, he said he strongly believes “that the earlier a child can be reliably diagnosed, the better.”

More broadly, Iossifov is interested in a large scope of neurodevelopment disorders as well as cancer. In the last few years, however, he’s focused considerable effort and attention on autism.
Autism, he explained, seems to require the kind of approach he has to research, looking at the big picture and narrowing that down to individual genes or even base pairs. So far, he has looked at the 1 percent of the nucleotides in the human genome that encode genes.

“We have been carefully examining each variant for its potential effect on the gene it belongs to,” he said. “We analyze thousands of families, focusing in on de novo variants,” variants present in a child and not in her parents.

Iossifov is now planning to extend his analysis over the complete genome. He is hoping to hire new staff before long, to help with data collection and analysis.

Iossifov is grateful for the backing of the Simons Foundation, which provided funding and supported the collection of many of the genetic samples he is studying. He hopes the foundation will continue to endorse efforts to scrutinize additional areas of the genome, even those that other scientists hadn’t previously considered, to find other regions where he might discover “interesting variants.”

Iossifov splits his time between Philadelphia, where his wife Ani Nenkova works in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Long Island. The couple have a four-year old son Pascal, whom they call “Paco.”
When he’s on Long Island, he enjoys visiting beaches. Iossifov said he speaks “one and a half” languages, although, at this point, he’s not sure which is the half. He grew up speaking Bulgarian, but his friends at home suggest he’s developed an American accent in his native tongue. “I apparently sound funny” speaking Bulgarian, he said.

Iossifov said his parents didn’t push him to do anything in particular, although he is following somewhat in the footsteps of his father, who is a retired chemist.

In terms of teaching their son about the world, Iossifov and Nenkova encourage him to understand that “he can go deeper,” in whatever he learns.

Iossifov is excited to continue working with autism. “Autism is a complex disorder and is highly prevalent. Any progress on autism would be great on many aspects.”

When it spreads, it becomes more difficult to treat. Understanding metastatic cancer presents significant challenges to doctors and scientists in part because the disease is different in the liver than it is in the lungs.

Lloyd Trotman, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has created a mouse model of prostate cancer that becomes metastatic. By exploring what happens to cells in different areas, Trotman hopes to get a better understanding of cancer as it spreads.

“New technology allows us to tag cells when they are at the metastatic site,” he said. He can look at “how they differ from where they started.”

When prostate cancer becomes metastatic, the cells “forget about their identity,” Trotman said. They become more like cells that are developing, which means they are not as dependent on male hormones for their survival. This change in their identity makes them difficult to treat with hormone therapy.

By developing these metastatic models of prostate cancer, Trotman has been able to do preclinical studies of drugs designed to treat the original disease and its metastatic form. He has worked with scientists from Cornell University, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

“We can ask if a drug specifically is beneficial against metastatic cancer and especially against the hormone-refractory kind,” he said.
Trotman’s research also explores how cancers that were in remission become active again. “Most [treatments] will not be curative,” he said. “Why? If it works, but then the disease comes back, what is driving the disease? What is it that the drug is doing wrong at the point that it was looking good? What limit does the drug need to push to be curative?”

With his model of the disease, he can track the changes in a living animal. He can see how the cancerous cells are glowing in areas including the liver, lymph nodes, lungs, and bone. “Our hope is that by making these things visible at a very primitive level, we can see it first, then harvest it, and read the sequencing,” he said.

Trotman’s approach has won him the admiration of other scientists. “For an early career scientist, his work stands out as particularly innovative,” said Scott Lowe, a cancer biologist and chairman of the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Lowe was deputy director of the cancer center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was involved in recruiting Trotman to join CSHL. “His research on an important cancer gene caught our attention,” Lowe said. He described Trotman as an “enthusiastic scientist who strives to address the most important questions in his field.”

Trotman explained that his goal isn’t just to understand how the genome works to cause cancer, but to figure out how to cure metastatic prostate disease. He wants to see where potentially effective drugs fail and to figure out what they should be doing differently. If he develops the kind of data he hopes to explore with the mouse, he would then argue that the same kind of analysis is necessary in humans, to make sure the model and the reality in humans are aligned.

While he’s focused on prostate cancer, Trotman said he would like to find a methodology that allows him to combat and understand cancer on a broader scale.

Born in the United States, Trotman moved to Switzerland when he was 2 years old. He attended high school and received his doctorate in Switzerland. He returned to New York to do his postdoctoral work at Sloan Kettering. He became a faculty member at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007. Trotman’s Swiss background enabled him to become fluent in English, German, French and Swedish.

A resident of Oyster Bay, Trotman lives with his wife Eva Frosch, who runs the gallery Frosch & Portmann in New York City, and their sons Liam, 8, and Finn, 5.

Trotman loves summers on Long Island, where he can surf on the south shore and head to the beaches on the North Shore.
Trotman said he hopes his mouse model of prostate cancer can help uncover how cancer progresses, becomes metastatic, and resists drug treatment.

“There are many theories about how diseases like cancer evolve,” he said. His model can “help bring [the research] down to a level where everybody can see it.”

Paul Bingham and Zuzana Zachar, a husband-and-wife team at Stony Brook University, have spent the better part of a decade exploring a way to disrupt cancer’s energy supply line.

They have developed a compound that takes advantage of the different way cancer cells produce energy. With the help of other scientists at Stony Brook, including James Marecek in the Chemistry Department, they created another form of lipoate, called CPI-613, that doesn’t foster cancer growth.

“It’s like a Trojan horse,” explained Zachar, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. “It has no catalytic ability,” which means that it looks like a key molecule for a cancer pathway in mitochondria, but doesn’t act like it.

By shutting down tumor cell mitochondria, the researchers are able to trigger several cell-death pathways selectively, explained Bingham, who is an associate professor in the same department. The scientists anticipate lower vulnerability to evolved resistance because the CPI-613 attacks two enzyme targets at the same time.

The Stony Brook team are in Phase II trials of this drug at Wake Forest University with patients who have leukemia and lymphoma.

“We saw a 38 percent response rate [among patients who were not responding to other therapies] in the first Phase I trial we completed” said Timothy Pardee, an assistant professor who conducted those trials and is performing a similar function in Phase II. While he believes the treatment has extended people’s lives, he cautioned that “it’s important to remember that these are very early results.”

The scientists have to generate significant evidence to be confident in their approach, both for basic science and for use with patients, Bingham said.

Even though the treatment has shown promise, it’s possible that cancers may respond to this approach the way they have to so many other treatments, by finding another way to avoid selective eradication. While the treatment the couple has worked on is designed to minimize this risk, they will only know whether they have been successful after extensive testing.

“Until we get more clinical experience, we can’t know that natural selection operating on cancer cells doesn’t have a diabolical trick we haven’t thought about,” Bingham said.

Robert Haltiwanger, the chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, said scientists had known since the 1930’s that the metabolism of cancer cells is different from that of normal cells. Bingham and Zachar have developed a compound that “seems to have an effect,” which means it has potential in a “wide variety of cancers.” In addition to contributing to cancer research, Bingham is also a “very popular lecturer,” said Haltiwanger.

Bingham and Zachar, who had done extensive work on the fruit fly Drosophila, began looking at cancer metabolism in the late 1990’s as a “side project.” That showed enough promise for them to transform it into a full-time pursuit.

Bingham grew up in the rural Midwest, attending high school in a small town in a farming area of central Illinois that produces corn and soybeans. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Zachar was born in what is now the Czech Republic. She moved to Ghana, West Africa when she was 10 and emigrated to the United States in 1968, settling near Chicago, Ill. She was at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Bingham was at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina when they met.

“We didn’t grow up as clinical researchers,” Bingham said. “We came up as basic, fundamental” scientists who were “drawn later in our careers into clinical work. When I was told we were going to work with people, my first reaction was anxiety for fear of doing harm.”

The researchers, who are residents of South Setauket and have lived on Long Island for 32 years, love the hiking trails.

They expressed satisfaction at the prospect of contributing to an effort that might aid in cancer treatment. Bingham said the research has particular meaning for him.

His mother, Doris Rorhman Bingham, died of cancer when he was 16. “Had she lived another 10 or 20 years, my life would have been completely different,” he said. “I still think of her almost every day.”

Zachar said the couple feel fortunate to be able to do this kind of work., “Saving other families from what [Bingham’s] family went through would be supremely fulfilling,” she said.

The human body not only defends itself against bacteria and viruses, but it also has a system to suppress or prevent tumors. Cancers, however, weaken this defense.

Sumita Bhaduri-McIntosh, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Stony Brook University, has recently discovered a step cells take to weaken the cell’s defenses and become cancerous.

Using the Epstein-Barr virus, which causes mononucleosis and which more than 90 percent of people carry, Bhaduri-McIntosh has been able to turn healthy cells into those that divide and grow uncontrollably.

“If we take B cells (a part of the immune system) from healthy individuals and isolate those cells, we can infect them with EBV in the lab, where the virus expresses its own cancer,” she said. “This allows us to systematically examine a variety of cellular events, from minute one until we have these proliferating cells.”

Human cells have a defense called DNA damage response. This system is a set of mechanisms operating in every dividing cell that finds damage or defects in the genetic code and slows down or pauses the process of copying DNA and promotes repair of the damaged code, Bhaduri-McIntosh explained.

The virus she inserted triggered the activation and increased production of the cellular protein STAT3. Scientists knew this protein could drive gene expression and was an important ingredient in many human cancers. What they didn’t know, however, was that it also muted DNA damage response.

The results of these experiments were recently published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

This finding “reveals a novel mechanism for development of cancer,” said Ayman El-Guindy, an assistant professor in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Yale School of Medicine, where Bhaduri-McIntosh was a postdoctoral fellow and an assistant professor. Disruption of these pathways can “lead to accumulation of mutations in our genome that can ultimately cause cancer.”

El-Guindy suggested the kind of work Bhaduri-McIntosh is doing, while filled with the potential to help people, faces financial obstacles.

“While it is unfortunate that basic research is increasingly underfunded and has suffered multiple budget cuts in recent years, Dr. Bhaduri-Mcintosh’s discovery highlights the importance of basic research to develop new remedies against cancer,” El-Guindy said.

While a majority of people have the EBV, Bhaduri-McIntosh reassured people that it is extremely rare for it to become cancerous, especially in North America.

“There are EBV-related cancers that occur and are quite prevalent in other parts of the world,” including endemic Burkitt lymphoma in equatorial Africa, nasopharyngeal cell carcinoma in Southeast Asia and AIDS lymphomas.

Cancers caused by EBV can occur in as many as one in five solid-organ transplant recipients, triggered by the immunity-suppressing drugs that keep the recipient from rejecting the new organ.

A native of India, Bhaduri-McIntosh has a medical degree and a Ph.D. She sees patients as an attending physician at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, although she spends most of her time doing research.

“When I was going through medical school in India, infectious disease is an even bigger scourge than in the western world,” she said. “You see it all around you, with tuberculosis, leprosy and parasitic diseases.” Studying infectious disease was “a very natural connection.”

Becoming an infectious disease expert “fed the detective urge,” she said, as symptoms don’t necessarily point to a specific diagnosis.

In one case when she was at Yale, she worked with a 10-year-old boy with multiorgan failure, while his bone marrow was making blood cells that were being destroyed. In an investigation of family members, she helped discover that some of them had a mutation.

The boy had a bone marrow transplant and, from the last she heard, “is doing rather well.”

Bhaduri-McIntosh credits her success to her parents in India and to her Wading River-based family. She and her husband, Michael McIntosh, the science adviser to the Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory on Plum Island, have a 14-year-old son, Rohin, and a 12-year-old daughter, Uma. She called the three of them “absolutely, veritable rocks.” She is also grateful for the support of the Pediatrics and Molecular Genetics departments.

When she’s not in the lab or helping patients, Bhaduri-McIntosh likes to sing. She was trained in Indian classical music. Nowadays, she sings Indian contemporary, as well as Western, music.

As for her career, working with patients and in research makes her better in both arenas, she said.

They know it works, but they’re not exactly sure how. They mix ingredients with something that helps make everything happen and, like a magician, wave their wand and get the rabbit, or in this case, the clean hydrogen, they were trying to produce. Except that, in their world, nature is the one whose slight of hand remains a mystery.

That’s where Argentinian-born Dario Stacchiola and his Brookhaven National Laboratory team of two postdoctoral researchers and one graduate student come in. An associate chemist, Stacchiola is trying to figure out the small steps in between the beginning of a reaction and the creation of this form of hydrogen, which is suitable for fuel cells in cars and industrial chemical processing.

While Stacchiola recognizes the possibility of a commercial use of his analysis down the road, he emphasizes that he is on a basic scientific mission. “Our end goal is not to get a commercial catalyst,” he said. “We are a step removed from that transition. We are really trying to look at the atomic level.”

Stacchiola’s curiosity about catalysts has earned him the admiration of his colleagues and coworkers. He is “well-respected not only across the lab, but also in our field,” said Ashleigh Baber, a postdoctoral researcher who has worked in his lab for three years.

His “knowledge of catalysis, coupled with his strength in experimental physical chemistry give him a unique perspective on how to approach and tackle important issues and holes in the field.”
Indeed, one of those many holes is understanding the intermediate reactions in the water-gas shift reaction, which is used to purify hydrogen and remove carbon monoxide.

“There are at least four different mechanisms proposed” for that reaction, Stacchiola said, with each one involving between five and 10 steps. His experiments helped to “narrow it down to two probable mechanisms.”

One of the big problems for scientists looking for these intermediate steps is that these reactions are easiest to see under cold, high-vacuum conditions, where the scientists don’t have to worry about interactions between the reactions they’re testing and atoms in the air. In those conditions, some of the intermediate chemicals generated during the reaction don’t form.

Using the latest technology, including near-ambient X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, near-ambient pressure infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy, density functional theory computational analysis and scanning tunneling microscope, they were able to look behind the curtain in some of these steps at more everyday temperatures and pressures.

“We are now starting to see processes happen that we couldn’t see at lower pressures,” he said. He sees the stabilization of weak intermediates at the interface of oxide and metal nanoparticles in catalysts.

Scientists had predicted that the reactions Stacchiola studies would involve a carboxyl group, which is present in most organic acids and is made up of carbon, two oxygen atoms and hydrogen. These groups hadn’t been found on metal or oxide surfaces in this process. His research detected a product derived from the carboxyl group that was attached to the metal oxide interface of nanoparticles.

Scientists had predicted the likelihood of this carboxyl group for about a decade. The discovery of this combination of atoms was the closest thing to a “Eureka” moment he has had, Stacchiola said.

At conferences, Stacchiola has met with people who are trying to improve the efficiency of these reactions and who are looking to optimize the perimeter of oxide-metal interfaces.

Baber explained that “even small increases in catalytic efficiency extrapolate to huge savings in large-scale industrial processes.”
A resident of South Setauket, Stacchiola lives with his wife, Zulema Cabail, who does research and teaches microbiology at Stony Brook, and their 11-year-old daughter, Sofia, whose name, he said, is easy to reproduce in any language, which is helpful for a couple from Argentina who have lived in South America, Europe and North America.

As for his work, Stacchiola said he is driven by some of the same curiosities he had as a child, where he needed to understand how things worked. “I never felt very comfortable with black boxes,” he said.