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FACES OF PUBLIC HEALTH |
The author, a frequent contributor to Environmental Health Perspectives, is a freelance science writer based in Portland, Ore.
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Valerie J. Brown (e-mail: vjane{at}teleport.com; Web site: http://www.nasw.org/users/aretha).
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When Dr Kenneth Olden steps down this year from his position as director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program, he will leave institutions far different from the ones with which he started. He has transformed both of these components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from relatively obscure, basic science-oriented organizations into diversified sources not only of basic science but also of an interdisciplinary research agenda, community involvement, and international outreach in environmental health. In his 12 years at the helm, Olden has negotiated the often politically fraught national health infrastructure with the grace and agility of a fencer, pushing his vision not by force but by inspiring and enlisting the support of researchers, patient advocacy groups, and politicians. Although leaving the directorship, he will continue as an NIEHS investigator and has no intention of leaving public service. In fact, his name is in the ring as the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a job he makes no bones about wanting.
The expansion and diversification of NIEHS were largely attributable to a threefold increase in funding during Olden’s tenure. "He has brought about the effective integration of basic research, population-based research, and community outreach and education," as well as new initiatives in toxicogenomics, proteomics, and integrated systems biology, says Raymond Novak, director of the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at Wayne State University, whose Center in Molecular and Cellular Toxicology with Human Applications is funded by NIEHS.
Olden has also expanded the scope of the NIEHS journal Environmental Health Perspectives beyond its role as a peer-reviewed journal. Under Olden, Environmental Health Perspectives has become "much more of a people-oriented journal" that disseminates information "to a much broader audience," says Tom Goehl, its editor-in-chief. Environmental Health Perspectives now delivers free print copies to developing countries; 40 000 copies are distributed in China, where, Goehl says, they "become rabbit-eared, they’re used so much." A Spanish-language edition will be available soon, and Environmental Health Perspectives is now an open-access online journal.
Much of Olden’s success rests on his ability to bring the best out of those who work for him and to build a constituency outside the agency. He listens to everybody, from citizens in the Rust Belt who are worried about chemicals in their water supply to intra- and extramural scientists investigating the arcana of endocrine disruption. "He listens to ideas," says Goehl. "He doesn’t shut down when a new idea is produced, he asks how we can get that done."
Olden is the first African American to head a division of the NIH. He says his early life is the source of much of his approach to and his success at administration. In the small southern town of Parrottsville, Tenn, it was poverty as much as race that limited both Black and White residents’ lives. But, Olden says, "Most of the qualities that have made me a success are the direct consequence of growing up where I grew up. The things that really count for leadership I learned as a kid and I didn’t forget them."
When Olden became head of NIEHS in 1991, he immediately started a series of brown bag lunches with scientists and staff. He also began conducting town meetings with everyday citizens around the country and built relationships with patient advocacy groups such as the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition. Elizabeth Sword, the coalition’s executive director, says, "Early on, he had made a commitment to raising children’s environmental health on the radar screen and putting some muscle and research dollars behind it." Theo Colborn, a professor in the Zoology Department at the University of Florida at Gainesville and coauthor of Our Stolen Future, a popular-press book on endocrine disruption, says that—unlike many leaders of federal agencies—Olden "always wanted to know what I thought about things."
Olden remembers the epiphany that sent him down the road to scientific research. It hit him while he was a senior at Knoxville College. As a participant in an interuniversity research program at the University of Tennessee on the other side of town, he visited a laboratory for the first time. "I was thrilled by research," he says. "I am now 65 years old, and that was the best decision I’ve ever made."
He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Knoxville College, a master’s in genetics at the University of Michigan, and a doctorate in cell biology and biochemistry at Temple University (with research conducted in absentia at the University of Rochester). He did postdoctoral work and instructed at the Harvard Medical School (while running a dormitory at Radcliffe College with his wife for 4 years) before conducting research at the National Cancer Institute. From 1982 to 1991, he worked at Howard University in several roles, ultimately as director of the Howard University Cancer Center. In 1991, Olden moved to the directorship of NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program, with a concurrent scientific post as chief of the Metastasis Section of the NIEHS Environmental Carcinogenesis Program.
Olden has maintained his research interests throughout his administrative career. Among his many publications are a 1978 paper on glycoproteins in Cell that has become one of the 100 most-cited scientific research reports1 and a 1985 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that reversed the 15-year conventional wisdom that secretory proteins are transported via a "conveyor belt."2
Olden’s early cancer research led him to study the role of glycoproteins in cancer. Working with Ken Yamada and others at the National Cancer Institute, Olden became fascinated with fibronectin, a glycoprotein that promotes the attachment of cells to the extracellular matrix. Because fibronectin disappears from cancer cells, which then metastasize, fibronectin might hold the key to metastasis prevention, thus saving patients’ lives. The team got as far as preventing metastasis in mice but was unable to do the same thing in humans.3
"We now know the protein is so big it spans the bilayer," he says. "The tail part is inside [the cell], and when you add something outside, a signal is transferred through the molecule into the tail, and it activates a lot of things inside the cell." This trans-membrane signaling is the focus of his current research, which also includes further investigation into the anticancer potential of swainsonine, an alkaloid (the "loco" component of locoweed) known to be an inhibitor of metastasis and tumor growth.4,5 "I’m excited about getting back in the lab," he says, "and I hold out hope that [blocking signals critical to cancer metastasis] is going to be done some day."
Olden entered college in the late 1950s, before the civil rights movement and affirmative action. "I’ve not had African American mentoring," Olden says. "There were so few African Americans in science when I came through." As a student, Olden himself did not view his African American professors as role models, and it was not until he entered the laboratory at the University of Tennessee that he saw university research as an attractive career. But because he had excellent mentoring throughout his career, he has long made a point of mentoring students of all races and backgrounds, from high schoolers to postdocs.
"He has been a patron, a godfather—he’s been wonderful," says Freeman Hrabowski, an African American mathematician and president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Charles Wells, director of Environmental Justice/Health Disparities and Public Health Activities at NIEHS, says of Olden, "He’s one of the few institute directors that would take his lunch period to talk to postdocs and to young people about his career as a scientist. I’ve seen him go without lunch to mentor not just African Americans but any young people that seek his advice."
In 2000, Olden’s name was suggested as the Bush Administration’s new director of the Environmental Protection Agency. He didn’t survive the cut, but the post may yet be in Olden’s future, according to former Republican Representative John Porter of Illinois. Olden testified before Porter on numerous occasions when the latter was chair of the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies.
"There’s always the possibility, especially if the president were to be reelected," Porter says. "There’s often a large changeover and I think Olden would be high on the list." Porter adds that Olden is "extremely able, very forthcoming, and an excellent director in all respects." Olden is unabashedly enthusiastic about the job, saying the Environmental Protection Agency would benefit from having a scientist at the top. "I’d love to have it," he says. "I can interpret the science correctly and not go beyond what it says and stretch it."
A few years ago at a NIEHS center directors’ meeting, the directors gave Olden a "Fencing for Funds" award that recognized his expansion of the NIEHS budget, unaware until the day of the award ceremony that Olden had actually fenced in college. Novak, who helped organize the meeting, says that even Olden’s body language while delivering a speech brings fencing to mind, and that "knowing when to jab and when to duck may be the underlying basis for his ability" to dance through the often cooperative but sometimes competing interests that make up the environmental health community.
The "Fencing for Funding" award is only one of many honors Olden has received; they include election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and to the Academy of Toxicological Sciences. "Whatever he does," says Bernard Goldstein, dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, "we hope that he will remain a spokesperson for the environment and for a public health and scientific approach to environmental protection. We’re going to miss him, there’s no question about it."
Accepted for publication June 4, 2004.
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2. Yeo K-T, Parent JB, Yeo T-K, Olden K. Variability in transport rates of secretory glycoproteins through the endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi in human hepatoma cells. J Biol Chem. 1985;260(13):7896–7902.
3. Humphries MJ, Olden K, Yamada KM. A synthetic peptide from fibronectin inhibits metastasis in a murine melanoma model. Science. 1986;233:467–470.
4. Humphries MJ, Matsumoto K, White SL, Olden K. Oligosaccharide modification by swainsonine treatment inhibits lung colonization by B16-F10 melanoma cells. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1986:83:1752–1756.
5. Humphries MJ, Matsumoto K, White SL, Olden K. Inhibition of experimental metastasis by castanospermine in mice: blockage of two distinct stages of tumor colonization by oligosaccharide processing inhibitors. Cancer Res. 1986;46(10):5215–5222.
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