Pritzker News
Renowned researcher talks about her work, time at Pritzker BY ELIZABETH GARDNER
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PHOTO BY BRUCE POWELL
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hen Clara Bloomfield, MD’68, was just a girl playing pretend with her friends, she quickly discovered that she preferred giving shots to receiving them. That spark led Bloomfield on a path to be a physicianscientist, combining her interest in medicine and academics to become one of the world’s leading leukemia and lymphoma researchers. During a recent visit to the University of Chicago to give the keynote address at a leukemia symposium, Bloomfield spoke with Medicine on the Midway about her work, her inspiration and her time at our medical school. Bloomfield comes from a family of academics: Her father was an economist, and her mother was an English and biology teacher who later became a lawyer. The bar was always set high. When she announced that she wanted to become a nurse, her mother suggested she become a doctor. Bloomfield did just that — and more. Through her research and dogged advocacy, older leukemia patients are now treated and often cured, instead of automatically consigned to palliative care. She was one of the first to study how different types of cancer cells respond to treatment, helping lay the groundwork for personalized medicine. Bloomfield was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 for her work in changing the way the World Health Organization classifies cancers of
Clara Bloomfield, MD’68, tells young female medical students, “I always sit in the front row.”
the blood, from a morphological basis to a genetic one. And Bloomfield’s research showed the existence of the Philadelphia chromosome in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. That discovery built on the work of another distinguished researcher, the University of Chicago’s Janet Rowley, who first described the Philadelphia chromosome and identified it as a distinctive marker for chronic myelogenous leukemia. (Rowley also introduced Bloomfield to the man who would later become her husband, molecular geneticist Albert de la Chapelle, MD, PhD.) Bloomfield, now Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State University, visited her alma mater in April to speak at the “Molecular and Translational Breakthroughs in Leukemia Research” symposium, held at the Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery. She spoke about clinical use of molecular markers in curing acute myeloid leukemia. During her chat with Medicine on the Midway, Bloomfield discussed her research and her penchant for sitting in the front row.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION
What led to your interest in leukemia and lymphoma? I’ve always been interested in tackling problems that people were not successful tackling. When I was a child, any little children who got acute lymphoblastic leukemia would die. To see someone healthy and then die — that was shocking to me as a child. I thought it would be cool to do something about that. Then, when I was doing a fellowship at the University of Minnesota, I analyzed 10 years’ worth of data on patients with acute myeloid leukemia, and found that the longest survivor was a teenager who lasted 33 months. Here was something for me to do. I was going to cure leukemia. What do you remember most vividly about your time at the University of Chicago? There were extremely smart people here — both students and faculty — and we were a small class so you could really get to know the faculty. It was an exciting environment. The interns and residents who taught me, and then the ones I taught later, all made it an incredibly positive experience. Also, the curriculum was extremely academic, which many of the medical schools at the time were not. It was part of biological sciences. My biochemistry class wasn’t biochemistry for doctors, but for biochemistry students. . . What advice do you have for young women entering medicine? I always sit in the front row because I can’t see otherwise, and I want to see and hear every word. . . I recommend that students challenge everything they’re taught. And for women, don’t let others tell you what to do. You can’t have people saying you can’t sit in the front row.