HE A LT H , W EL L N ES S & B E AUTY
Nitric Oxide, COVID-19, and the Breath of Life An Interview with Kat Mische Elle
he longer I live, the more obvious it becomes that my success had very little to do with me but rather a divine power that steered me in the right direction and guided me along the way. No one could ever imagine or orchestrate my life’s journey and hardships into what my life is today, not even I. I grew up in a loving family, but my parents divorced when I was 8 years old. My older brother and I attended six different schools from elementary to middle school. My dad had a car accident in 1984 leaving him paralyzed from the mid-back down. My brother and I helped take care of our dad for several years, including working jobs at 11 and 12 years old to help pay bills. When our dad moved to take a new job in a new town, my brother and I moved in with our uncle and stayed there for a couple of years. When I was 15 and my brother was 17, we moved into our own apartment to finish high school. After one year, my brother graduated high school and moved out. I kept the apartment and lived by myself for the last 2 years of high school. I was the only kid in school who could sign his own report card. As a result, I developed a strong sense of independence and responsibility very early on. I made good grades in high school despite working two jobs after school and on weekends to pay my bills and I graduated fourth in my high school class.
After graduation from UT, I spent 3 years in the industry working as a chemist and quickly realized this was not for me. There was no independent thinking, and my job was monotonous and mundane. I went through a divorce after just one year of marriage during this time. I quit my job as a chemist and spent a year or two trying to decide what to do with my life. I was financially, spiritually, and emotionally broke, divorced, and had no real sense of direction. In 2000, I enrolled at LSU School of Medicine in their Ph.D.program in Molecular and Cellular Physiology. It was there that I was introduced to the science of nitric oxide. Two years earlier in 1998, a Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to three U.S. scientists for their discovery of nitric oxide. I had a chance to meet one of the Nobel Prize winners and have a conversation. It then became clear to me that this was an important area of research and still so much to learn. This was really the turning point in my life. I had a new passion for science, creativity, and innovation and I had a path forward with meaning.
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I N S P I RE D S U CC E SS MAGAZINE | SP RING/ SUMME R 2022
Photo courtesy of Bridget Daehler
It wasn’t until after high school that I had an idea of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be when I grew up. Before then, I never really gave it much thought. I was accepted into the University of Texas at Austin College of Natural Science pursuing a degree in Biochemistry out of high school. I’ve always had an interest in science and medicine, but this really became apparent to me when I was a student at UT Austin. I had an opportunity to do undergraduate research in biochemistry. This was a time when protein overexpression in bacteria was revolutionizing science and medicine. We could overexpress specific proteins in bacteria, then isolate the protein from the bacteria and then study its activity and function. This provided science a strategy to gain a better understanding of what may go wrong in many diseases by understanding specific proteins’ structure and function.
