Don’t tell Stephen O’Rahilly that weight is just a matter of will power. He’s already proved you wrong. |
Stephen O'Rahilly sits deep in the shadows near the rear of the restaurant, luxuriating in a moment of hard-earned solitude. Gripping a pint of lager in one hand, a half-smoked stogie in the other, he is dressed for the evening as he was for the morning--in a tie of indifferent weave. The Maharajah is one of the best Indian restaurants in town, but O'Rahilly does not look pleased. "For decent food of any kind one really needs to go to London," he mutters in a mild Irish brogue as he peruses the menu. "In Cambridge, it's hard to find an edible loaf of bread." Snuffing out his cigar, he waves over a waiter and orders another beer and enough curry to feed several maharajahs. O'Rahilly takes his food seriously, and it shows. A tennis champion in his youth, at 42 he has the look of a man whose relationship with sports is confined to that of spectator. "One thing I hated about America was having people come for dinner, drink one glass of wine, and leave at nine o'clock, saying that they had to jog in the morning," he says.
Clearly, O’Rahilly is made of sterner stuff. No number of Saturday night pints and cigars preclude his spending Sunday mornings at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, a cavernous complex on the city’s edge with all the charm of a parking garage. There the physician and researcher makes discoveries that are rocking long-held beliefs about why people get fat. Using a combination of old-fashioned clinical observation and modern biochemical analysis, he has shown that a person’s appetite and their eating behavior can be linked to specific genes—and that even a tiny defect such as the absence of a single nucleic acid in a sequence of DNA can lead to runaway weight gain. The research has not only encouraged new treatment ideas, but challenged long held notions that being fat, or not, is a matter of free will.
“I’ve always considered it distinctly unlikely that there are not genes that effect behavior,” says O’Rahilly, Professor of Metabolic Medicine at Cambridge University, as he eats a mouthful of nan, slippery with butter. “This doesn’t mean that every behavior is genetic: for example, that one has a love affair because one is genetically determined to do so. But the idea that a fundamental human behavior like eating is not to some degree genetic, to my mind, is absurd.” That has been a tough chew for some scientists, who argue that eating behavior is too complex to reduce to genetics. “Before O’Rahilly began publishing his findings, a lot of scientists considered humans exempt from biology,” says Rudolph Leibel, head of the division of molecular genetics at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. “Now we can no longer get around the presence of genes as a regulator of body weight.”
Physicians must also take note of the fact that O’Rahilly made these major discoveries by simply being a good old-fashioned doctor who cared about his patients and listened carefully to them.
Medical sleuthing, O’Rahilly says, works best by studying patients who seem to defy all sorts of standard diagnoses: “I study the experiments of nature to illuminate the normal.” Earlier this morning, for example, he and his scruffy band of post-doctoral and clinical fellows spent part of their weekly meeting puzzling over the mystery of a tragic case: an extended family of Arabian descent afflicted with obesity so severe that it has killed several members. The family has no apparent genetic defects, which only seems to galvanize O’Rahilly. “We haven’t found the problem yet,” he said. “But believe me, we will.”
His ambition is fueled not only by a driving scientific curiosity but also a bristling social consciousness. “I had a woman in her twenties in my clinic yesterday who weighed 420 pounds,” he says. “The girl’s life was a ruin, an utter hell. She never left her house, and she felt like a leper. She’ll undoubtedly develop obesity-associated diseases like diabetes and arthritis. Like so many of the people I see, she has and is going to continue to have a terrible quality of life. Yet in addition to her physical ailments, she has to endure the jibes of others who treat her condition as a joke.”
What O’Rahilly finds particularly irksome about public attitudes, and what he hopes his research will overturn, is our peculiar habit of blaming the victims of these ills for their misfortune. “I’m sometimes criticized by so-called liberals who tell me that I shouldn’t be working to validate these nasty people whose disgusting behavior has made them so sick,” he goes on. “People who are not victims of these disorders have claimed the moral high ground. They believe themselves to be virtuous. But the truth is, they’re just lucky.”
“The idea that a fundamental human behavior like eating is not to
some degree genetic is absurd.”
O’Rahilly’s impatience with moral arrogance runs deep. He grew up in a working class suburb of Dublin. His mother worked from age 14. His father, a pharmacist, dismissed his job as “a glorified clerk selling lipstick to housewives.” In school, O’Rahilly studied Latin, English literature and little else under the cheerful tutelage of the good De La Salle Brothers. “Brother Paddy was the worst biology teacher imaginable,” he says. Still, O’Rahilly managed to cram in enough on his own to graduate first in Ireland in chemistry, and enter medical school at the University College Dublin.
There, at 17, an age when many teens are bullied by hormones, he decided to master them. “Science is about revealing beauty, and I thought that it was somehow beautiful that chemicals—hormones—could act like messages in the human body,” says O’Rahilly. “Biomedical science has a pragmatic outcome, of course, but it’s the beauty part that I’m after. It’s the catch in your heart, equivalent to the moment you suddenly realize that the Marriage of Figaro is wonderful. A Mozart aria is perfect because no one else but Mozart could have done it in the way he did it. And that’s what one hopes to do in science, do something in a unique way that is, in some sense, beautiful.”
At Dublin, he was inspired by Professor Ivo Drury, a medical Johnny Appleseed who had set up diabetes clinics all over Ireland. “He was an incredibly generous man,” O’Rahilly recalls. “Utterly admirable. His great pain was that he hadn’t been able to do more science.” Determined not to suffer a similar disappointment, O’Rahilly signed at Oxford Univeristy to do research in diabetes inheritance patterns. Five years later, in 1989, he took a position at Harvard Medical School where he studied insulin resistance, a common condition among diabetics that keeps the body from responding fully to the hormone. He began searching for genetic forces that might unbalance the body’s exquisitely tuned glucose delivery system.
THE “FAT” GENE MYSTERY: Both these mice carry a gene defect that prevents production of leptin, a hormone that is made in fat cells and acts in the brain’s hypothalamus to regulate appetite. Without leptin, mice eat voraciously and balloon in weight (left). Daily doses of leptin can slim down the huge mice (right). But is there a human equivalent of this gene? Stephen O’Rahilly found out. |
When he returned to Cambridge two years later, O’Rahilly began developing a tight network of physicians who send send him patients with baffling metabolic syndromes. “O’Rahilly is the only scientist in Europe really looking for unusual patients,” says endocrinologist Jeffrey Flyer, a former colleague at Harvard. Ironically, one of O’Rahilly’s most significant patients simply waltzed into his weekly endocrine clinic. The 42-year-old woman had struggled throughout her life with health problems doctors blamed on her weight. O’Rahilly suspected otherwise. “He never prejudges patients,” says his Addenbrookes colleague, endocrinologist Sadaf Farooqi. “He listens to them.”
Full text of this article appears in Discover magazine. 
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop established the Shape Up America! Web site to broadcast information about obesity as a U.S. health issue and offer lifestyle-change advice: www.shapeup.org.
The North American Association for the Study of Obesity Web site (www.naaso.org) is an authoritative, scientific on-line resource about obesity.
The International Association for the Study of Obesity Web site (www.iaso.org) offers news and links to groups worldwide.
