Doug Melton Born: September 26, 1953 Mother: Betty Melton, court reporter Father: A. Melton, grocery store managerPh.D. thesis: Gene injections into amphibian oocytes
Sitting in Doug Melton's Harvard University office on a spring day, I look at the faces of his children in photographs on the desk. Sam is 14 years old now, with short hair and a slightly awkward smile; Emma has long, dark hair and serious eyes. A college freshman, Emma once wrote in an essay that she wants to become an embryologist like her father. "I am also interested in becoming a member of Congress and petitioning for a cure that way," she wrote. Her father says, "I just hope she gets the chance."
Inside Sam and Emma is an immune system that has destroyed cells called islets that are responsible for producing insulin in the pancreas. Insulin is an enzyme that helps transport sugars from the blood into cells for use as fuel. Without it, sugars gum up in the blood vessels as sugar does in a gas tank, causing an untreated diabetic to go into shock and die. Most diabetics today are saved by frequent shots of synthetic insulin, but the balance between blood sugar and injected insulin is a crude calculation. Diabetics receive either too much or too little insulin each day, which causes damage to organs and muscles. For Melton's children, this imbalance is most likely an early death sentence, unless, of course, their father can discover a stem cell fix for pancreatic cells in diabetics that are inexplicably attacked by the body's immune system.
Melton's Prometheus-like resolve to give the embryological equivalent of fire to his children is evident from the floor plan of his office. Unlike the offices of most senior science professors here and at other elite institutions, which can resemble those of the world headquarters of a corporation, Melton's digs are nondescript. As I sit with him at a small table near his desk, it's clear where he would rather be—in his adjacent personal lab, also unusual for a superstar scientist. "I don't want to waste any time," he says.
Melton's determination and humble earnestness are immediately clear. With undergraduate degrees in both biology and philosophy and a Ph.D. in molecular biology, he seems to love nothing more than a passionate, long-winded argument.
