Dame Julia Polak obituary AN AMAZING LIFE-STORY
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/14/dame-julia-polak
The scientist Dame Julia Polak, who has died aged 75, was a leading figure in the field of histochemistry, the study of chemical components in cells and tissue. After receiving a heart and lung transplant in her mid-50s, she embarked on a remarkable second career developing laboratory organs for transplantation.
As a histochemist, Julia pioneered the use of a technique known as immunohistochemistry to make peptides – amino acid compounds – visible under a microscope. It is now routinely used in labs all over the world. She was able to show that peptides were located within nerves; a highly original finding. She further demonstrated that these peptides were actually present in the little granules that the nerves release when they are activated and by which they control other tissues. This meant that nerves talk to each other by means of peptides. While she first found this in the gut, bladder, lung and heart, she later showed it was also true of the brain itself. These were fundamental discoveries that contributed enormously to our current understanding of how the body's hormones and nerves work together – and how the brain works...
One of Julia's scientific collaborators was the surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, who sent her samples of lung tissue from his transplant patients. Julia herself had respiratory difficulties as a young child, which steadily worsened with age. By the age of 56 her illness was so serious that she could no longer climb the stairs and she was finally diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. Yacoub persuaded Julia that her only chance of survival was to have a heart and lung transplant, a very high-risk procedure at the time. He performed the operation in 1995, and after a year spent recovering she made a remarkable return to her lab, where she was determined to take on a new and far bigger scientific challenge.
Julia knew that she had been lucky to find a matching donor, with lungs that could fit in her slight frame. She was also aware that others had died waiting for transplants, and she made it her mission to find a solution. A chance encounter with Larry Hench, a material scientist at Imperial, introduced her to the field of tissue engineering – the idea of growing new organs in a laboratory – and this set her on a quest to create artificial lungs. Julia quickly recognised that such a huge scientific challenge could not be solved by any one scientist, or even one specific discipline, so in 1998 she and Hench set up the centre for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine at Imperial, based at Chelsea and Westminster hospital...
AN AMAZING STORY, AN AMAZING WOMAN...SHOWS WHY THE UK IS LEADING THE US IN MEDICINE RESEARCH...
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