The long and winding road

Fatty acids play important roles in health and disease. Scientists used to think cells just kind of passively absorbed those fatty acids, but in the early 1990s, Nada A. Abumrad, Ph.D., helped change all that.

She proposed that cells must use receptor proteins to import fatty acids. At the time, it was a very controversial idea, and it’s almost certainly an idea she never would have come up with if her parents hadn’t been pushy.

“I didn’t want to go into science, actually,” Abumrad explains. “I wanted to be a writer, a journalist, but my parents kept pushing me towards medicine.”

Abumrad, now the Dr. Robert C. Atkins Professor of Medicine and Obesity Research, decided to split the difference. She wasn’t interested in becoming a doctor, but to appease her parents, she studied biology in college while still taking some literature courses “on the side.” Eventually, she dropped literature and stuck with biology, not that her mother was completely happy.

Abumrad’s mother was a math teacher. She had five children, so eventually she stopped working to take care of the family. Abumrad’s father did various jobs when she was growing up in Beirut. He worked for an airline and later represented a casino. So although neither of her parents had a real background in science, they certainly wanted their daughter to go in that direction.

“They would just keep insisting and wear you out,” Abumrad recalls. “Even though I went into science and enjoyed it and did pretty well, until about five or six years ago, my mother still would tell me I should go back to school and get a medical degree. She just thought medicine was more secure in the long term.”

Abumrad earned degrees in natural science and nutrition from the Faculte Des Sciences and the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Then she got married and came to the United States with her husband, who was doing a residency in surgery at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University (SUNY) in Syracuse. She worked in a lab for about a year before deciding to pursue her doctorate.

As it happened, she also had a baby, so she worked toward the degree on a part-time basis for about two years before finally going back full time and completing her doctorate in pharmacology.

“That whole period was extremely, extremely busy,” she says. “I would take care of my son, Jad, during the day and then spend half of the night getting my work done. Luckily, I had a wonderful neighbor who was super helpful in taking care of the baby when I got overwhelmed.”

Soon Jad was in day care, and Abumrad was working full-time.

“For the longest time, I felt guilty about that,” she recalls. “But I think, looking back, it was a great thing for both of us. I think he gained a lot of confidence and independence.”

Jad grew up to make his mother very proud. He works in New York for National Public Radio and produces the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning program Radio Lab.

“I’m very proud of him, and I just love the fact that he’s working in journalism, a profession that I also love,” she says.

After completing her doctorate, Abumrad went to work as a research associate in the Department of Cell Biology at Syracuse University, but not long after taking that job, her young family was off to Nashville, Tenn., where she began a postdoctoral fellowship in Vanderbilt’s physiology department. That’s where she began to study fatty acid transport. That’s also where her family life suddenly changed.

The first of five children, Abumrad’s siblings include two sisters, Huda, a painter and manager of a line of beauty products, and Randa, who has a public relations agency and also likes to renovate homes. A brother Roger, who she says “doesn’t have any creative genes and collects degrees,” is a mechanical engineer and has a consulting firm for energy management.

Her youngest brother, Rafik, earned a degree in psychology. As they had done with her, Abumrad’s parents pushed Rafik to continue his education and become a doctor rather than remain a psychologist. But he never got the chance. As he was finishing up his master’s degree in psychology at Vanderbilt, Abumrad’s brother suffered a ruptured brain aneur-ysm and died.

That changed her life in two big ways. First, she lost her baby brother. Then, because Rafik’s wife also was having health problems, Abumrad took in their 6-year-old son, Ramzi. Now 22, Abumrad considers Ramzi her second son. Ramzi just graduated from Vassar College with a degree in psychology.

During her years at Vanderbilt, Abumrad published a couple of papers arguing it wasn’t possible to explain fatty acid transport with the accepted theory that fatty acids moved across cell membranes in a passive manner. She proposed that a protein receptor was facilitating fatty acid entry into cells, and that went against the grain of what most of her colleagues believed.

That began to change when she reached her next destination at SUNY Stony Brook. The main reason was that she identified a protein. Called CD36, the protein did the things Abumrad had argued were necessary to facilitate transport and metabolism of fatty acids.

“When you have a protein, you have something you can work with,” she says. “I think people started believing more in the work when we had mouse models and could demonstrate that CD36 did have a role in fatty acid uptake and utilization in vivo.”

One of her colleagues at both Vanderbilt and Stony Brook, Roger Johnson, says Abumrad was very persistent in winning others over to her way of thinking.

“Her quietly persevering manner clearly won the day against brasher and more outspoken investigators in this field who initially and vociferously discounted her ideas,” he says. “Nada exhibits both the perseverance and curiosity necessary to be a really good scientist. And she continues not to be persuaded by conventional thinking, but rather displays a willingness to explore totally new approaches.”

The thing that pushed her to continue advancing her work with CD36 was the fact that she just couldn’t accept the idea that fatty acids just passively showed up in cells.

“Why would a cell be very fastidious and picky about which sugars and which amino acids it lets into its cytoplasm while just being completely open to any fatty acid any time?” she asks. “It just has to regulate fatty acids the way it regulates other nutrients.”

Because changes in fatty acid metabolism had been linked to diseases such as obesity, atherosclerosis and type 2 diabetes, Abumrad’s work was of great interest to Samuel Klein, M.D., director of the Center for Human Nutrition and chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Nutritional Sciences at the School of Medicine.

“Nada is an outstanding scientist and a world-class fat cell physiologist,” he says. “She provides us with the ability to evaluate the cellular mechanisms responsible for the metabolic abnormalities associated with obesity. She also has been able to translate her discoveries in animals to humans, which will eventually help us provide better care for patients.”

Eventually, he was able to recruit Abumrad to come to St. Louis as the first Atkins Professor. And Abumrad says she was excited to come because of the strong research environment here and the opportunities here to participate in research into so many diseases related to fatty acid metabolism.

“When I visited, I kept thinking, ‘Wow! My work would interface well with this person’s work!'” she recalls. “There are so many outstanding people here working in the fatty acid area, and the ability to collaborate was a very important thing for me.”

The downside of coming to St. Louis was that her son and nephew stayed behind in New York. But there is an advantage to having family out of town if you like to take trips.

“I like to go for weekends in New York to see my son and my nephew,” she says. “And we pack in a lot of theater, opera and restaurants during those visits.”