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Fifteen years after his retirement, Dr. Lawrence R. Gurley, NC State University alumnus and retired fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, looks back on his North Carolina public education as the key to his success in what was the fledgling field of biomedical engineering. While best known for his groundbreaking work on chromosomal proteins, he also pioneered the development of methods to isolate proteins from cancer cells and lung fluids and was the first to isolate proteins from the fossil of a 150-million-year-old dinosaur. Gurley attributes his love of science and his many accomplishments to the influence of his North Carolina education. From his early school years in the 1940s to his university years in the 1950s and 60s, his education instilled in him a love of learning and prepared him to be a great student, teacher, scientist and citizen.
“I had a lot of trouble in school as a child,” said Gurley, because “I was, and I am, dyslexic.” He had difficulties reading and so instead came to really enjoy and excel in science and math. He avoided careers in the humanities, medicine and law, preferring analytical thinking to professions requiring reading large volumes of literature and rote memorization. “I directed my attention more to the sciences, chemistry and math, and so it was logical that I would eventually end up a chemical engineer.”
He made his way to NC State in fall 1953 and enrolled as an engineering student, graduating in 1958 with a chemical engineering degree and a great deal of undergraduate experience with the chemical industry. He worked with Enco (now ExxonMobil) as an upperclassman, spent his summers working at a coal-burning power plant and was able to visit General Electric while the company was building some of the first nuclear power plants. “I got a real insight into the energy industry,” he said of his undergraduate career.
After graduation he got a job with Merck & Co. in Virginia but came back to NC State for a year to get a master's level degree. This professional chemical engineering degree, only offered at NC State for a short time, was Gurley's introduction to biochemistry and what would would later give rise to biomedical engineering.
It was a field that essentially didn't exist yet. “You could see how it was coming together,” he said, and he liked what he saw, but at the time there was no way of getting an education in this new profession. He began doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working in the medical school with biochemistry, genetics and DNA. “I essentially had to make my own curriculum for biomedical engineering,” he said.
After graduating from Chapel Hill in 1964 with a Ph.D. in biochemistry he was recognized by the NC Academy of Science with the Coker Award for an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation. At the UNC Medical School Gurley had been working on histone proteins, and he was ready to start a career in the field. “You have to look for where the action is at the time,” he said, “and you go there.”
That action took him to the National Laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., where he spent his entire career of 35 years as a biomedical scientist and engineer and 20 of those years as a Laboratory Fellow. It was here that Gurley began the process of isolating 150-million-year-old proteins from the fossil of a Seismosaurus, the longest dinosaur known to man, a feat never before accomplished. They had found this large beast, he explained, and didn't know anything about it. But they were looking for proteins, Gurley's specialty. “With all the technology we had,” he said, “we could learn a lot about this fossil.”
“But that,” Gurley said, “was just a minor part in my career.”
So what was a major part of it?
“The most significant thing I've worked with would be the cell cycle,” he said. “How DNA replicates and assembles with histone proteins to make chromosomes, how cells divide and the histone protein's role in controlling this cell cycle proliferation process.” This work was relevant to the understanding of cancer proliferation and its therapy, the work he had started back in North Carolina. Cell differentiation and apoptosis (programmed cell death) were some of the last things Gurley studied and worked on before his retirement in 1993. This programmed cell death would be what he would have continued researching if he were still in the lab. “That's one of the next frontiers in this whole business of understanding cell differentiation and cancer,” he said. “The understanding is very rudimentary right now, but it is the frontier. Biomedical engineering is going to go there, it probably already is.”
But Gurley's name is also well known for his efforts in health-related sciences. In the 1980s he applied his chemical engineering experience to working on the health effects of the production of petroleum from oil shale, and he worked with the U.S. Department of Energy studying the toxicology and diseases related to coal and uranium mining. He went on to pioneer the fractionation and analysis of the proteins in the fluid lining of lungs exposed to toxic products of the energy industry.
Gurley said he has always been interested in working on the problem of cancer, and given his experience with the cell cycle and chromosomal proteins, he was well positioned to do so. At the end of his laboratory career he demonstrated how the biochemical, cyclic AMP, induces reverse transformation in cancer cells so that a tumor cell population can regain a normal cell phenotype. In a population of proliferating malignant cells this treatment can induce apoptotic death in the rapidly dividing cells, halting the malignant growth.
So how hard was it, for a man so dedicated to science, engineering and research, to retire? Not as difficult as it might have been, he said, if he had actually stopped working after his retirement from from the Los Alamos Lab in 1993. At the time he had five papers in his lab notebooks, so over the next five years he eased himself into retirement, publishing a paper a year until he was finished.
Even after finishing this work he still stayed busy, traveling with missionary groups building schools and teaching in third-world nations. “I did it through the mission programs, not because I'm a missionary, but because that's where the action was,” Gurley said. “It's been a very rewarding process.” He started out going to Kenya in 1993 and 1996, working on schools and waterline construction projects. He traveled to Haiti in 1996 and again in 1999 with his wife -- she taught Psychology and Counseling while he taught in the agricultural school. “I taught everything that year,” he said, from general chemistry and biochemistry to cell biology, genetics and nutrition.
With the publication of 97 scientific papers over a span of 35 years and covering topics ranging from protein biochemistry and cell proliferation to radiobiology, pharmacology, cancer drug metabolism and paleontology, Gurley still attributes his impressive professional career to his educational career in North Carolina.
-anselm-
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