Marie-Françoise Chesselet

Marie-Françoise Chesselet has spent the past 40 years working in neuroscience. She has been the Chair of Neurobiology at UCLA for 11 years, she has been a part of some of the biggest breakthroughs in the study of Parkinson’s disease, and she’s currently embarking on her next chapter: life after work. This interview is a reflection of her time in the field and her hopes for the future.

December, 2016

What about getting into Parkinson’s specifically?
That's a good question. It's related to the fact that I was interested in neurotransmission. The major treatment for Parkinson's disease had been discovered in the late ‘60s, not long before I started getting involved. That's the use of L-DOPA, which is now what's what every person with Parkinson's takes. Have you ever seen the movie Awakening?

No.
Oliver Sacks wrote a book about the experience of using L-DOPA in people who had encephalitis, something similar to Parkinson's disease, after World War I. People that had Parkinsonian symptoms were completely still and couldn't move, but with L-DOPA they could start moving and talking. At the time it looked miraculous. When you think about it, it is miraculous. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and it does not prevent the disease from progressing. It was extraordinary to me because it was a discovery that really changed people's lives but that was based on basic science. It was based on understanding the brain, understanding the disease, and taking it to a transforming therapy.

So wanting to work in that field was largely motivated by the fact that the one person in France was doing what I was interested in. When I got into the lab he assigned me to a group where I didn't work on Parkinson's disease, but I worked in the area of the brain and the mechanisms that are affected by Parkinson's disease. It was very basic science. I didn't really work on Parkinson's disease until maybe 15 years ago. I was working in the areas that were affected by the disease but not on the disease itself. What made me move to work more on the disease itself was that in the late ‘90s, some genes involved in the cause of Parkinson's disease were identified. So at that time it became interesting for me to work on the disease.

Because of that discovery?
Yes, because it was no longer a black box. There was a way to really study it.

But the cause is unknown?
It's unknown but it's like a form of Alzheimer's disease, so there is a very small proportion of patients that have a familial form. In terms of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the mechanism that is affected by the mutation of the gene is also affected in people who don't have the mutation. It gives you a key to understanding what happens in people that do not have the mutation. It's a way in. That fact became much more scientifically interesting for me to study it.

What was that moment like when that knowledge was discovered?
It was better than that, because I was at a workshop where it was discovered. There was a discussion between somebody who was a geneticist and somebody who was a clinician who had gathered information from a unique family in New Jersey and tested their blood but he wasn't sharing his discoveries. So in front of members of the National Institutes of Health and the whole group of colleagues, the geneticist challenged him to give him access to the material and this geneticist found a gene. I was at the workshop. I was there at that moment of discovery.

Are those moments the things that sort of keep you going as a researcher?
Oh, completely. When you discover something and you know that you are the only person in the world who knows that thing. It’s something completely novel, something that nobody suspected before. It happened a few times. I didn't find the PD [Parkinson’s disease] gene but the two aspects of what I’m talking about are: 1) when you find something that nobody knows even if it's a small thing, 2) being a part of the whole enterprise and understanding what’s going on.

You recently retired. How do you feel about that?
Well, I had decided a long time ago that I would retire this year. In part because I want to spend more time in France but also because I feel it's time to retool and spend time doing what I enjoy. I used to enjoy doing the experiments, running the lab, running the department…. I enjoyed all of those things, but at this point I would like to spend my time thinking and writing and putting those two things together.

Be a little bit more focused on yourself.
Rather than on other people. I would be kept awake at night wondering how I was going to feed the people in my lab for the next months. [Laughs] When you are active in research, you really have to focus a lot.

I really like to read and I think that’s where interesting ideas come from. I used to do that a lot at the beginning of my career. There are a lot of new techniques to be learned from reading journals on cancer and things that have nothing to do with my field. But as you go deeper into your field and you accumulate more responsibilities, you can’t afford that time anymore. You spend so much time in the daily monitoring, daily managing, the survival to keep funded, to keep your lab running. I would like to have more time to read.

It’s an interesting parallel with many careers. I have spoken to a lot of women who have started their own businesses out of a passion for something. But the work always becomes focused on the business and 20 percent is left over to do the thing you loved in the first place.
Exactly. So, I want to go back to 95 percent of what I love.

How do you feel being at this junction in your life?
You always give up something up. When I was cleaning my office I found files for old projects I kept thinking that one day I would revisit, but now I never will. There are moments of sadness when you leave things behind. It’s like when you move; you may be excited about your new house but you still have some things you love about your old house. It’s human.

What about looking back over the span of your career?
Well, I don’t really dwell so much on the past. But with these five weeks I took to clean up my office, I was really going from moments of sadness for things that I will never do or I did not succeed at and moments of complete joy and remembering the great people I met along the way.

It’s funny when students talk to me about their careers and they say they don’t want to go into science because they are a “people person” and they want contact with people. Science is the most people-oriented activity, more than medicine. In science, you are never on your own and you develop these long-term relationships. It’s teamwork.

What’s the perception of being a scientist?
Women, in particular, often think that they have to sacrifice having a family or another interest to be a scientist. You do have to be passionate about science to do it. That is absolutely clear. If you do it as you would do any other job, don’t go into science. You have to feel like this is the one thing you can do with your life. There are things that you will “sacrifice,” of course, but it shouldn’t matter.

So, you can have a family, you can have friends. There are a lot of things I gave up, but I didn’t give them up because I had to give them up. I gave them up because the only thing I wanted to do was to spend my entire weekend working.

I have one child, but I have friends who have been very successful scientists and have three or four children. They are just very organized.

Over the last 40 years have you seen more women go into science?
Certainly compared to when I started. When I entered medical school, there were maybe 5 percent women and when I ended my medical school it was closer to 30 percent, only three years later. That’s medicine, not science. But still, there are a lot of women going into biological science. It’s even less for physics and chemistry.

It’s very disheartening for me to see a woman think that she has to sacrifice having a family to go into science. Maybe you can’t be a full-time scientist and also have six children and live in a big house with five dogs, but everybody makes a choice, right?

What was it like being the chair of the department at UCLA?
I had been the chair of the Department of Neurobiology for 11 years, until 2013. I stepped down from that because I wanted to do it for ten years and not longer, but then I was recalled to be an interim chair of neurology, although I am not a neurologist. But there was a transition period and because I had experience being chair and I had been the member of that department for almost 20 years, the dean asked me to serve in that capacity.

It was very interesting being in that position, because it was learning experience. I was in an interim position, so it was not my place to make long-term decisions for the department but to make sure that I handed the department in good shape to the successor, who happened to be one of my trainees.

Really? I’m sure you’ve influenced a lot of people along the way.
I hope. It’s like being a parent. You always feel that some of your trainees will achieve what you have not achieved, and that is the best part.

The beauty of science in the US is that your trainees are all over the world. The greatest pleasure I have is not only that they keep in touch, which is nice, but that they interact amongst themselves. When you are in your formative years in the lab, that’s where you make your connections and the people you grow up with in the lab. You really have a level of appreciation for each other that you can never have in society. That kind of relationship is really unique.

What about looking forward and the future of Parkinson’s disease?
Obviously we all want a cure. We want something that will stop the progression of the disease so that we can treat people very early on so that they may have only symptoms or in some cases we could even prevent it. That’s what we all wait for and that’s what we always work for.

I think it’s been harder than anybody expected. People thought that once we knew what we know now it would be easy to treat but it’s not because it’s so complex, and that’s true for all of the diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, all of those.

Is it true that we still know so little about the brain?
We know little, but I think we know a lot in terms of treatment. We don’t need to know everything. We will probably never know everything. But think about aspirin or morphine, which has been a miracle pain reliever for centuries. People have relieved pain with them for years without understanding the mechanism at all. People don’t die in childbirth as often as they did 100 years ago.

It’s such a rapid change.
When you look at what medicine has accomplished in terms of infection, in terms of cancer, it’s amazing. I have many friends who are cancer survivors and they would not have survived if they had it when I started doing this.

What is the best piece of advice you could give?
I had just had my son and I was in standing in line and a woman friend asked me, “So, how are you doing? How are you surviving?” And I said, “Well you know, day by day.” And standing in the line was this absolutely wonderful woman, a winner of the National Medal of Science, who turned to me and said, "Never let anybody tell you that you can't have a family and be a scientist, because women have much longer careers than men."

It was so nice of her to say that. It completely resonated. Don’t let anybody say you can’t have a family. And that’s really why I am so passionate about explaining to young women that they can do it.

Another thing I learned especially for women is…. I cannot say this is in a sentence but I will tell you the anecdote. When I was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, I became the president of a learning society, which is a local society at the university where physicians and scientists meet several times a year. They have cocktails and they listen to a couple of talks. They had not had a woman president, so they picked me. So I decided that at each function there would be a man and a woman doing the talks.

They usually showcased young faculty members that had just been hired. At that time it was not electronic so I would get paper files of candidates. There was one remarkable woman after the other. So I would contact one man and one woman for each month. Every single man said, “Oh, yes. Thank you very much. I am honored to do it.” Every single woman said, “Oh, maybe I should do it next year when I will have more data? Maybe I should go a few times first so that I know what to do?” That was really an eye opener. Women can’t push themselves to be affirmative enough and those were extraordinary women. I really had to convince them to do it. The guys saw the opportunity.

I had this exact conversation with another woman featured on Bird, Lauren Rosenberg. A guy will see a job and just go for it but a woman will see a role and think she’s not experienced enough.
It’s exactly that. It’s exactly the same thing and not being confident in yourself as a woman. It’s interesting that this woman had exactly the same experience and it’s too bad that it’s still like that.

I think we are in an interesting time now where we’re seeing a lot more collaboration amongst women and hopefully with that will come confidence.
It’s important to not to shy away from supporting other women. A phenomenon that’s well known is that if you have a man and a woman going for an election, usually not too many people vote, but the woman will be elected because other women vote to make sure that they support the woman.

What does science mean to you?
It’s the only thing I could possibly imagine doing with my life.

Photography by Magdalena Wielopolska ©