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A Long Life Devoted to Science
By Jennifer Fisher Wilson
“I was educated at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, Bryn Mawr College and Johns Hopkins Medical School,” Nancy L. R. Bucher ’35 says. “M. Carey Thomas and her Quaker friends, determined to promote education of women equal to that of men, were deeply involved in all three institutions, which gave me a great start.”
Bucher still remembers the moment when she first became intrigued with science some seven decades ago. Her high-school biology teacher surprised the class one day by dissecting a cat.
“I thought this was most interesting. I was fascinated by how this cat was put together,” Bucher says. She went home and told her parents about it over dinner. “My mother said I should have waited until after dinner,” she recalls.
Today, at age 90, Bucher continues to find science fascinating and remains active in research. “It’s still fun. I like dealing with problems, and I still have ideas that I want to test,” she says.
Over the course of her career, Bucher has seen dramatic changes in medicine and science. Yet even so, she pursues the same line of research — on liver regeneration and cancer — that she began in 1946. Along the way, her experiments have moved from cellular to molecular to genetic levels as advances in technology have opened up new pathways for research.
“New technologies keep appearing and I apply them to my research. Now I’m studying genes and which proteins they turn on and off,” Bucher says.
From Medicine to Basic Research
After graduating from Bryn Mawr College and traveling through Europe for nine months, Bucher enrolled at Johns Hopkins at the outbreak of World War II. “In medical school, the basic sciences were heavily focused on anatomy — all that was known about biochemistry was covered in one or two lectures,” Bucher recalls. “Whether genes were composed of DNA or protein was widely debated.”
After graduating in 1943, she took an internship at Boston University Medical School. One of her early clinical experiences included administering the newly discovered drug penicillin to military servicemen. Because the drug was impure, the interns had to inject the drug intravenously every four hours around the clock. “It was indeed a wonder drug,” Bucher explains. “There were no drug-resistant bugs. Patients on the brink of death from streptococcal or staphylococcal blood poisoning were sent home cured after a little more than a week.”
After the war, Bucher decided to pursue basic research. In 1945, she joined Harvard Medical School’s Huntington Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, which was under the directorship of the renowned physician and cancer researcher Joseph C. Aub. He had the then-radical notion that cancer could be understood by studying how growth of normal cells is regulated in the body.
Bucher’s assignment at Huntington was to investigate liver regeneration in rats. That is, what triggers the rapid regrowth in rat liver — after two-thirds of the liver is surgically excised, it is restored to normal size and structure in about 10 days. Bucher had no idea that the work would continue to challenge her throughout her career.
Along the way, Bucher’s research has helped to advance knowledge of the fundamental mechanisms of liver regeneration and the relationship between regeneration and uncontrolled growth in cancer cells. However, she modestly observes, “Neither I nor anyone else completely understands it. I was a pioneer in the sense that I applied common sense to scientific questions.” Bucher characteristically attributes the special honor of her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to “sheer good luck.”
Remaining Active
Although Bucher had always planned to return to her hometown of Baltimore, she stayed at Huntington until the labs closed in 1979. She left Harvard Medical School when university policy required her to retire four years later at age 70.
But Bucher was not ready to retire; she moved on to Boston University, where she is research professor of pathology and laboratory medicine. Nineteen years after joining the faculty, she describes herself as “the local fossil” among a younger group of colleagues. Bucher continues her own regeneration studies and collaborates with younger researchers interested in growth-controlling genes. “These new opportunities make retirement of no interest to me,” she says.
The National Cancer Institute had funded Bucher’s work continuously for 46 years until just last year, when she had to let her grants lapse after an injury that kept her out of the lab for months.
“I went to have a haircut. That’s usually not considered dangerous. Well it can be,” Bucher explains. “While I was looking in my wallet to pay, the hairdresser walked around me with a hair dryer and the cord caught my ankle in a loop. When I went to leave, I tripped and broke my pelvis.”
Despite a long and painful recovery, Bucher remains active in her personal and professional lives. This winter, she not only moved both her lab and her apartment, but she also traveled to the Amazon for a bird-watching tour.
While in the Amazon, Bucher found herself alone at camp when the rest of the tour group left for a strenuous hike. Instead of taking time off to relax, she joined two non-English speaking guides in a dugout canoe to visit a pond where brilliantly colored birds could be observed.
“It was a different world, and I saw the most interesting things. It was just amazing,” Bucher says. “My recipe for life is to keep moving and — most important — don’t lose your sense of humor!”
About the Author
Jennifer Fisher Wilson is a contributing editor for The Scientist. She writes frequently about science and medicine for various publications, including Lancet Neurology, Science and UCLA Magazine.
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