Anne Mclaren

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

AN INTERVIEW WITH… Anne McLaren

day would turn into mice if one transferred Last month, the 2007 March of Dimes Prize them into the uterus. And I guess this in Developmental Biology was awarded to Dr Janet Rossant from The Hospital for Sick was partly because, this was in the Royal Children in Toronto, Canada, and Dame Veterinary College in London now, he had Anne McLaren from The Gurdon Institute in a culture system set up in his lab; he was Cambridge, UK. In the May issue of Nature working on cultured chick bones and I Reviews Genetics, we published an excerpt was working on embryo transfer. So we got from a conversation with Dr Janet Rossant. chatting and thought it would be interesting This month we talked to Dr Anne McLaren. Magdalena Skipper asked her about her reasons for to culture the embryos… choosing a career in biology and what prompted her to make some key transitions in her research. Below, Dr McLaren shares her reflections on her life in research so far and her views on some You are a President of the Association of current issues including ethics and women in science. Women in Science and Engineering and are well known for your support of women Wikipedia describes your family as “industrial fascinating or memorable problem you had to in science. The fact that men outnumber magnates known for their attention to liberal grapple with? women in most walks of science has attracted politics and women’s suffrage”. Were you That’s an impossible question to answer. But different explanations and comments… encouraged to study science? my early career very much followed the focus Except in biology! Certainly at the moment No I wasn’t. Not at all, it was rather of March of Dimes — I started my Ph.D. there are more women students in biology disapproved of. It was not a suitable thing on neurotropic viruses in mice; it was the labs than there are in other sciences. for young women. days when polio was pandemic, like HIV is today, that was before the vaccines. […] One And in the other disciplines that are more Why did you decide to study it despite the was very much encouraged to do animal male dominated, how does one encourage discouragement? model studies. After that I was concerned female scientists? I wanted to go to college and I was put down with reproductive biology: fetal growth, It is a difficult issue. But I think that a lot of for entrance in English literature because prematurity, birth weight and also congenital the postdoctoral fellowships that are given I was quite good at writing essays. But when I malformations. My first 20 years in research now are much more family-friendly … read the requirements for the exams I realized was very much involved with all of that. And there is good maternity leave, there is extra that it meant reading a lot of literature that then I moved on more towards the culture of support for childcare while at conferences I’d never ever read and I only had 8 months embryos and making chimaeras, and later on … that makes a lot of difference. But in the to swat for the scholarship exam, so that was still I got interested in germ cells, which I UK, certainly, there is insufficient affordable, no good, and so I looked at all the papers am still interested in. And stem cells… convenient, available childcare. It’s different and biology was easiest — you didn’t have to from one country to another… read so much, you could swat it all up from What guided those transitions? There is also a certain amount of ‘old textbooks, as opposed to reading novels and The choice of neurotropic viruses was boy’s network’, you know, men tend to think poems … you know, Milton’s Paradise Lost, pragmatic — I needed to get a Ph.D. in of their men-friends when jobs are going. every play by Shakespeare… 2 years because my first year hadn’t worked But there is a growing ‘old women’s When I got to Oxford I had to do a year out. And viruses breed much quicker than network’ now. or two of science in general so I did zoology, rabbits. At that time, infantile paralysis, as physics and maths. But I found zoology at polio was called then, was known to affect You had a role in establishing the UK’s the end of it most interesting so that’s what I young, athletically minded people, and people Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority carried on with. noticed that it tended to be the limbs that (HFEA). What do you think about some they were using that were affected. I found in recent criticisms of HFEA and suggestions How do you remember those early days in the mice that if the neutrotropic virus was merely that it might be outdated? laboratory? circulating in the blood there was no paralysis, HFEA is doing very well and is well thought It was fascinating because it was very but if one lowered the blood–brain barrier by of. It has coped quite sensibly with recent polarized. This was the early 1950s, the injecting a drug into one of the limbs then that problems with cytoplasmic hybrids where Cold War … and the department was very limb would become paralysed because the cow and rabbit eggs have been used to make much split between left wing and right wing virus was able to get into the nervous system. stem-cell lines for research. politically. […] Everybody was friendly but And that made the newspapers. HFEA is being merged now with the there were lively discussions, shall we say… Human Tissue Authority, and it will be And the switch to cell culture? interesting to see how that works out; it’ll You have mainly studied fertility and germline Well, with my colleague John Biggers, we were be a much bigger organization but the two development. What was the hardest, most the first to show that embryos cultured for a have a lot in common.