RE Log Fall 2016

26 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2016 STACY BLAIN describes herself as that kid in science class. She was the student who refused to part with her dissection kit at the end of her sev- enth-grade year at Ransom Everglades, taking it home over the summer to more closely examine the disemboweled frog and other organisms. A few years later, she was the kid in the back of Dr. Robert “Doc” Crab- tree’s biology class, resolutely executing her own experiments by putting fruit flies under a store-bought ultra-violet light to see whether she could change their eye color or wing length. She was also the girl who spent hours peering into a microscope in her backyard in Kendall. She imagined that, when she had children of her own, she would attend to them between experiments. “I kind of have that life now,” said Blain, a mother of three children be- tween the ages of nine and 16. “Except my lab isn’t in my backyard.” Blain actually splits her time between two laboratories near her home in Brooklyn. She is an assistant professor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where she specializes in cancer research while teaching a cancer curriculum at the center’s medical school. She also labors at a new, MARC DAVID SANDERS ’84 Assistant Professor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center Columbia University, PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology Princeton University, BS in Molecular Biology Memorable teacher, class: Dr. Robert “Doc” Crabtree, Biology science I’m a big believer inSTEM: You’ve got to keep kids engaged... there are future scientists in those classes. ST CY BLA N ’85 start-up biotech company, ConCarLo Holdings LLC, working to develop a drug designed to interfere with a particular cell action that leads to the spread of cancer. “It’s a new venture,” she said. “It’s doubled what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis.” Blain started the company in September 2015 after she and her research team discovered a method of inhibit- ing a particular protein in a cell that causes it to divide when it should not. Though the discovery involved substances invisible to the naked eye, it was large in significance. “We’ve been studying one protein, one little complex, for 20 years,” Blain said. “It is the culmination in the sense that, once you knew how it worked, you could find out how to block it. It’s a turning point.” Academics do research, but they don’t develop drugs. The desire to find a real-life solution to the problem she unraveled through the lens of a microscope led her to found the start-up – a task, she said, that has brought daunting new challenges. “My learning curve is almost vertical every day,” she said. “That’s pretty cool. I like the fact that I’ve opened a whole new door…. I’ve been very lucky in my career that I’ve had these opportunities.” Those opportunities started in her youth, then con- tinued at Ransom Everglades School. From RE, she went on to earn a bachelor’s in molecular biology at Princeton, then a PhD in molecular and cellular biol- ogy at Columbia. She began her career at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center before moving to SUNY Downstate, where she revamped and modernized the school’s cancer curriculum as she delved deeper into her research. “I was the beneficiary of a really good STEM educa- tion,” she said. “I’m a big believer in STEM: You’ve got to keep kids engaged. You’ve got to keep them fired up... There are future scientists in those classes.”