Elizabeth Murphy: Perseverance Pays Off.

Abstract

For even the most accomplished researcher, the path to discovery is more often marked with failure than success. Rather than be deterred, Elizabeth Murphy, Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, sees each challenge as an opportunity to uncover new and unexpected insights into human biology. It is this sense of perseverance and optimism that has made her a successful scientist and a leader in cardiac research. Elizabeth Murphy Murphy (who is better known as Tish among her peers) has dedicated her research to understanding the molecular changes that occur during and after a heart attack. Her early work focused on the ion changes that lead to cell death during ischemia and reperfusion. She found that an increase in sodium leads to a subsequent increase in intracellular calcium,1–3 which triggers cell death pathways in the mitochondria.4 Her work has helped to define many of the basic pathways that are responsible for cardiac cell death. Recently, Murphy turned her attention to the mechanisms that protect cells from ischemia and reperfusion. Her lab focused on the effects of preconditioning: brief intermittent periods of ischemia and reperfusion that protect the heart from subsequent, more sustained attacks. Murphy and her colleagues identified several post-translational modifications and signaling pathways are activated during preconditioning.5–7 Even with this success, her work took an unexpected turn. At the time, Murphy was like most researchers, using male mice exclusively to study ischemia reperfusion. For one set of experiments, a collaborator offered her female mice as well. When Heather Cross, a postdoctoral researcher in Murphy’s lab, compared the males and females, she was surprised to find that males were much more sensitive to ischemia–reperfusion injury than female mice.8 Murphy and Cross were quick to follow-up on …