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SCIENTIST AT WORK: Victoria Elizabeth Foe; Drawing Big Lessons From Fly Embryology

SCIENTIST AT WORK: Victoria Elizabeth Foe; Drawing Big Lessons From Fly Embryology
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August 10, 1993, Section C, Page 1Buy Reprints
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VICTORIA ELIZABETH FOE seems to have the wrong voice for the rest of her. On the telephone she sounds small and timid, like a character from a moody novella who sits by herself at a corner table, sipping tea and dispassionately reviewing the minor disappointments of her life.

But in person, when she lets loose and starts talking about her work as a developmental biologist who spends days upon nights peering into a microscope, observing the earliest moments of embryonic life and charting every throb and tremble of every individual cell, she expands to epic dimensions and superlatives fly.

"There's a deliciousness and a delight to looking at embryos," she said. "It's a celebratory act, an act of enormous pleasure."

Later she said: "It's like a diver going down into the sea. You notice something new and something totally amazing every single time. It's just a wonderland."

Still later she said: "This is biology's golden age. It's analogous to cathedral building of a thousand years ago. We are building and building this great edifice. Some of us are building arches, some painting murals, some carving in stone. I feel enormously privileged to be alive now and to be a part of it."

And the woman herself has so much flair and presence that everything else looks stunted by comparison. She wears a long peasant skirt, a peasant blouse and cowboy boots that surely lift her up to six feet tall. She has a wild spray of long black hair and features that are at once delicate and strong.

Dr. Foe, 48, a research scientist at the University of Washington, is widely celebrated among developmental biologists and drosophila geneticists, who study the fruit fly for insight into how all animals grow. All her peers know her work and cite it in papers of their own. They know she is the one who made the seminal observation that very early in development, different groups of cells in different regions of the formless embryo begin dividing at markedly different rates, a discovery that casts light on how a monotonous bleb of tissue, to use the biologists' term, gives rise to the complexity of body and brain. She is so highly regarded that the National Institutes of Health gives her a supporting grant that is independent of any affiliation with a university or institution, the only such grant it awards. Dr. Foe has also just received a five-year MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius award that comes with no strings beyond the expectation of continued brilliance.

She is a woman who has forged a novel path for herself in science. Most other biologists either work in academia, trudging down the track to tenure and gathering ever more graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and technicians along the way, or they take jobs in industry for steady salaries.

Dr. Foe has done neither. She has never sought a professorship because she did not want her life to be consumed by administrative duties that would take her away from her research. She would never want to work for a company, out of a dislike of being bossed. She has never had technicians or students working for her, although she may accept a graduate student this fall. Her grant from the N.I.H. supplies her salary and money for equipment and biological materials, which means that her arrangement with the University of Washington is relatively loose. In essence she is a self-employed scientist, and what she has done she has done largely on her own, as Foe Inc., a one-woman band.

"She's a very unusual character, and she has had a strong impact," said Dr. Claude Desplan, a fruit fly geneticist at Rockefeller University in New York. "But her style is fundamentally different from the way most science is done today."

Yet in her tremulous telephone voice is a telling clue to her character. Despite her accomplishments, the courage of her unorthodoxy, and her conviction that the work she is doing is grand and profound, Dr. Foe, say those closest to her, has all the ego strength of a teen-age girl at her first sock hop. She gets nervous easily. She is always afraid that her grant will run out and will not be renewed. She works maniacal hours and then worries that she has not done enough, or is wrong or obtuse or muddled in her thinking. She considers herself a dull and inept speaker, although everybody who hears her talk is enraptured.

"On the one hand she has an unbending iron core and she absolutely knows what she is doing is the right thing to do," said Dr. Garrett M. Odell, a developmental biologist at the University of Washington. "But that is coupled with this amazingly persistent insecurity about whether she is good enough to be talking to smart people. Even now, she's worried that the MacArthur people are going to call her back and say, 'Are you VICTORIA Foe? Oh, sorry, we meant VICTOR.' " Dr. Odell has recently become Dr. Foe's collaborator and her live-in mate, although that usually means living in at the lab. Pondering the Whole

The mix of fear and fortitude is only one of many contradictions that Dr. Foe embodies. In an era when most basic biologists take a reductionist approach to their craft, breaking down a problem into its smallest possible component, Dr. Foe is more like an old-fashioned naturalist who observes the nuances of the entire organism as it goes about the business of growing. She looks at embryos of fruit flies, blowflies, mosquitoes, frogs, hornworms, fish; dusk will cede to dark, the dark to dawn, and still she will keep looking. Yet far from being an imprecise empiricist, she swiftly adopts new technologies and uses molecular biology to make her observational work ever keener.

"I use increasingly 20th-century techniques for a 19th-century approach, where I spend hours just looking," she said. The technology is now taking on a 21st-century flavor, as she and Dr. Odell hook up her observational microscope to computers and controls that will allow Dr. Foe to mark individual cells of a fly embryo and follow them through the entire odyssey from their initial emergence in the blob-like blastula to their final destiny as constituents of antennae, foot, thorax or eye. The enterprise is expected to take about two years, and the cellular atlas that will result will be the most detailed record ever produced of embryonic growth, far outstripping in complexity the famed fate map that scientists have made of the much more primitive laboratory roundworm.

Dr. Foe, as well as the many other fruit fly geneticists who avidly await the production of her master atlas, will then be able to use the blow-by-blow descriptions of cell fate to determine which genes control the behavior of cells as they mature. And for scientists, it is an article of faith that finding the genes behind the growth of fruit fly larvae will hasten the discovery of the equivalent developmental genes in humans.

"There are probably 10,000 people working on drosophila today, and what Victoria is doing is incredibly useful for most of them," said Dr. Bruce M. Alberts, the new president of the National Academy of Sciences who was Dr. Foe's postdoctoral adviser at the University of California at San Francisco.

Dr. Odell said: "Her approach takes the sort of patience that almost nobody has anymore. She's monastic." The Art of Science

The observational approach also suits Dr. Foe's esthetic sensibility. "There are always roads you didn't take, other paths that beckon, and for me the other road was art," Dr. Foe said. "If you look at my science, it's extremely visual." She makes detailed drawings of what she sees, and her finely delineated and brilliantly colored diagrams of fruit fly embryos are so exacting and sensual that it is a pity they are confined to scientific journals.

Dr. Foe is also a perfectionist. While other scientists rush to put out as many publications in as brief a period as possible, Dr. Foe will work for years on a project, not reporting her results until she is satisfied that the findings are solid and complete. As a result, her curriculum vitae is shorter than that of many scientists her age, but most papers listed are more like books than reports. In publishing one of her exhaustive papers, the journal Development warned other would-be authors not to take similar liberties in length unless they were prepared to match her rigor and breadth of research.

Yet here is another contradiction. Dr. Foe is a scientific loner, but she has a strong political conscience. One reason she never sought a tenure-track position in science was to give her the freedom to switch gears quickly when she wanted to pursue political activities.

As a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, she dropped out for a year and a half to work as a political aide and help overturn the state's anti-abortion law. She was involved in the women's movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. More recently, she and Dr. Odell rallied vigorously against the Persian Gulf war, and this week they are planning to go to Canada, where Dr. Foe has a plot of land, to protest the Government's plan to allow logging in an old-growth forest.

"Most scientists try to ignore the rest of the world, but she has a tremendous guilt complex," Dr. Alberts said. "She feels guilty about doing science all the time and allowing people to starve or go to war." Political Lesson

Even in her science Dr. Foe finds a political lesson. "The wonderful lesson to come out of biology in the last five years is the same genes, the same parts, turn up again and again, from one species to another," she said. "The important lesson to realize is that we're all made of the same fabric, we're part of the same web, and there is some humility in the idea that is appropriate."

Dr. Foe came by her capacious perspective in childhood, as her family moved from Wyoming to Mexico to England and eventually back to the United States, her father changing careers from law to farming to teaching. "One of the things I got from living abroad was a larger world view," she said.

Her father was a shining knight in her life. He was fascinated by everything, she said, and he stimulated the same intellectual hunger in his three children. He died of congestive heart failure when she was 21, and Dr. Foe still feels deep sorrow that he did not live long enough to see what she has discovered as a diver into microscopic realms. "It would have absolutely delighted him," she said. "It would have completely interested him. He put up with our larval states and then didn't get to enjoy us as human beings."

Dr. Foe's unconventional scientific career can be traced to her marriage to Dr. Michael Dennis, a neurophysiologist at the University of California. When her husband decided to quit science and become a sculptor, Dr. Foe, then a postdoctoral student, decided to leave California with him and his daughter and move up to Denman Island in Canada. Horrified that Dr. Foe, too, might leave science, her adviser, Dr. Alberts, helped her arrange to work out of Friday Harbor Laboratories in Washington, a spectacularly beautiful research station not far from the Canadian island. "I thought it would be an incredible waste if she went up there and did pottery or something," Dr. Alberts said.

Dr. Foe completed her postdoctoral training at Friday Harbor, and then, in the mid-1980's, persuaded the N.I.H. to give her the independent grant she still receives today.

Dr. Foe and Dr. Dennis have since divorced, although she continues to see him and his daughter and is now building a one-room cabin for herself on Denman Island. A Break in Synchrony

Her talents have not been squandered. In the findings that made her reputation, Dr. Foe discovered in the late 1980's that early in the development of an embryo, a spectacular transition occurs. While all the cells of the embryo grow in unison through the first 13 rounds of division, splitting in half and in half again as a single pulsating bundle, the synchrony breaks down at the 14th division. At that point, different groups of cells begin dividing at markedly different rates. These various arenas of division are called mitotic domains, after mitosis, or cell division, and there are 25 of them in the early fly embryo, with clear boundaries between one domain and the next.

These domains are previews of coming attractions, the first visible signs of cell specialization that eventually will yield distinct organs. Much further down the line in embryonic growth, one domain will give rise to the nervous system, and another the creature's limbs.

"It gives us a completely unexpected window on cell determination," Dr. Foe said. "It looks like the embryo has virtually painted on it its own fate."

Yet even with this window, scientists cannot say exactly how the domains give rise to body components. "We have a rough fate map, but we don't know any of the little territories in detail," she said. "We may know this domain is in an area that gives rise to the nervous system, but we don't have a clue to which component of the nervous system it makes."

Gathering those details will consume the next phase of her career, as she traces the lives of individual cells within the different mitotic domains -- monastic, often alone, but delighting in the spectacle unfolding before her.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: SCIENTIST AT WORK: Victoria Elizabeth Foe; Drawing Big Lessons From Fly Embryology. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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