How I became a biochemist—from Moscow to Philadelphia, by way of Charlottesville: A story of one Wood/Whelan fellowship journey

✍ Scribed by Vladimir R. Muzykantov

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 123 KB
• Volume: 62
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1521-6543
• DOI: 10.1002/iub.290

✦ Synopsis

It was an eventful, yet troubled beginning of the 90s in Moscow. A failed attempt at a coupe d'e ´tat in August of 1991 was followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in early 1992. In fact, a slightly frightening premonition of dramatic changes and a growing feeling of a weird mix of enthusiasm and insecurity were in the air since the late 80s. We all hoped for the best, and some things did change for the better: the fall of the Berlin wall and Gorbachev's reforms brought to us unheard of freedom of speech and travel abroad. Yet, the situation in my country was far from quiet, as the economy rapidly deteriorated. Inflation (the term that my generation learned for the first time in a college course on the Marxist theory of capitalism but was irrelevant before the 90s) was rampant.

Thanks to newly granted freedom to travel, more and more researchers in the Institute of Experimental Cardiology, a premiere National biomedical research center in Moscow, went on long-term fellowships in American and in European research centers. This was a general trend for younger scientists at premiere research centers and institutes in Moscow and other cities with advanced biomedical enterprises, including St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Novosibirsk. It turned out that most of these temporary leaves transformed into long-term assimilation into research, teaching, or other endeavors abroad. By a conservative account, about 200 researchers from the Institute of Experimental Cardiology were working in the USA and other Western countries by the mid-nineties. Since then, very few have returned to Moscow and some managed to attain fairly successful careers in their new countries.

I was a researcher in the Institute of Experimental Cardiology and worked on drug delivery in cardiovascular systems pursuing two principal approaches: drug carriage by erythrocytes and affinity targeting to vascular endothelium. I feel incredibly fortunate that I have been able to continue to explore these two research directions for the last 16 years at the University of Pennsylvania. One of my drug targeting projects deals with protection against ischemic injury in organ transplantation. We all know that transplantation is a very risky, injurious, and complicated process with low rates of long-term success. This is the story of my transplantation from Moscow to Philadelphia that encompassed an unpredictable and complicated chain of events and reactions, not unlike the propagation of signal transduction cascades in a cell. Indeed, very much like cellular signal transduction that needs a receptor to ignite the process, there was a key component that initiated my relocation and provided the mechanism for its implementation, progress, and eventual