Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 16, 1991 TAG: 9103160042
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
There's neither television coverage nor a stadium full of adoring fans inside the labs of the National Institutes of Health, where Tu performed the equivalent of a grand slam.
In obscurity.
That's life these days for a future bonus baby in biomedical research.
Last month, though, USA Today evened the score a bit, emphasizing for one brief moment the academics of college, not the athletics. It named an All-Academic First Team. Among the 20 scholars chosen from across the country was a lean 18-year-old, 5-foot-6, 140-pound star with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average: Thomas Tu, future biomedical researcher, karate enthusiast and ballroom dancer.
Say 4.0 and the picture that comes to mind is the desk-bound, library-living hermit focused solely on his career.
But that's not Tu's style.
"I'm not going to say biomedical research is the only thing I'm interested in," the self-assured, quietly articulate Tu said on a windy Friday as he sat just inside the doors of UVa's Memorial Gym. "To really understand what's going on in one thing, you have to know a lot about a lot of different fields," he added. "Maybe something you take from physics or something that I learned in my karate class is going to help me understand how a biological mechanism is going to work."
He is the academic version of the old triple threat. Or more accurately, a double-triple threat. Consider the Tom Tu's resume, one almost too good to be true:
His cancer research the last two summers in the molecular pathiophysiology lab at the National Institutes of Health ended up as part of a paper in the Journal of Endocrinology.
He is a blue belt in the martial art discipline of Myo Sin. During breaks from UVa, he teaches science as a substitute at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria.
He hopes to graduate at 19, after three years in Charlottesville, and is mulling a combined M.D. and Ph.D. program that would make him a double doctor and launch a career in public health as a biomedical researcher.
He recently became enamored of ballroom dancing and can't wait to learn a few new twists or dips to add to his repertoire.
He is active in the Vietnamese Students Association on campus and hopes to become fluent in the language.
Next year - if he decides to finish his degree after just three years in Charlottesville - the graduate schools will come begging. But already, Tu is wise enough not to limit his field of view.
Ask him about his idols and he tells an illuminating story. First, he rattles off a list of high school teachers and college professors. And he concludes with the karate instructor he met when he came to Charlottesville two years ago, a man who got his degree in nuclear engineering, then decided it just wasn't the right career.
So the instructor traveled to Taiwan, studied Chinese and the martial arts, then moved back to Virginia and opened a karate school.
"I really admire that sort of courage to really find out what you like and pursue it," Tu said. "I can't really say that I've found that for myself. I've found a number of things that really make me happy, but I'm not sure there's any one thing I can pursue for the rest of my life."
It is a story told by a teen-ager who has accomplished so much so fast, yet seems determined not to let ambition swallow him. Not even the heady work he's done at NIH.
"It just happens that a lot of opportunities came my way" in biomedical research, he said. "I was able to do a lot of things that I'm not going to be able to do anywhere else. So I've been able to progress the furthest in that field."
Tu grew up in the Washington suburb of Vienna. His father is a computer scientist for a defense contractor, and his mother is an editor at the Voice of America. At Thomas Jefferson High, a magnet school, a teacher first encouraged his interest in biology.
"I thought it was pretty interesting stuff," Tu said. "In physics, you learn what's the basis of all matter. It's interesting, but to me it's not directly relevant. It's not going to help me understand people, human interaction in your daily life.
"In chemistry, you get a little more complicated, but you still can explain things very well. Then you get to something like biology, where things are so complex it's very difficult to explain what's going on. And even more complex is something like the human body, which is a very sophisticated biological machine.
"Just trying to figure out how everything works . . . is pretty major."
So he started doing just that. In high school. First, he worked at the Naval Medical Research Institute while still in high school. And the past two summers, he was an intern at the National Institute of Diabetes and Kidney Disorders, a part of NIH. There he worked in the molecular pathophysiology branch, specifically studying something called the G protein, which exists on the surface of cells and helps control them.
He explored what went wrong with the cell's DNA in people who had endocrine cancers, specifically cancers of the thyroid and parathyroid glands.
"The key to what I was doing is a really brand-new technique called polymarase chain reaction," Tu said, lecturing effusively. "It's a very new technique in the field of molecular biology. It's really revolutionized the way things are done. It's a very elegant tool. You can go in and say, `I want to see that piece of DNA - we're interested in just this gene for this kind of cancer.' "
His, he admits, was a very small part of a basic science research. His hope is that the small piece of the puzzle he helped uncover - which mistakes in the DNA might lead to cancer - may someday fit into another researcher's answer to thyroid cancer.
"That's one of the things that's very frustrating," Tu said. "You're young and you think, `Oh wow, I'm going to work at NIH, and I'm going to cure cancer my first year there. [But] you can't do it all right away. You can't go in there and solve the world's problems. . . . All the work I did is appealing; it's good work. But I can't say my work is going to directly lead to some kind of new treatment."
He downplays his research work.
"It's all simple ideas," Tu said, "very basic ideas that anybody could understand if they just took the time to really explore it."
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by CNB