When Research Gets Personal

This summer, an unusual twosome worked together in a Packard Center lab at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. One was a high school intern; the other, a young neurologist on a research scholarship from Turkey. Both have been touched by ALS. Two teachers in student Katherine (Kat) Yi’s hometown have the disease. For researcher Oguz Gozen, it’s even more personal: His mother has ALS.

High school intern Kat Yi, left, assisting neurologist Oguz Gozen. “Having a mother with the disease pushes me to work harder,” he says. PHOTO: BRYAN HORAN

Kat Yi got a firsthand introduction to the Center in June 2004 when she and a busload of students arrived from Northport, N.Y., with a check for $32,000—funds they had raised to honor their teachers. During a tour of the labs, Center Director Jeffrey Rothstein offered to mentor a student with a strong science aptitude. Kat, a stellar student who hopes to become a surgeon, was selected.

Fortunately, she was paired with mentor Gozen, whose will to cure ALS drives his work. As Gozen recalls, his mother’s ALS began with an unexplainable limp. At first her doctor thought she had multiple sclerosis. But when doctors diagnosed “motor neuron disease,” Gozen, then a medical student doing a rotation in the department of neurology, knew immediately they were using a euphemism for ALS.

Gozen seeks ways to protect key spinal cord neurons before ALS’s damage begins. He is also involved in NIH-sponsored translational research for ALS therapies. Research scholarships have taken him to labs all over Europe, but none, he says, compares with Hopkins. “Here you have resources, equipment and people to bounce ideas off of constantly.”

He will eventually return to his post at the Aegean University School of Medicine in Turkey.

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