Laurie Glimcher: Merging cell biology and immune function

T rained in research by some of the giants of immunology, Laurie Glimcher is herself a major force in that fi eld. Most of her career has fo-cused on understanding how different subsets of immune cells develop and are regulated (1). However, Glimcher is known in cell biology circles for her discovery of XBP-1 (2), a transcription factor that turned out to be important in lipogenesis (3) and in the ER stress or unfolded protein response (UPR). Determined to follow an interesting lead wherever it will take her, Glimcher devotes part of her time toward understanding the interplay of ER stress with immune function and neurodegenera-tion (4, 5). Meanwhile, she continues to explore the regulation of immune function , while also making waves in the field of osteobiology (6). We spoke with her about how she's driven her career across professional and disciplinary boundaries. As an MD, what made you want to pursue research on top of being a doctor? It was the quest for knowledge, and the questions that went with it that drew me in. I became fascinated by immunology when I was a first-year medical student at Har-vard. I was curious about how the immune system is regulated and why it is dysregulated in autoim-mune diseases—when the cells of your immune system start attacking your own body. In my fourth year of medical school I spent basically all of my elective time— about nine months—in Harvey Cantor's lab. While I was there, we identified a protein that would later become known as Nk1.1, which ended up being pretty valuable in immunology circles, and for which I received the Soma Weiss Award. That was particularly meaningful to me because my father, who had done his own medical training and spent all of his career at Harvard, had won that award 26 years earlier, and because I was the first woman to win it. I guess you could call that a turning point for me. You didn't abandon medicine for research right away, though? No. I fi nished one year of internship and one year of residency because my husband , whom I met at medical school, was doing three years of residency at Harvard. By the time I was in my second year of residency, I was already casting around for research projects to do. It wasn't that I was bored, it was just that being a physician …