Christine Jacobs, age 28, discovered how bacteria know when to defend against antibiotics like penicillin, activating a gene that produces beta-lactamase, an enzyme that protects the bacteria. "This is great biochemistry and molecular biology," said Thomas Cech, the chair of the judging panel, "but it is also medically important if we're to develop new, successful antibiotics."
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Jacobs's research was more than academically rigorous; it required that she work in five cities in four countries: the United States, France, Belgium, and Sweden. Said Jacobs, "I thought it was exciting to pack my two suitcases to live in different places." She worked in laboratories in St. Louis, Paris, Liège, Boston, then Stockholm.
"It's an unusual way of doing a Ph.D. thesis," said Jacobs, "but it allowed me to take advantage of what each lab was doing, because they were each expert in studying different aspects of my question." She related that she found mentors in each laboratory who helped her along the way. She was able to address her research from different angles, then tie the pieces together into an important discovery. Jacobs's work helps us to understand the mechanism behind bacterial resistance; besides its clinical applications for developing effective treatments, it solves several questions about bacterial physiology.
Jacobs is no stranger to winning -- or losing. For 15 years, since the age of nine, she played competitive badminton in Belgium, where that sport is considerably more popular than in the United States. During her youth, she won the national title five different times as a "lady single," and won many other times in the ladies double and mixed double categories. She had hoped to win the national title as an adult: "But I often could not participate because it was the same time of my finals at the university. Once I made arrangements with my professors to have my oral exams before, so that I could participate, but I broke my wrist the week before." Jacobs can no longer play badminton because of surgery on her shoulder; instead, she has recently taken to windsurfing.
When asked how she plans to spend the $20,000 prize, she said, "It's not real at all to me yet. I haven't actually thought about it." Later, she added, "I would love to go to Hawaii to windsurf. And I would like to make a nice present to my mother too, but I have not found a good idea so far." She related that it is very important to her that she thank her mother for being a great role model. Said Jacobs, "When my father abandoned the family when I was 16, my mother made it a priority to give her three children the best education and moral support. She made a lot of financial sacrifices."
Jacobs plans to keep conducting research. "My wishes for the future are to get a position in a top university, which would allow me to start my own laboratory of research with excellent facilities." For her, "excellent" does not mean extravagant, nor necessarily comfortable, but that she has the resources to make important discoveries for science and society. Currently working as a postdoctorate (postdoc) at Stanford University, she is studying the cell cycle and cell polarity in Caulobacter crescentrus (a bacterial model for learning more about cellular development and differentiation, which results in the cell taking on new properties). She is most pleased that the Pharmacia Biotech & Science Prize means that her winning essay will be published in the journal Science, giving her work a broad audience in the science community.
Ms. Jacobs worked at the following labs for her dissertation:
Staffan Normark's laboratory at Washington University, St. Louis,
United States
Jean-Marie Frère's laboratory at the University of Liège, Belgium Jean van
Heijenoort's laboratory at the University of Paris-Orsay, Paris, France
James T. Park's laboratory at Tufts University, Boston, United States
Staffan Normark's laboratory at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Normark
had since moved from the United States to Sweden, where he is from)