The Impossible Heart

Stefan Kren, who joined Taylor’s team after Ott left, thinks that, for Taylor, being a woman in the male bastion that is Big Science has been a challenge, one she doesn’t like to talk about. “Doris doesn’t mince words,” Kren says. “When a famous male scientist tells you in no uncertain terms you’ve messed up, you automatically cower and say he’s brilliant, but if a woman does, she’s the b-word.”

But it isn’t her gender per se that’s made her an inviting target in her male-dominated field. It’s how she thinks. Women are expected to be meek and accommodating, to perform certain “biologically appropriate” roles, to be followers, to be the meticulous data collectors. Whereas a man might be permitted to take risks and break rules, a woman is suspect unless she follows the conventional protocol, which, in science, means the incremental reductionist method that keeps researchers inside the box until every question is answered.

Taylor respectfully disagrees with those who regard reductionism as sacrosanct. It’s fine as far as it goes, she says, but for her it doesn’t go far enough. “What is a hypothesis? It’s a hunch, and then you go find all the data you can to back up that hunch—or not.” Hypothesis is also defined as the process of attempting to falsify a hunch through experimentation, and Taylor’s approach, if not heretical, is regarded as reckless by some.

While it’s tempting to attribute to that extra Y chromosome Taylor’s passion and openness, treatment of her team as family, willingness to collaborate, and faith in intuition, she will have none of it. What makes her a good teacher, for instance, is a sense of values, priorities, conscious decision-making, and intent, not some quirk of biology. “I’m good at articulating in a fairly straightforward way what we do, bringing together absolutely disparate thoughts and ideas.” To which she might add “without fear of consequences.”

“Like that New York Times guy said in ’98, if it was simple or easy somebody else would’ve done it,” she says. “It’s true we want to make a difference. So we want to go for the things that are likely to work. There are so many things we could’ve done. We could’ve said, ‘Let’s transplant cells and then slice the heart and look at them’ or ‘Let’s transplant cells and see if they make a difference in the ability of the heart to function. If they do, we can figure out how. If they don’t, we stop or we go back and figure out if we did the experiment wrong.’

“We’re never going to understand every detail. That’s where my mantra, ‘Give nature the tools and get out of the way,’ comes in for me. That’s what the whole cell therapy piece taught me [at Duke]—that we can wait the rest of our lives and understand exactly what every one of those cells does or we can start trying to understand it enough to make it safe and effective. And then we can go ahead and try to make a difference in somebody’s life. Tell ’em the truth. Tell ’em what we know and when we think it’s safe. ‘It’s an experiment, but here’s what we know. If you’re on board, you’re on board.’ ”

Her assignment when she was given her state-of-the-art lab and plush corner office on the seventh floor of the Mayo Building on the Minneapolis campus was to help make the U of M one of the world’s top research institutions, whatever that took. Minnesota’s weather terrified her at first, and its chilly social customs seemed a far cry from southern hospitality. But she was given a taste of something sweeter than a mint julep when she took the decell idea that had been rejected by the National Institutes of Health to the university’s Academic Health Center and was handed $250,000—though it was a pittance by NIH standards.

She has since shown the world what can be done on a relative shoestring, and now the NIH wants to fund her research to the tune of millions. What she and her team can do with that kind of money should make every Minnesotan’s heart beat a little faster.

“Ask My sister about the ants,” Taylor says toward the end of a recent conversation. If you were to focus on the species that put Doris on the road to science stardom, it wouldn’t be rats, pigs, or even people. Remember that National Science Foundation project? It would be ants.

Juliana Taylor hesitates a few seconds before telling the story. “Yeah, it’s true,” she says. “Doris and Dan made me drink red ant poison. They didn’t think it would do anything. They were just curious, I guess.” The twins were ten, Juliana only four. She nearly died. “You know those chemistry sets kids used to get?” Juliana asks. “Doris wanted that chemistry set so bad, and when she finally got it for Christmas—oh, the stuff she came up with! The vile sulfur smells! Something was always exploding at our house. They shouldn’t put stuff like that in the hands of children. I’ve always said, though, ‘Someday Doris is going to win the Nobel Prize.’ ”

People still claim center stage in Taylor’s life. She and her sister talk on the phone every day, and usually the topic is Juliana’s eighteen-year-old son, Taylor Forrest, who spent a month working in his aunt’s lab last year. Doris concedes she treated him as if he were her own son. While she misses the South, especially her family and her colleagues at Duke, Taylor says she’s made “wonderful” friends in Minnesota, including her partner, who brought to the relationship three teenaged children. It’s taken time and emotional energy, but Doris “is a Minnesotan now,” Juliana says. “Except when it’s minus-15 and she’ll call me and say, ‘They’re wearing Bermuda shorts!’ ”

Taylor hopes that with the NIH now apparently eager to fund her research (“We’ll believe it when we see it,” she hastens to say, because she hasn’t written the proposal yet), she’ll be able to attract more young scientists to her adopted state to work by her side, trusting their crazy ideas, thinking outside the box, and making a difference the way she was taught by her mother.

Julia Taylor died two years ago. She lived long enough to see pictures of her daughter’s beating bio-artificial heart, though not the headlines when the story finally broke on January 13. “But do you want to know the coolest thing?” Doris Taylor says. “January 13 is Mama’s birthday.”

Bonnie Blodgett is a St. Paul freelance writer whose book on smell will be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2009.