Michael J. Borowitz
- What do you feel was your major contribution to the field of Cytometry?
- I have, from the beginning of my career, been involved in clinical cytometry, particularly in the area of leukemia and lymphoma, and, broadly speaking, the contributions for which I am most noted have been educational. I authored the first NCCLS guidelines for immunphenotyping of leukemias, and organized and participated in several consensus conferences designed to standardize the practice of flow cytometry in these areas. For more than 15 years I have been engaged in teaching a practical course on leukemia flow cytometry, and from this course developed an educational CD-ROM that has had fairly wide distribution, and been well received. Although more people likely know of me from these educational efforts, I like to think that my 20 plus years studying childhood leukemia by flow cytometry, most recently in the area of detection of minimal residual disease following therapy, have also been considered significant to those engaged in this research area.
- What drove you to this achievement?
- What drives anyone? Along the way, I can’t think of a single time that I had my eye on a major prize at the end of a complicated endeavor. Rather, everything I’ve ever done has seemed like a logical extension of what I was doing at the time. It is only in retrospect, looking back, that I can say that at some level it was important to me to play my small role in improving the lot of children with leukemia. Maybe that was always there as a motivation all along, but it wasn’t a conscious one.
- Why was it that your team was able to do it? Was it a special skill? Sudden insight?
- I have two skills that I think made my contributions possible. I am considered a good teacher because I am good at digesting the essential elements of a complicated problem, and presenting them in an organized and palatable way. This skill is particularly useful in building and writing consensus documents, because it makes it possible to wade through the cacophony of dissimilar opinions and find common ground, something I like to think I was able to do. A similar but not identical skill served me well in my research endeavors too. I don’t plan experiments in the usual way, having one day’s result dictate the next day’s work; rather, I collect data in large bunches – I can safely say that I am the only person in the world to have performed flow cytometric immunophenotyping of something approaching ten thousand cases of childhood leukemia – and what I seem to be able to do is to see patterns in complex data and figure out how these patterns correlate with other things that one can measure.
- Was someone else’s work or influence fundamental in driving your work? Please describe.
- I have had so many colleagues and collaborators along the way that it is impossible to acknowledge all of their contributions. Obviously everything I have done in the area of childhood leukemia required an incredible effort on the part of literally hundreds of people, from the oncology group leadership who saw the value in my work, the clinicians who ran the studies, and the data managers who saw to it that I got samples from well over a hundred different institutions. But I want to digress here and give a specific acknowledgment in a different area. One of the things for which I am known is a strategy for leukemia phenotyping that relies on identifying blasts based on displays of CD45 and right angle scatter. And while it is true that an early paper that I wrote was instrumental in popularizing this technique, the original observation was not mine. Mike Loken and Leon Terstappen first noted it, and Greg Stelzer and Keith Shults recognized the practical implications. All I did was teach people about it.
- How do you think your work impacted the field of Cytometry?
- Impact is not something for me to assess. I will, instead, relate an anecdote. Two years ago I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Wallace Coulter Distinguished Lectureship award. After my presentation, Cathy McCoy, whom I have known even longer than her husband Phil has, got up and polled the audience, asking for them who there had ever heard me lecture or taken a course from me; nearly every hand went up. It was arguably the most touching moment of my career. At least in that audience, I may have had an impact.
- Michael J. Borowitz, MD Ph.D.
- Professor of Pathology and Oncology
- Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions