Marc Ferrell
Medical Student
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Marc Ferrell
Medical Student
Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles … if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.
Karl Popper | The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Karl Popper | The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Professional Biography:
I am a scientist and future pediatrician studying small molecule metabolism. I investigate the interface of health, informatics, and basic biology to improve healthcare and uncover the unique nature of humanity.
Humans are the most unique species on the planet due to rapid adaptations not seen in other organisms. The ability to drink cow's milk and live at high altitudes result from genetic shifts in the last few thousand years. People now thrive in nearly every climate on Earth, but recent changes are too quick even for the rapid evolution of humans. Industrialization, urbanization, and the move from a mostly outdoor to mostly indoor life have occurred too fast for evolution to keep up, resulting in simultaneous crises of metabolic and mental health as a new world of abundant calories and depersonalizing institutions clash with bodies adapted to scarce food and tribal life.
Modern health problems have to be met with behavioral and engineering interventions, but these are not possible without a firm understanding of how our bodies work in the context of the new environment of the last 100 years. The most important health problems, in terms of mortality and morbidity, are disorders of energy and biosynthesis. The leading causes of death worldwide are all heavily impacted by metabolic syndrome: brain and heart ischemia, cancer (which requires large amounts of energy to grow), diabetes. Congenital disease, often disorders of energy and vitamin metabolism, is also a major contributor to global mortality. Understanding disorders and metabolic maladaptations will be crucial to maintain healthy populations, and I am uniquely positioned to pursue this area of research.
I became interested in the connections between metabolism, environment, and health while working in the nutrition department my first year of college. The group wanted to know why a carbohydrate-free diet, better known as the ketogenic diet, sometimes improves seizures in treatment-resistant cases of epilepsy. I knew commensal microorganisms were likely to be involved, and we did not have the tools at the time to pool publicly available data from microbiome studies. Trying and largely failing to build these meta-analysis tools led me to the discipline of bioinformatics. I spent the rest of my college years contributing to a software suite called SQANTI, an annotation and quality control tool for RNA sequencing.
My exposure to both clinically-focused and basic science made me see the value in both, and the limited time I spent in the epilepsy clinic planted a seed that would later grow into a desire to practice medicine and do research. The mostly underage epilepsy patients often improved on our diet interventions and were also teaching us how the brain functions while utilizing ketones. I wanted to be a doctor but I had a problem.
My Roman Catholic background and my exposure to AM radio while driving back and forth across the rural South made me extremely wary of borrowing money. Fortunately, the NIH-funded Medical Scientist Training Program is tailor made for someone pursuing a career in academic medicine and allergic to debt. I moved to Cleveland in 2016 to start at Case Western's MSTP.
During my early years at Case Western, I looked for a niche where I could further develop my data science skills without getting away from basic biology. I also to acquire the clinical skills to meet diagnose, treat, and gather data directly from patients. The Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences department at Case-affiliated Cleveland Clinic was the ideal environment. The department is home to the largest academic mass spectrometry facility in the area as well as a bioinformatics core service.
Within Stanley Hazen's lab, I spent 5-6 years (depending on whether you count my work before formally joining the lab) testing whether unknown branches of human and microbial metabolism contribute to vascular disease. I learned how to design and run large scale chromatography and mass spectrometry experiments on older triple quadrupole systems as well as high resolution orbitrap and time-of-flight instruments. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the department, I found several years of mentorship in skills I learned in college including tissue culture and rodent procedures. Finally, I handled the lab's burden of documenting "custom computer code", which academic journals recent enacted strict rules for, as well as data visualization, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Naseer Sangwan and the metabolomics fellows (Amy, Maryam, and Ina who has a lab of her own now) and Hooman and James at UCLA were invaluable mentors in the analysis of sequencing and metabolomic and genomic data, respectively.
I finished my PhD in 2023 and returned to medical school for clinical rotations. On my Pediatric rotation I rediscovered a love of working with children and their families from so many years ago. Medical genetics is also a field I am interested in for the variety of unanswered biological and analytical questions that go with the territory. Research funding for in-house genomic analysis would make for a good clinical genetics practice, and relationships with patients with unexplained extreme phenotypes could make a good researcher.
The "niacin paper", as we call it, is published now, and it includes about half of the entire content of my dissertation. The reception is amazing: I now get to talk and email with people all over the world about niacin metabolism and dietary supplements. These days I am looking forward to residency, hoping to find a Pediatrics program that can serve as a transition to a faculty position where I can settle down and build a practice and research program over the next decade or so.
I am a scientist and future pediatrician studying small molecule metabolism. I investigate the interface of health, informatics, and basic biology to improve healthcare and uncover the unique nature of humanity.
Humans are the most unique species on the planet due to rapid adaptations not seen in other organisms. The ability to drink cow's milk and live at high altitudes result from genetic shifts in the last few thousand years. People now thrive in nearly every climate on Earth, but recent changes are too quick even for the rapid evolution of humans. Industrialization, urbanization, and the move from a mostly outdoor to mostly indoor life have occurred too fast for evolution to keep up, resulting in simultaneous crises of metabolic and mental health as a new world of abundant calories and depersonalizing institutions clash with bodies adapted to scarce food and tribal life.
Modern health problems have to be met with behavioral and engineering interventions, but these are not possible without a firm understanding of how our bodies work in the context of the new environment of the last 100 years. The most important health problems, in terms of mortality and morbidity, are disorders of energy and biosynthesis. The leading causes of death worldwide are all heavily impacted by metabolic syndrome: brain and heart ischemia, cancer (which requires large amounts of energy to grow), diabetes. Congenital disease, often disorders of energy and vitamin metabolism, is also a major contributor to global mortality. Understanding disorders and metabolic maladaptations will be crucial to maintain healthy populations, and I am uniquely positioned to pursue this area of research.
I became interested in the connections between metabolism, environment, and health while working in the nutrition department my first year of college. The group wanted to know why a carbohydrate-free diet, better known as the ketogenic diet, sometimes improves seizures in treatment-resistant cases of epilepsy. I knew commensal microorganisms were likely to be involved, and we did not have the tools at the time to pool publicly available data from microbiome studies. Trying and largely failing to build these meta-analysis tools led me to the discipline of bioinformatics. I spent the rest of my college years contributing to a software suite called SQANTI, an annotation and quality control tool for RNA sequencing.
My exposure to both clinically-focused and basic science made me see the value in both, and the limited time I spent in the epilepsy clinic planted a seed that would later grow into a desire to practice medicine and do research. The mostly underage epilepsy patients often improved on our diet interventions and were also teaching us how the brain functions while utilizing ketones. I wanted to be a doctor but I had a problem.
My Roman Catholic background and my exposure to AM radio while driving back and forth across the rural South made me extremely wary of borrowing money. Fortunately, the NIH-funded Medical Scientist Training Program is tailor made for someone pursuing a career in academic medicine and allergic to debt. I moved to Cleveland in 2016 to start at Case Western's MSTP.
During my early years at Case Western, I looked for a niche where I could further develop my data science skills without getting away from basic biology. I also to acquire the clinical skills to meet diagnose, treat, and gather data directly from patients. The Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences department at Case-affiliated Cleveland Clinic was the ideal environment. The department is home to the largest academic mass spectrometry facility in the area as well as a bioinformatics core service.
Within Stanley Hazen's lab, I spent 5-6 years (depending on whether you count my work before formally joining the lab) testing whether unknown branches of human and microbial metabolism contribute to vascular disease. I learned how to design and run large scale chromatography and mass spectrometry experiments on older triple quadrupole systems as well as high resolution orbitrap and time-of-flight instruments. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the department, I found several years of mentorship in skills I learned in college including tissue culture and rodent procedures. Finally, I handled the lab's burden of documenting "custom computer code", which academic journals recent enacted strict rules for, as well as data visualization, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Naseer Sangwan and the metabolomics fellows (Amy, Maryam, and Ina who has a lab of her own now) and Hooman and James at UCLA were invaluable mentors in the analysis of sequencing and metabolomic and genomic data, respectively.
I finished my PhD in 2023 and returned to medical school for clinical rotations. On my Pediatric rotation I rediscovered a love of working with children and their families from so many years ago. Medical genetics is also a field I am interested in for the variety of unanswered biological and analytical questions that go with the territory. Research funding for in-house genomic analysis would make for a good clinical genetics practice, and relationships with patients with unexplained extreme phenotypes could make a good researcher.
The "niacin paper", as we call it, is published now, and it includes about half of the entire content of my dissertation. The reception is amazing: I now get to talk and email with people all over the world about niacin metabolism and dietary supplements. These days I am looking forward to residency, hoping to find a Pediatrics program that can serve as a transition to a faculty position where I can settle down and build a practice and research program over the next decade or so.
