Paul Herrling

First Person | Paul Herrling Courtesy of Ruder Finn When Paul Herrling didn't do his homework at his Swiss boarding school, the facility's science-loving director devised unusual punishments. The then-teenaged Herrling, now Novartis' head of corporate research, had to catalog the man's collection of crickets, which the director had recovered from ice, ages old, on a nearby Italian mountain. "He was studying glacial repopulation," says Herrling. The discipline, and the fervor of the director's science lectures, opened Herrling's eyes to biology. "With every lesson, I was learning absolutely astonishing stuff," he explains. Herrling was hired in 1975 when the Swiss government, he says, was telling drug houses to hire their own instead of the better-trained English scientists. Multilingual and well traveled, Herrling visits Singapore six times a year, where he directs the newly established Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases. He spent his youth in Alexandria, Egypt. He makes the most of his time on the road. An accomplished antiquarian, Herrling has amassed more than 1,000 old and rare science books. The collection includes some Darwins and those of the French phylogenist George Cuvier. A favorite is an 1857 first edition by Louis Agassiz, Harvard University's first zoologist, who wrote about American turtles. The shopkeeper, ignorant of the book's value but conscious of its large size and dust-attraction properties, begged Herrling to buy it, for less than $50. The plea wasn't necessary. "I couldn't believe it." What was your PhD thesis about? Cataglyphis bicolor. My thesis instructor, who had worked on the navigation of bees, wanted to find another insect with the same behaviors but that could not fly. In view of my North Africa origins, he asked me to find a suitable site for a research station to study these desert ants. I found them near Maharès, in Tunisia. My job was to find out whether there were specific receptors in the eye that were especially sensitive to ultraviolet, polarization analyzers. I found them. Do you miss the lab? Yes, that's where you make some of your best friends and your best enemies. How do you keep up with current research? Two major ways. Scientific reading is done during travel. The other [is] a much, much, more efficient way: When I am interested in a topic, I can invite the best person in the world to give a talk, or go to see them. I ask a lot of questions, and that's how I learn. If you stop learning for a few months, it's very, very difficult to get back. What is your favorite paper? We described the electrophysiological effects of NMDA [N-methyl-D-asparate] in cat, which were distinctly different from those of other excitatory amino receptor agonists. We don't really depend on paper numbers in industry. You will see that several of [mine] cover a period of time and a larger number of experiments. Which current Novartis projects have the most marketable promise? One area is probably oncology, simply because of the encouragement and exhilaration and kick we got out of Gleevec. This drug is not only a breakthrough but the scientific proof of the concept that attacking cancer through the specific biological mechanism causing it is feasible. We got lucky with Gleevec. It took 30 years to understand the biology of the leukemia it addresses and to develop this new type of therapy. The other area is Alzheimer disease. When I was head of the nervous system group, [we] developed one of the first models with plaques. We're to the point where we can test compounds clinically. One of the key things is that transgenes helped us to select among many hypotheses relating to the causes of the disease. They showed that the deposition of beta amyloid was a key step in the disease process. [Transgenes comprised] the first disease model with a homology to the human disease; we used the human mutated gene found in some Alzheimer families. So future drug discovery looks relatively easy? No. We are still only at the beginning of understanding the biology of diseases. We also need a cultural change in biological science, one where biologists become much more quantitative in order to develop the modeling tools needed to address the complexity of biological processes. We probably need more physicists in biology labs. Describe one of your multidisciplinary initiatives. We have biologists working ... with chemists and engineers designing high-throughput, miniaturized technologies to measure the interaction of synthetic molecules with biological pathways. How often does a pharmaceutical house get lucky? You have to accept that the probability of your drug project actually making it is always minimal. Are you under pressure to produce? Of course. The fascination is what keeps you alive. 1. P.L. Herrling et al., "Effects of excitatory amino acids and their antagonists on membrane and action potentials of cat caudate neurones," J Physiol, 339:207-22, 1983. function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false if (document.frm.score[0].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[1].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[2].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[3].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[4].checked) result = true; if (!result) alert("Please select") return result; } .myradio{background-color : #94bee5} Please indicate on a 1 - 5 scale how strongly you would recommend this article to your colleagues? Not recommended 1 2 3 4 5 Highly recommended Please register your vote

Paul Herrling

The Scientist Staff

First Person | Paul Herrling

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