Building Basic Science in Pittsburgh

On the occasion of the retirement of Dr. Arthur Levine from the University of Pittsburgh, we asked him about his career and what he sees ahead for Pitt and UPMC. For the second half of the 31 years he spent at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he was scientific director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Then, in 1998, Dr. Levine came to the University of Pittsburgh to be its senior vice chancellor for the Health Sciences and dean of the School of Medicine. He became widely recognized for building an academic environment in which talented faculty conducted exemplary research that pulled in substantial federal grants, earning Pitt and UPMC a national reputation for medical innovation and excellence. He stepped down from those roles in 2020 to oversee Pitt’s Brain Institute. He retired from the university at the end of June, but will continue conducting research at Pitt into the fundamentals of Alzheimer’s disease. 

Q: Can you discuss your background and how you got to the NIH?

A: I grew up in Cleveland and later went to a novel boarding school: The Windsor Mountain School, a small, co-ed boarding school focused on adolescents and their academic strengths. It was founded by Max and Gertrude Bondy, who started a school in Europe but were chased out by the Nazis. There were 12 or 14 students in my graduating class. It was one of the most important, novel schools in the country. I went from the Berkshires in Massachusetts to Manhattan for college at Columbia, where I majored in Russian Literature. In those days, most medical schools wanted people who were strictly pre-med, not Russian Lit majors who worked off Broadway as I had. So, I went to the Chicago Medical School, which welcomed students with broad interests — especially in the humanities. I did my residency at the University of Minnesota, where I gained experience in both pediatric and internal medicine. Minnesota was one of the most important sites for young physicians who wanted to become researchers. And when the military draft for doctors came, I had the choice between going to Ho Chi Minh City or Bethesda, Maryland. I went to Maryland and became an officer in the U.S Public Health Service and built a career at the NIH.  The fact that I ended up at NIH with my background was itself quite special.

Q: How did you decide to make a change and come to Pittsburgh? You had big shoes to fill in succeeding Dr. Thomas Detre. How did that evolve?

A: I thought I would spend my whole career at the NIH. I was very dedicated to it and I’m very disturbed by the lack of support there now. But in 1998, my daughters were grown and out of the house, and my late wife, Ruth, was an artist with a career that was portable. Both of us thought it would be fun to do something else and shake up the soul. I’d had a successful career at one of the most recognized scientific institutions in the world, and I had been offered but declined many good jobs. Then I was offered an especially attractive job in Pittsburgh. It was an excellent match for who I was and what I wanted to achieve.

My vision in the next phase [of my career] was to bring strong basic science to Pittsburgh, and to succeed Tom Detre. Tom was a psychiatrist from Yale and he brought many fine colleagues to Pittsburgh to develop one of the top departments of psychiatry. He was so successful that it was logical that he was given a broader job [of] running not only Pitt’s six health science schools, but also establishing the framework for UPMC. Mark Nordenberg, Jeff Romoff, and the board felt that although Tom had achieved a great deal, they wanted to add strong, basic fundamental research in the medical school.

Q: You’re credited with building the university’s basic science focus. How did you do that?

A: The challenge was to bring the world’s leading young scientists to Pittsburgh. It’s still a challenge.  Detre used to say Pittsburgh was a place “you fly over, but don’t land.” It was a gamble for me to leave the NIH, as it was for the people I was trying to recruit. I wanted to recruit top-tier talent from the NIH and elsewhere, and build basic science in areas that hadn’t been established in Pittsburgh or anywhere else. One of the areas was computational biology, which is using computer science to further develop our insight into biology. Ours was the first such department in a medical school in the country. We also developed the Department of Structural Biology — another first. Many of those I recruited became members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; we went from having no members to having eight.  For me, my most important career achievement has been recruiting and retaining talent. Each of the top people I recruited went on to have great careers in science and benefitted the human condition.

Q: How did you work with and help build UPMC?

A: UPMC is an academic medical center. That’s different from community hospitals. The association with the medical school means there’s discovery science, and the translation of discovery science to the bedside. Conversely, the stronger the medical center, the stronger the faculty we could recruit. UPMC now has a commanding and compelling recognition nationally and internationally as a place for excellent medical care, thanks in part to discovery science and its translation to the bedside. Examples of Pitt’s stellar physician-researchers include Jonas Salk and Tom Starzl, as well as one of my heroes, Bernie Fisher, who was one of the first physician-scientists to truly understand the biology of cancer. His work was monumental. I also worked intimately with Jeff Romoff. He was born in the Bronx and I came from Shaker Heights, yet we had the same values. The capstone for me was the recruiting of Dr. Jose Alain Sahel in 2016. Last year, he won the prestigious Wolf Prize in Medicine for the landmark efforts of Jose and his collaborator to restore sight in the fully blind using a molecular approach. I expect he’ll soon be elected to the National Academy. He’s built what is likely the best vision research and treatment center in the world here in Pittsburgh. Sahel left France because of the history of antisemitism there, which he felt was unsafe for himself and his family. He had offers from everywhere. Everyone wanted him. I stepped in at the last minute and was able to talk him into coming to Pittsburgh. I couldn’t have brought him here  without the help of my wife, Linda. His family wanted three houses next to each other near the orthodox synagogue. Linda is a real estate agent who grew up here and has a very extensive network. She managed to find three houses not on the market and talked the owners into selling.

Q: What role did you have in building Pitt’s and UPMC’s federal research funding? And where do you see Pitt and UPMC in the future of the medical research world?

A: I recruited the talent, and they’re the ones who got the NIH grants. I feel some guilt in having built so much excellent NIH-funded research because now there is so much to lose! I was succeeded in 2020 by Dr. Anantha Shekhar, a successful entrepreneur from Indiana University, as medical school dean and senior vice chancellor for the Health Sciences. The university thought there had to be other sources of funding in addition to the NIH to support research. It was looking for someone who could take advantage of all that I and others had built, and leverage that toward the marketplace. In other words, take some of the discovery science and put it in a bottle. I’m concerned now because of how the government is treating basic science. Cutting grant funding will push talented researchers out of the country or, worse, out of science entirely. Important studies might not finish or might not even start. That will imperil biomedical advances, which means that new treatments, potential cures, and novel prevention strategies will take longer to achieve or won’t be discovered. I am deeply concerned about the toll that will take on the future of biomedical research and on people’s health and lives.