Thomas J. Meade
Thomas J. Meade is a highly successful inventor and entrepreneur, a founder of several tech companies worth hundreds of millions. He is also the Eileen M. Foell Professor of Cancer Research, as well as the Director of the Center for Advanced Molecular Imaging, and a Professor of Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, and of Radiology, all at Northwestern University.
Meade’s many achievements in science began with a childhood love of astronomy. His very first grant as an independent investigator, from Research Corporation, helped him become a productive scientist.
“My folks took us camping a lot,” he recalls of his childhood in upstate New York. “I could look up at the night sky and just be astonished at what I could see with no city lights. So that sparked my interest in science.” Today Meade has an 11-inch Newtonian reflector that he still takes out for deep-sky observations.
But growing up in Rochester, New York, he also craved sunlight. His older sister lived in Phoenix, so, at age 15, he hitchhiked to Phoenix, Arizona. Meade said he became an expert hitchhiker as a teenager traveling around to chess tournaments, another of his youthful passions.
He enrolled in Arizona State University, which, in 1976, was not known as the bastion of academic excellence it is today. “When they see my track record, people ask me why I went to ASU,” Meade says. ”I needed photons, in other words, I needed the sunlight.”
A Need to Do Real Science
By the second semester of his sophomore year, he also felt he needed to do real science in a working lab. “Because laboratory courses were just that,’’ he said. “They were prescribed, documented experiments that weren’t really experiments. You learned how to do the experiment, but there was nothing new to learn. I wanted to do the real thing. I loved learning the sky and the stars, and I wanted to turn that into doing actual experiments as opposed to lab courses.”
Undergraduates working in labs was not encouraged at ASU in that era. But Meade was determined. “I was going to get in a lab and I didn’t care if I would be cleaning glassware, or tables, or what. It didn’t matter.”
He also didn’t care what kind of lab it was. He started his quest in the biology building, the first stop in a cluster of science buildings, taking the elevator up and going down the hallways knocking on the door of every professor – the answer, invariably, was no -- and gradually working his way to the basement.
“I get through biology, and I can’t remember what the next building was, and then there’s geology, and then there was chemical engineering, and then there was physics, and now I’m in the chemistry building and there are four wings, like fingers. So I went through A, B, C, and D. Now, four-and half or five hours into this -- that’s how long it’s taken me knocking on all these doors -- I’m in the D wing. I mean this is it, so I’m a little bit depressed and dejected…”
He recalls that he was about to push the elevator button to descend to his last shot, in the basement… “And there in the elevator was my freshman chemistry teacher, Therald Moeller [1913-1997], a legend in inorganic chemistry. He had moved to Tempe from the University of Illinois in Urbana. “That bit of information is important,” Meade notes, “because the real, true birthplace of inorganic chemistry on this continent back in the ‘30s and ‘40s was the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.”
In addition, Moeller came from a school that routinely encouraged undergraduates to work in labs.
“Here’s Your New Undergrad”
“So I get in the elevator and he sort of recognizes me – ‘Weren’t you in my general chemistry class?’ And I said yes, Professor Moeller. He says, ‘You look a little down. What’s the matter?’ Now, by the way, the elevator is going from first to second to third, and on its way it’s stopping and people are getting on and off, so I was doing a true elevator talk – for the previous five hours I’ve been told to go to “the neither regions” by every single professor, and I just wanted to get in a lab and do real science. We get to his floor, which is on the top of the building, and instead of getting out of the elevator he pushed the button for the basement. We went right back down. He was a very large man, big hands, I remember. And he took me to his laboratory and he put that large paw on the back of my neck and he looked in the lab and there was his was his leading postdocs, and he said, ‘Joe, here’s your new undergrad.’ So I became an undergraduate student in an inorganic chemistry lab. And that was it.”
Meade spent the rest of the year in Moeller’s lab doing what might seem trivial to the uninformed -- drying solvents. But he says it taught him the fundamentals of doing hard-core science,.
During the second semester of Meade’s junior year, Moeller directed him to write a proposal for his senior thesis. When he submitted it at the start of his senior year, Meade recalls, “I’ve never seen more red on a page in my life, and what Professor Moeller taught me was priceless. He said, ‘Tom before we go any further with writing your Senior Thesis, I want you to retake eighth-grade English.
Not in a class of eighth graders of course, but get the materials and ‘its high time you learned English.’ And I did. And by the second semester of my senior year, I was producing scientific manuscripts that were actually in English. And it changed everything.”
Meade followed Moeller’s advice on where to go to graduate school. He earned a master’s degree in biochemistry at Ohio State, followed by a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry. He did his postdoctoral research and radiological training at Harvard Medical School and finished with a post-doctoral fellowship with the legendary Harry B. Gray at the California Institute of Technology.
Meade was recruited to return to Harvard Medical School in Radiology as an assistant professor, only to realize after a couple of years that he was not doing the type of research he yearned for. So, he returned to Caltech and joined the Division of Biology and the Beckman Institute, which was dedicated in 1990. He arrived there August of 1991. After what he describesas the most singularly difficult decision of his career, he left Caltech and moved to Northwestern University, where he is currently The Eileen M. Foell Professor of Cancer Research and Professor in the Departments of Chemistry, Molecular Biosciences, Neurobiology, Biomedical Engineering, and Radiology -- “Yup, I go to a lot of faculty meetings,” he said.
Chemistry of Life Processes Institute
Meade was recruited to Northwestern so that he and his long-term friend and colleague, Professor Tom O’Halloran, could start what is called the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute (CLP).
“Tom had this idea for a long time, but it was really piggybacking off an idea of Dr. Arnold Beckman and Professor Harry Gray that they had presented to the scientific communities in early 1980s: chemists and biologists occupying the same space,” Meade said. “They were trying -- and succeeded -- to have researchers in a facility in which no two disciplines of the same flavor could be adjacent to each other. And so a chemist was now being plunked down between two biologists, a neuro and a developmental. And of course that had a significant impact because my neighbors were doing science that I wasn’t familiar with, but I could absorb and start to do things with them.”
Currently, Meade said, CLP has chemists, biologists, engineers and clinicians in the same building. “All the faculty are on a bridge between two lobes of the Institute, and no two disciplines can be in the same office suite. So chemists, biologists, engineers and clinicians are all mixed up and not by discipline. Institute members who have their labs there are tripping over each other every single day. And that leads to trans-collaborations.”
At Caltech, Meade recalled having three or four collaborators over about 12 years, while at CLP he currently has 16 active collaborators, which he defines as someone he’s published with at least twice. “And eight or nine of them, many more than twice.”
Thirty years ago the Beckman Institute was one of the first places to actively promote cross-collaborations, Meade notes, “and it was led and directed by Harry Gray. I had worked for Harry as post-doc so we were already very close friends. I’ve collaborated with Harry for many years. Still do. He’s served on the science advisory boards of two of my companies, Clinical Micro Sensors and Ohmx, and has probably made the most profound impact on my scientific career as a mentor and as a dear, dear friend.”
Meade is also the director of Northwest’s Center for Advanced Molecular Imaging. It’s based on an idea he also credits to Harry Gray. “At Caltech they put in advanced technology cores and hired someone to run them. And these were cores where researchers could come and do science on a fee-for-service basis. It serves the needs of dozens of researchers and it is a powerful recruiting tool.”
At Northwestern that concept translates into a multimodal imaging platform, “multimodal meaning magnetic resonance, optical, positron emission tomography, SPECT – single photon emission computer tomography -- ultrasound, and more,” Meade said. “I wanted to build an imaging center that had all of those modalities. Why? Because each one has its strength and weakness.” Meade helped to raise the money from donors and oversaw the facility’s design to get “a center that went from molecular resolution to mouse. That’s what we have.”
First Research Corporation Grant
Meade received his first grant from Research Corporation in 1992, for an investigation of electron transfer in DNA. “I was asking the question, do electrons go faster through something that’s got Pi orbital stacking? What I wanted to determine whether the p bonds were close enough together so that I could run electrons through them, rather than through the sigma bonds, and see if it was faster. It had to do with my interest in photosynthesis. Basically what I was looking for was a ‘p-way’ for electrons. Well, I looked at DNA and I said I see base pairs that have a lot of p character as part of their inherent structure and I bet they have excellent overlap. Turns out they don’t (well almost don’t), they’re too far apart.”
Out of that and subsequent studies he formed the first of five companies, Clinical Micro Sensors, in 1995 with one of his postdocs, Jon Faiz Kayyem. The company was bought by Motorola in 2001 for $300 million and is currently known as GenMark.
“But the long and the short of it is that my very first grant from Research Corp became a company that ultimately went public,” Meade said.
Meanwhile, another part of Meade’s lab was working on magnetic resonance imaging agents, which eventually led to his second company, MetaProbe. For that enterprise he turned to Research Corporation Technologies (RCT) for administrative support. Beginning in the 1940s Research Corporation was a pioneer in technology transfer services. Those functions were separated from the Foundation in the form of RCT in 1987. The two entities have no connection today.
“MetaProbe was formed in 1999,” Meade recalled. “RCT ran the business side of the company from Tucson and we had a lab for MetaProbe in Pasadena adjacent to Caltech. I couldn’t have done it without Research Corporation Technologies. So you might say I’ve had two overlaps with Research Corporation, and both have led to successful companies.”
Besides Clinical Micro Sensors and Metaprobe, Meade has also founded the companies PreDx and Ohmx. They are developing handheld devices for protein and DNA detection, and bioactivated magnetic resonance (MR) contrast agents for in vivo imaging of cancer.
Steadfastly Academic
Over the years, Meade has remained steadfastly academic, avoiding the intense gravitational pull of industry dollars.
“If I had left Caltech to go to Clinical Micro Sensors, I would have made 10 times what I’ve made. Maybe 20,” he said. “But that would have meant I couldn’t work on what I wanted to work on in other areas, like imaging. Once you’re in the industrial world, you’re working for the fiduciary gain of the company, and it‘s that topic and only that topic. I wanted to keep exploring academically. I liked the notion of taking undergraduates, graduates and postdoctoral people to train them as I’d been trained. And I actually enjoy teaching. I’m not suggesting that I want to teach a lot, but I don’t mind. And I like the academic environment where I can help creative young people and train them and do problems that I’m interested in working on. If I went to a company that would limit me.”
His advice to early career scientists is: “If you’re pre tenure do not start companies. It’s a distraction. You don’t have time. Hold off. If you’re going to use Research Corporation money to start companies, do it after you’ve got tenure.”
Meade is rigorous in his separation of his academic and corporate duties. “During the day I never mix my company time with my academic time. So my board meetings are after hours at the companies. And my (corporate) scientific advisory board meetings? Never during the day.”
How does he balance academic and corporate duties? “It just makes for 11- and 13-hour days,” he said. “So on average you’re looking at 68 to 75 hours a week. And that’s over 30 years. But it’s been very rewarding.”
For Meade, the ultimate reward comes down to one word:
“Why do I stay in science, why have I always been a scientist? Why do I look at the sky? Why did I want to get into a lab when I was a sophomore in college? And why did I want to stay in the academic environment when I could have gone to a company? Discovery. I continue to be passionate about discovering things. So if I was going to give advice to somebody pre tenure, I would say: Aim high and be passionate about discovery. “
