An Interview with Dr. David Scadden, MD, Recipient of the 2019 ISEH Donald Metcalf Award
Interviewed by Stephen Loughran of the ISEH New Investigators Committee If you had to pick one discovery, what do you think has been your greatest contribution to science to date? At the risk of being grandiose, I would like to think that my lab helped open up the field of niche biology. First, by using an engineered mouse to alter a specific subset of bone marrow stromal cells and showing a hematopoietic phenotype. And, second, by showing that perturbing a specific set of stromal cells leads to disordered hematopoiesis and myeloid malignancy. I think these studies helped define elements of hematopoietic niches and perhaps, encouraged others to study mammalian niche biology more broadly. I don’t think there were any in vivo studies defining a mammalian niche before the work from my and Linheng Li’s labs. How did you get into the field you are working on? I have a very practical orientation driven by my training as a physician so I was interested in hematopoiesis as a way to c...