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At 90, retired pediatrician hopes his genes will make a difference

November 14, 2009

By Arthur Lightbourn, Rancho Santa Fe Review

November 14, 2009

Healthy longevity is something retired pediatrician/cardiologist Dr. Forrest Adams has been blessed with - and he’s convinced it has a lot to do with his genes.

In fact, Adams is so convinced, in an effort to save lives, he contributed samples of his DNA and his stem cells to two separate research programs to help unlock the genetic secrets behind lifelong good health.

In the early days of his career in Minnesota, Adams — who turned 90 in September — treated hundreds of patients suffering from contagious and infectious diseases, “and I never got a thing,” he said.

“We had patients with tuberculosis, meningitis, measles and, at one time, I had 350 patients with polio. Never got it.”

“He’s a phenomenon,” said Joan, 77, his wife of 40 years. “Healthy with tremendous energy. I get tired and he never gets tired.”

Throughout a medical career spanning more than a half century — at the University of Minnesota, UCLA, UCSD, Children’s Hospital and Scripps Clinic — research has always been part of his academic challenge.

When he was 88, he volunteered to participate in and the Wellderly Study being conducted by Scripps Health.

The study is focusing on people 80 and older with no history of chronic disease who are willing to contribute samples of their DNA to help unlock the genetic secrets behind lifelong health.

To date, some 800 volunteers, including Adams, have signed up for the study which is still looking for an additional 200 volunteers to form a 1,000-person statistical base.

Wellderly Study principal investigator Eric J. Topol, M.D., a renowned cardiologist and director of Scripps Genomic Medicine, said “Looking at the genes of healthy elderly people is a unique approach to understanding the underpinning biology of health, and ways this can be inherited.

“A great many people carry the genes that cause heart attack, cancer and other diseases, but some have modifier genes that cancel out their risk - it’s nature’s way of protecting them,” Topol said.

Adams read about Topol’s Wellderly Study in this newspaper and decided to sign up two years ago.

In addition, and more recently, Adams talked his way into a newly-launched research study being conducted by The Scripps Research Institute to which he donated his stem cells. The Research Institute recently announced it had developed a method that dramatically improves the efficiency of creating stem cells from human adult tissue without the use of embryonic cells.

Adams’ stem cells, harvested from a skin biopsy taken from his shoulder, were incubated, nourished and multiplied to such a number that they are now currently being preserved and stored in liquid nitrogen.

“What are they going to do with them?” Adams said, anticipating the question. “That’s a research decision. I hope, since I’m a pediatrician, they will use them in infants and children who have serious or fatal diseases.”

But, he added, “My stem cells should also be good for Parkinson’s disease and all the many other genetic disorders.”

The hope of many researchers is that it will eventually be possible to use stem cells — which have the remarkable ability to develop into many other distinct cell types, such as nerve, heart and lung cells — to repair damaged tissue from a range of diseases and injuries.

“Just to let you know where we stand,” Adams said, “I think that about 95 percent of medical problems that humans have in the United States are genetic in origin. That leaves 5 percent that are non-genetic.

“There’s a lot of talk about the role of exercise, diet and alternative medicine. But they are only going to change 5 percent of what the medical problems are.”

Diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type 1 diabetes, and heart disease are, in his estimation, 95 percent genetically caused, and future therapies to counter those diseases will be genetically-based.

“I’ve arrived at the age of 90 and I’m very healthy,” Adams said. “We still play tennis, we walk, we travel, and I have none of those disorders.”

Adams was born in 1919 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the oldest of three sons.

“When I was 9 or 10, my father and I went to a fathers-and-sons banquet at our church and the guest speaker was Dr. Walter Judd. He was a medical missionary in western China. He gave a fascinating talk about his work and I said: ‘That’s what I want to be. I want to be like him.”

As it turned out, Adams didn’t become a medical missionary, but he did become a physician.

“I identified more with the man than the religion,” Adams said.

Adams’ formal medical education started at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, continued at the University of Minnesota where he completed his undergraduate studies, earned two master’s degrees (one in infectious diseases) and his medical degree, with specializations in pediatrics and cardiology.

A highlight of his early career was meeting and working with Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the controversial Australian “bush nurse’ who served in the Australian Army Nurse Corps in World War I, earning the nursing rank of “Sister.” She later became renowned for her progressive and innovative treatment of polio.

“We had a big polio epidemic in Minneapolis in 1942-43,” Adams said. At the time, acute polio patients were put in body casts in a procedure that neurologists thought would “rest” a patient’s inflamed nerves.

Sister Kenny, who came to the U.S. to promote her treatment methods, challenged conventional medical thinking of the time.

“She was a big lady,” Adams recalled. “Probably almost six feet. Very pompous. Most of the time, she wore a hat. Very opinionated. And the problem with the other doctors was they immediately started arguing with her. She didn’t respond well to severe questioning.

“So I learned, as a young doctor, to keep my mouth shut. And basically, as we say in the medical profession, she dropped pearls, every time, and, if you’d just listen, you learned another pearl from her.”

She applied hot packs to the patients, hand-manipulated their limbs to re-educate their muscles, and got patients out of bed and on their feet as quickly as possible. Today, we call the procedure physiotherapy.

“And lo and behold, people were getting better literally overnight and certainly within a week,” Adams recalled.

The Australian nurse was the subject of the 1946 biographical film, “Sister Kenny,” starring Rosalind Russell.

Adams was appointed the first pediatric director of the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute in Minneapolis where he cared for some 350 polio patients.

Simultaneously, he served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota from 1948 to 1952 where he was a pioneer in pediatric cardiology, best known for his work on the early diagnosis and treatment of congenital heart disease in infants.

In 1952, he was invited to join the newly forming faculty of UCLA’s medical school. During 24 years at UCLA, he directed the Marion Davies Children’s Clinic in West Los Angeles and created a Division of Pediatric Cardiology.

He was one of the first to perform heart catherizations on newborns and small infants.

He was also the first to use exercise testing of children to determine the severity of heart disease and the results of surgical treatment.

While at UCLA, he made trips to 18 countries where he lectured on cardiology as a “Goodwill Ambassador” for the U.S. State Department’s cultural exchange program.

Moving to San Diego in the early 1980s, he served as research director at Children’s Hospital, on the staff at Scripps Clinic, and as a member and later chairman of the medical advisory committee of the Public Employees Retirement System of California (Cal Pers).

His philosophy, he said, has been to make this place better than the way he found it, and, he laughed, “now that my stem cells are growing, my genes will live forever.”

To find out if you, a family member or loved one might qualify to participate in the Wellderly Study, call Sarah Topol at (858) 554-5747 or e-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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