Unlocking the Secrets of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Cancer

Pernilla began our interview by describing her background. “I was born in Umeå in Northern Sweden and grew up there until I was in 1^st grade. Then we moved to Gothenburg. I attended high school there, studied the natural science program. When thinking about what to do next, I had heard about Chalmers. It sounded like a fun place; I had been to a party there once. I liked maths. I applied to the Physics and Chemistry Programs at Chalmers. I wasn’t admitted to the Physics Program because the competition was very intensive, but I made it into the Chemistry Program – not that I necessarily wanted to study chemistry, but I wanted to join Chalmers. 

The program was Chemical Engineering, but after a week of orientation activities I realized that I did not want to become a chemical engineer working with big machines in some factory. I therefore geared my courses towards more basic chemistry. I spent my last year in the Master’s program at Imperial College in London, England. That is where I developed my appetite for doing research and working in a laboratory, trying out new ideas and figuring out things that nobody had done before. By now I was setting my sights on a doctorate. I returned to Sweden and worked on my PhD in Physical Chemistry with focus on proteins, DNA, and other small molecules that create life.”

With her PhD from Chalmers, Pernilla decided to continue her academic career in the United States. “I always liked to travel and see new places. When you study towards a PhD, you can apply for funding to do a few years of research in someone else’s lab. I applied for Swedish funds to go abroad, got the funding and wanted to go somewhere exciting and fun. I ended up at California Institute of Technology (CalTech) outside of Los Angeles. I stayed there for two years and then learnt about the possibility to do an academic career and become a professor. This sounded exciting.“ 

She didn’t fancy the idea of going back to Sweden quite yet. She started applying to several different universities and was invited to a couple of interviews, one of which was at Tulane University in New Orleans. They offered her a position in the Chemistry Department. 

“Fortunately, my Swedish husband also managed to find a job in New Orleans. We lived there for 5 years, during which time I was promoted to full professor with tenure. At one point I organized a party for alumni from Chalmers who lived in America. One of them was a professor at Rice University in Texas. He suggested I send them my c.v. My only experience of Texas in those days was watching Dallas on TV, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to live there. But soon afterwards Rice University contacted me and offered me a position in Houston, a city which is a real hub for research in many fields. I accepted the offer. The company my husband worked for had its headquarters just outside Houston, so they agreed to transfer him as well. We were there for 5 years, during which my second daughter was born.”

Returning to Sweden

We asked Pernilla what made her decide to return to Sweden. “I became increasingly concerned about my children growing up in America, mainly because of the American food that they were being served at school. Every summer we spent two weeks in Sweden visiting my aging parents and other relatives. We began asking ourselves how this pattern of life would work in the long run.”

They weren’t desperate to move back to Sweden, but Pernilla decided that she would apply if a suitable vacancy came up at a Swedish university. “I sent in a few applications which got me nowhere, but then I found out that Umeå University was looking for seven professors in the Department of Chemistry. I felt that I had to apply, even though Umeå is not a big city and my husband might find it difficult to get a job there. Finally I visited the university and fell in love with it. I also inspected the school where our children would be going and very much liked the lunch menu. It all felt just right. My husband was offered a job in an innovation office in Umeå. Said and done, we moved there in 2008.”

One difference between America and Sweden is that, in the United States, people work all hours and weekends as required by their workload. They hire nannies to look after their kids. Pernilla wasn’t comfortable with that lifestyle. In Sweden, private life is more valued. In Pernilla’s view, this flexibility generates more satisfaction among scientists and one’s career is more sustainable in the long run, so that was another reason why she and her family were happy to return to Sweden.

Being back at Chalmers, Pernilla’s alma mater, meant having travelled full circle. Was it the result of chance opportunity, or had she planned it all along? “The move from Umeå to Gothenburg was not planned. When I left for America, I decided that I would never return to Chalmers, because it would be too familiar. That is where I started out as a student, and I believed people would still treat me like a student. But it was a combination of factors that made me do it. We had lived 7 years in Umeå. My husband’s office in Umeå closed down. Around that time Chalmers approached me, announcing that they were opening a new department in my field, and they wanted me to be the head of one of four new divisions. The challenge of being in charge of not just my own research group but of a larger team attracted me. My husband would find more job opportunities in Gothenburg than in Umeå. Besides, my mother’s health was failing and I felt that I had to be near her. All things considered, I decided to take the job.” 

Pernilla added that when you move to a different university, you get new colleagues and new ideas for your research. Her own research has evolved in part because of the new interactions and possibilities that have come with her moves. 

Pernilla offered a summary of her research. “Let me begin by saying that I work on proteins and how they interact. Proteins are made as long chains of amino acids in our bodies and perform most functions that makes us stay alive. In order to be functional, the protein chains have to fold into compact three-dimensional structures. My studies focus on how protein chains fold to their correct shapes. A lot of diseases are caused by protein chains not folding correctly. The key question is: how do long, floppy protein chains know what shape they are supposed to fold into? If we know the answer, we can design proteins that may cure diseases. Over the years I have studied how proteins fold correctly, but since my return to Sweden I devote more and more time to studying how and why proteins fold the wrong way. There are several neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s which occur because proteins misfold and start to clump together with each other, forming toxic plaque in brain cells.”

Pernilla and her research team also try to understand how the misfolding process can be stopped. “We need to stop these diseases tat an early stage – before it is too late. One exciting discovery we made recently is that we found a fish protein to be able to block the Parkinson’s protein from clumping together. When we eat fish, most of the content is broken down to pieces in our gut, but this one fish protein enters our bodies intact. Thus, it can meet human proteins and if our test tube experiments are true also in humans, it may explain why fish is considered ‘healthy’. We may use this concept to develop drugs that have the same effect.”

Yet another line of her research is how proteins bind to metals like iron, copper and zinc that are introduced into our bodies through food. These nutrients are essential to life, they often act as reactive centers in enzymes, but they must be carefully controlled as free metals can be toxic. Thus, we have dedicated proteins that move the metals to the right destinations in our body. “We are currently looking at a particular protein that moves around copper in cells. We found that this protein, in addition to delivering copper to the right enzymes, plays a key role for spreading of cancer cells in our bodies – the process we call metastasis. This is what people die from when they get cancer. If we can reveal a general pathway for the spread of cancer, then we can try to block it and thereby stop cancer metastasis.”

“As I get older, understanding how these processes affect human health becomes more and more important to me. I don’t just want to discover general principles that I can write scientific articles about. I want to do research that benefit humanity.”

Gender Initiative for Excellence

We asked Pernilla to tell us about Genie which stands for Gender Initiative for Excellence. “Chalmers is a semi-private university overseen by a foundation. The foundation funds Genie with about US$ 40m over 10 years. Genie is about increasing gender equality at Chalmers. Our university has a large number of male faculty as well as male students. Chalmers is actually the worst university in Sweden when you look at the fraction of female professors (17% at Chalmers). When I returned to Sweden, I thought the country was a model of gender equality, as do many foreigners. Indeed, Sweden is good in many ways, but when you look at top positions the male dominance is the same as in the rest of the world. There is a lot of talk about gender equality, but little action, and I wanted to change that.”

Genie is not about hiring more women just because they are women, but it is about fair and objective evaluation of merita. “I am leading this initiative, because I think it is important that someone in the faculty is in charge rather than Human Resources or administrators. We are aiming for more openness, fairness, inclusiveness in the way we grant promotions, do recruitment, conduct meetings, and reach decisions.” 

Genie is now in its third year. “We have started to recruit women faculty and engage the departments. We talk to many stakeholders, the Heads of Departments, the Vice Chancellor, and a lot of women and men on campus. The key thing is to get the majority onboard. And the awareness has definitely increased. But real change will take time and it may be years to see concrete results. But we just need to keep going, with more diversity you also get better science. I spend approximately 40 percent of my time on Genie matters in parallel with my research work.”

Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Pernilla is an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. We asked what the membership entails. “Becoming a member is a great honour. I am one of 18 members (under 67 years old) in the Chemistry class in the Academy. The work includes voting on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and we also hand out other awards.” 

Last year she joined the Nobel Prize Committee for Chemistry, which is where the hard work is done to select a Nobel Prize winner every year. “We do a lot of investigations, and it is very interesting and I learn a lot about chemistry. The work involves collecting and evaluating nominations, seeking outside advice, and deciding who should receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. As part of the work, one has to go back and find out who was the first to solve the scientific mystery in question. Last year I was involved in the announcement of the Nobel Prize winners (Emanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna) as their research field is rather close to mine.” 

Given Pernilla’s international experience, we wanted to know if it is useful for university students to spend at least one year at a foreign institution. “The answer is Yes! If possible, one should definitely spend a year abroad. You learn so much more than your subject of study – how to live in a different place, meet different people, how teaching is done in different countries. You mature a lot as a person and may develop contacts for the future. My daughter is now in Hawaii studying for one semester. That was the most exotic place she could go, given the travel restrictions due to COVID-19, because she has an American passport. If you want to make an academic career, or truly any career, a foreign experience will boost your c.v.”

“We do maintain a high education standard.”

Specifically, why should North Americans consider studying at a Swedish university? In Pernilla’s opinion, what are Sweden’s strengths from an academic point of view? “We do maintain a high education standard. In Sweden a lot of the university education consists of complete programs rather than picking and choosing among various courses. It is also easier in Sweden to have a dialogue with the professor for the benefit of your learning. If you want to find out about Swedish culture and society, that is the way to do it. As an added bonus, everybody speaks English which makes life for a North American student easier – something which one cannot take for granted in other European countries. The fact that Sweden gives out Nobel Prizes adds to our academic authority and gives respect.”

A lot of American universities offer exchange programs, and yet the take-up has been very poor. Compared to students in other countries, Swedish students are reluctant to move abroad, but that is such a waste of opportunities. The reasons appear to be a sense of security staying put at home, hanging on to one’s house and car, and an assumption that it is difficult for partners to find jobs or childcare abroad. In America, on the other hand, people move all the time.

As for how Sweden and Swedes are viewed in American academic circles, Pernilla had the following to say. “There aren’t all that many Swedes in academia that are well known in the United States, simply because our country is small. That said, we have a good reputation as collaborators and for our sense of organisation. We are trustworthy rather than impulsive. In my own field of research, most of the top scientists are Americans with huge research budgets and large teams. Here in Sweden, on the other hand, we often have smaller resources and instead rely on collaborations.”

Lastly, we asked Pernilla about her plans for the future. “Genie continues to be important for me, but eventually I want to hand it over to somebody else so that I can concentrate on my research. I want to study Parkinson’s and cancer in greater detail. I have many ideas which I want to explore. I also need to look for more funding so that I can hire more people. At the same time, I think it is important to look at the bigger picture, I like doing outreach, talking to young people, trying to get them involved in science. We need more people doing research. I want to make a difference with my efforts. That is what motivates me and keeps my energy level high.”

Interviewed by Peter Berlin