A Harvard Man on the Meuse

Although the title chosen for this piece might suggest the influence of rowing to some, I did not immediately see Professor Patrick Williamson as an oarsman. When I first encountered him on the fourth floor of the faculty of medicine building in Maastricht, I wondered how he had got into the building. He gave the appearance of having cycled there or at least hiked there; and, somehow, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to hear that he had scaled one of the external walls to get in.

Dressed in bottle-green cords, a hooped Icelandic-style sweater, smooth flat-topped cap and climbing boots, he looked ready for anything. He bore on his back one of those small triangular shaped knapsacks one sees so much of and I wondered what he had in it. I suppose that ropes and ice picks must have gone through my mind, but it could equally well have been his lunch. Without a pause for introduction, Patrick Williamson swept me off, cup in hand, in search of the nearest coffee-machine.

He was like a member of one of those outfits (the US Marines or the French Foreign Legion) where they do everything at the double. No time wasting for him. The search for coffee was briefly interrupted by a glance at a colleague's monitor and an observation on the flatness of a curve deriving from the previous night's experiment.

Scarcely pausing for breath, Professor Williamson, a leading authority on the molecular and chemical aspects of cardiovascular disease talked about his sabbatical in Maastricht, neatly combined with his occupancy of the Hustinx chair at Maastricht's cardiovascular research institute, CARIM.

A visit to the competition
First things first, of course. Yes, the kids were settling down at their Dutch school, although moving them in their mid-teens was not without its problems. It did prepare them for life, though, and they soon learned to stand up for their rights in a Dutch schoolyard. Patrick's librarian wife sometimes felt that she was not fully occupied, but that was no doubt a transitory phase. Why, I asked him, did you come to Maastricht in the first place? Why do professors go on sabbaticals? Is it just to escape?

Patrick Williamson said that first and foremost, you went away to be able to do some work. The demands on a prof's time tended to keep him out of the lab, attending to various, undoubtedly important, administrative tasks. The first time he went away, he went to Paris." I went to Paris because I wanted to go to Paris. It turns out that I had a major competitor there. We had been taking opposite sides of an argument in the literature and I think he was quite surprised when I asked him if could come and work with him. It turns out that they were right and we were wrong," he said.

Scholars are a competitive bunch and they communicate via the scholarly journals. What Patrick Williamson discovered was that a stay in another lab was about something different. It was not the discipline-specific issue that was important, but the human dimension. When he left Paris, he discovered he had developed a working relationship. This means that he had the feel of the place, he knew what the lab smelled like and had an appreciation of its style and the way that it approached its problems.

The death of the cell
Professor Williamson has been to other labs too, in England and now Maastricht. He's interested in lipids, an area well established in the Netherlands and in Europe generally. He talked about his area of interest. "Phospholipids, the molecules that make up the cell membrane," he said, "are a close relation of fat. What I study is the fact that the molecules in the outer layer of the cell membrane are different from those that face the inside. This feature of the membrane is called lipid asymmetry."

The question is why? One reason for the asymmetry is that it is fundamental to the blood-clotting process. This is something that scholars in Maastricht had determined. Patrick Williamson, however, was not satisfied that this was the complete answer. If the asymmetry just had to do with platelets (essential to the clotting process), why did all other cells have it? He and his team began to see that the asymmetry had to do with cell death. We generate loads of cells that we do not need and have to get rid of them.

Cells can be killed by being damaged through injury. However, the body has a lot of cells to get rid of. It requires a more efficient and less traumatic way of doing it. What happens is that the asymmetric distribution of lipids disappears. This signals that the cell is about to die and then it is engulfed. "The membrane," says Patrick Williamson, " is asymmetric in every cell because it is essentially part of the machine for deciding whether a cell is alive or dead and every cell has to have it."

Teaching
Listening to Professor Williamson, you quickly become aware that the man is a born teacher, and that is another thing that brought him Maastricht. He wanted to learn about the Maastricht problem-oriented approach that everyone is talking about. He comments: "While the system is not good at conveying coherent bodies of information and is not a method for fostering students' abilities to tackle problems on their own, it does foster a willingness to attack problems in a collaborative way. It is precisely that willingness to attack problems in the first place that is a hard thing to develop in a lecture setting."

"The system seems to work as an educational approach and moreover science is nothing if not a collaborative effort. In science, it is possible to be wrong," he says. "Just flat wrong. You can have a brilliant idea, well reasoned, carefully thought out, purely expressed and dead wrong. It happens to me all the time and if you don't have to run that idea by anyone else, you're going to be really slow to discover that this beautiful, well thought out, carefully reasoned, perfectly presented idea is wrong. It's just in the nature of things."

This approach nourishes a healthy skepticism. But skepticism, as Patrick Williamson says, is something that you have to work at. It must not become easy, like cynicism. Professor Williamson is not a cynic. The whole substance of our talk made me realize that he was above all, a teacher, able to engage the passerby's interest in something new and it did not really matter how he got into the building.
__