Broad Institute geneticist and rock singer Pardis Sabeti merges lab culture with pop culture.
Pat McCaffrey
What’s cooler than being the lead singer in a rock band? How about being the lead singer and a songwriter in a rock band, a Rhodes Scholar, a recent top graduating MD of Harvard Medical School, and the recipient of more than $2.5 million in funding for research on the genetics of malaria and other killer diseases?
Around Cambridge, it’s hard to imagine a cooler scientist than 31-year-old genetics researcher Pardis (pronounced Par-dice) Sabeti. One recent evening, after finishing a day at work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute, Sabeti met up with her band, Thousand Days, for a show at T.T. the Bear’s, a club just blocks away in Central Square.
Born in Iran, Broad Institute geneticist Pardis Sabeti graduated with her medical degree from Harvard Medical School last year, earning the school’s highest honor—the third woman ever to do so. She’s also the lead singer of the band, Thousand Days. (Credit: Maria Nemchuk, Broad Institute; Brian Bernier)
Music is more than just a nighttime hobby for Sabeti. She wants to bring the two sides of her life together, using music to turn children, particularly girls, on to science. With help from the MIT Council for the Arts and a women-in-science program sponsored by L’Oreal, the cosmetics company, Sabeti is planning a series of music videos featuring local luminaries like the Broad Institute founder and human genomics pioneer Eric Lander, MIT’s artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky, and Harvard biologist Andrew Murray.
The videos, which Sabeti would like to distribute online, are her way of subverting pop culture to show that science can be cool. “I want kids to see the faces of the people who are really changing their world,” she says. Her idea is that young viewers might become intrigued and want to find out more about the people in the video. “They might discover that the storekeeper in this video just happens to be one of the leading scientific minds of our time,” she says. “That would be great.”
Watching evolution
As a graduate student at Oxford University in England, Sabeti developed a way to detect natural selection at the level of individual genes. In Lander’s lab as a postdoc, she has scanned the entire human genome to figure out which genes have changed recently (within the last 10,000 years) and which have spread rapidly in the human gene pool due to natural selection. With these tools, geneticists can study how cultural and environmental changes have affected the evolution of the human genome.
Now Sabeti is applying this technique to her true passion: understanding the interplay between humans and the pathogens that cause diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and leprosy. These bugs turn out to be one of the strongest selective pressures shaping the human genome. The influence is mutual. When Sabeti turned the tables and applied her analysis to the malaria parasite genome, the marks of natural selection resulting from interaction with humans were not hard to find. The work, which was published last December, revealed genes involved in drug resistance and in evading the immune system, giving researchers potential targets for new therapies and vaccines.
Putting the band together
Sabeti represents the best of a new generation of genetics researchers, says Lander, who has been Sabeti’s mentor since she was an undergraduate at MIT 12 years ago. “She sees the opportunities of having all the information about all the genomes as an open invitation to discover things,” he says. And, he adds, “She’s very good at drafting people into all sorts of projects,” such as her music videos.
Sabeti says she’s frequently asked which career, music or science, she would choose. Despite her band’s promising future—there’s talk of doing a CD with a New York producer—Sabeti has no ambitions of touring or making music full time. She wants to focus on science instead. “That’s what I really love,” she says. “Other scientists start companies on the side. The band is my side gig.”
This fall, Sabeti takes a new position as assistant professor in systems biology and organismal and evolutionary biology at Harvard. She says that in her scientific and music life, going solo has never been her style. “The malaria team that’s formed around this project is my passion,” she says. “Being part of a collaborative team that is coming together to deal with this and other parasites using every tool we can muster—for me, that’s fun.”