College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Labside manner

He once had ambitions of becoming a physician. Instead Andy Norris found a different way to help patients.
As an undergraduate, Andy Norris gave serious thought to becoming a physician. Eventually Norris saw a flaw in that thinking.

"Basically I felt like I couldn't keep the emotional distance between my patients that would be essential in becoming a physician," Norris said. "So I decided to find out how I could still contribute to medicine without building a fortress around my emotions.

"I developed a passion for understanding the molecular basis of human disease and decided to do this instead."

Now instead of visiting patients at their hospital bedsides, Norris spends his time in his laboratory in the Molecular Biology Building. A specialist in biochemistry and molecular genetics, the assistant professor of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology researches the function of phosphotidyinositol phosphate (PIP) phosphatases in signal transformation.

His work has attracted the attention of the American Heart Association, which provides Norris with funding.

PIPs are a type of lipid molecule that regulate the functions of specific target proteins and thus mediate many information transfer functions within cells. He investigates a family of enzymes that control the levels and the structures of these signaling molecules.

Understanding the signaling pathways is essential Norris said to figuring how a cell operates. He says proteins control the information passed between different cells.

"Cells receive information from their environment through the stimulation of cell surface receptors which are coupled to complex signaling pathways," Norris said. "The study of these signaling pathways is important because inappropriate signaling can cause diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.

"Proteins control information passed between different cells and most diseases come about because the body has been given inappropriate information. Hopefully sometime in the future we'll be able to instruct cells to behave in a normal way."

One example Norris gives to get cells to behave normally is blood clotting. About half of Americans die of complications of blood clots which result in heart attacks, strokes and other health issues.

"Blood clotting is absolutely necessary when the human body is cut. Without clotting, we would obviously bleed to death," Norris said. "But as we age, something typically happens in the blood cells that tells it to start clotting when it isn't necessary. We want to find out what happens as we grow older that these type of mistakes occur more often.

"The cells did the work, just not at the right time. If we can get the cells to work appropriately then we can prevent these health problems."

Norris' research is attempting to document what a cell does and characterize the enzymes involved in this process. He says the key will be finding out the "personality" of proteins.

"The sequencing of the human genome is like having the names in a phone book," he said. "A listing will provide a person's name, phone number and address, but you don't know what they do. The challenge for the next decade is to find out what these proteins do and how they communicate with each other.

"Hopefully something my lab will discover can be used to reduce the suffering of so many people."

Spoken like a true physician.