Mina Bissell: Context is everything

M ina Bissell has never been afraid to challenge conventional wisdom, whether on a woman's role in the laboratory or on how a cell's context determines its function. Bissell came to the US from Iran to study chemistry at Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe Colleges, before pursuing a PhD in bacteriology at Harvard Medical School. She moved to California for her postdoc in virol-ogy, before joining the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1972, where she has remained ever since and was the Director of all Life Sciences until 2002. Bissell investigates how the microen-vironment—particularly the extracellular matrix (ECM)—infl uences cellular behavior. She proposed a " dynamic reciprocity " in signals between the ECM and the cell nucleus (1) and, to prove her model, she began to study mammary gland biology, devising 3D culture techniques that continue to reveal how differentiation is regulated by ECM proteins (2, 3). These cultures can readily distinguish between normal and malignant cells (4), and Bis-sell has shown how breast cancer cells can be reverted to nonmalignancy by correcting signaling through the ECM (5). Moreover, Bissell and collaborators have shown that destroying the ECM with metalloproteinases is suf-fi cient to cause tumors (6, 7). In a recent interview, Bissell helped put her own life and career into context. Where did your passion for science come from? I was always very curious. I grew up in an intellectual and highly educated family, and my parents—especially my mother— were extremely ambitious for us. I read voraciously as a kid, and was the top student in the country at the end of high school. But science wasn't a passion that I grew up with or anybody encouraged me to do; it just happened. Both of my mother's sisters were in the medical profession, and I had a brilliant uncle who was a professor at the medical school and another who was a math professor in the US. My father's family was religious aristocracy: my grandfather was an Ayatollah. And his father, grandfather, and so on were all Ayatollahs too. My grandfather was a wonderful, scholarly man—I never saw him without a book. He had a magnifi cent library, and he wore beautiful long white robes and was totally in love with my grandmother all his life. He was also the most benevolent man I ever met. My father had no intention of becoming an Ayatollah; he called himself an atheist. …