Torchbearer

When Samuel Evans Adunyah told his parents he was going to study chemistry in high school, he might as well have been performing at the Comedy Caravan in front of a brick wall with a microphone in his hand.

"When I told my folks I was going to study science, they started laughing," says the 1987 School of Medicine alumnus, who now holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from UofL.

"They said, 'This guy's not serious,'" Adunyah recalls, himself laughing at the memory.

Why so tickled?

"Quite frankly, when I was 13 in secondary school, my grades were very good the first semester in all subjects -- except chemistry," Adunyah remembers. "I got a 48 percent."

He might have continued down that path if a guest visiting his family in Kumasi, Ghana, in 1969 had not given him an organic chemistry book as a gift.

"What I found out later was that this book was actually so many years ahead of me. I didn't need it until maybe three years down the road, but I started reading it and somewhere I got very interested in it. So by the time I got to the point where I selected chemistry in high school, I was way ahead and remained best in my class in this subject throughout high school and college."

Adunyah eventually graduated with honors in 1978 as the top biochemistry student at Kumasi's University of Science and Technology, taking home a bachelor's degree and a thirst for more knowledge.

Now the chair of the biochemistry department at Meharry Medical College in Nashville and a nationally respected medical researcher, it is Adunyah who gets the last laugh. In October, his contributions to the field of biochemistry were recognized when he was named the UofL School of Medicine's alumni fellow for 2001.

Calcium-fortified

Samuel Adunyah's road from West Africa to Central Kentucky was paved with calcium.

He never intended on studying the most plentiful mineral in the human body, but when Adunyah showed up in the Zurich lab of famed biochemist Ernesto Carafoli at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology while working on a master's degree in biochemistry, he had little choice.

"In that lab, every single element on that periodic table was calcium," Adunyah jokes. "That's all they listed."

Under Carafoli's tutelage, Adunyah's stock rose steadily while studying calcium regulation in red blood cells, particularly human sickle cell erythrocytes.

Following completion of his master's degree work in Professor Carafoli's laboratory, Adunyah traveled to America in 1981 to continue his education at Oklahoma State University.

There, while earning a second master's degree in biochemistry, Adunyah scoured scientific journals for abstracts on calcium regulation, and he mailed letters to the writers -- all four of them. William Dean, professor of biochemistry at UofL, responded.

Several conversations and a visit to the lab later, Adunyah applied and was accepted into UofL's Ph.D. program.

Adunyah's research here focused on the biochemical process that regulates the release and repackaging of calcium in the blood-clotting process.

"When there is a need for blood to clot there are a series of sequential events which take place," Adunyah explains, "and most of these will have to do with signaling. Platelets first receive a signal to release a variety of agents, one of which is calcium.

"Upon release, that calcium sends a signal to begin the biochemical events that ultimately activate the platelets, causing them to form clots. When the clotting phenomenon is over, it then is important for the calcium to be removed from the scene and stored elsewhere in the body."

Dean says Adunyah's theories on calcium release inside platelets were "very novel" at the time, adding: "We were one of the first labs in the world to show this process in the test tube."

What separated Adunyah from his peers, says Dean, was an unrelenting work ethic fueled by an enormous energy and enthusiasm.

"He worked very hard, very long hours. Probably in the 21 years that I've been here, I think he took the shortest time to complete a Ph.D. -- fewer than three years. And in the short time he was in my laboratory we published seven papers together, which is a very, very prolific publication rate."

Adunyah left Louisville in 1987 to pursue his post-doctoral research training at the Cancer Research and Treatment Center at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

"Processes that are regulated by calcium were intricately involved in the mechanisms I was trying to identify and study in leukemia and bone marrow cells," he says.

"I thought this would be a very nice opportunity for me to expand my scope and get into cancer research. In the process, I learned more about oncogenes."

Two years later, he moved back east to take a job at the University of Alabama-Birmingham's Comprehensive Cancer Center, where he quickly shot up the biomedical food chain.

The person who recruited Adunyah to UAB left on a one-year sabbatical about a month after the biochemist arrived. But not before handing over the reins of a seven-person lab to the senior research associate and newest member of the team.

The unexpected promotion allowed Adunyah to prove himself as a manager of both the research lab and its people. The latter is an enviable ability he wears easily, according to colleagues.

"He was a really spontaneous person in generating a lot of excitement in research," remembers Russ Prough, chair of the biochemistry department during Adunyah's tenure at UofL. "He has an infectious laugh and sense of humor. He really puts people at ease."

Giving back

Adunyah remained at Alabama until 1991, when Meharry Medical College came calling. Making the move was an easy decision since Meharry's mission -- to educate and train African-Americans and other under-represented ethnic minorities -- feeds his passion.

"I wanted to give back to the community in terms of having the opportunity to train more African-Americans and other minorities who were interested in science and biomedical science," Adunyah says.

"So what I had gotten from UofL and other places -- I wanted to give some of that back. I thought the best way to have an influence is to get into a medical school where the student population is largely minority and use that opportunity to influence education."

His hectic daily schedule reveals a person truly in love with his trade. Besides chairing an 11-person biochemistry department, Adunyah teaches 45 hours of classes in medical biochemistry and an additional 75 hours in the graduate school program as an associate professor each year. He also is the principal investigator and chief liaison between Meharry and The Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

"I learned this trick in Louisville," he says cheerfully. "They will tell you there, in fact, that I was in the School of Medicine practically every day for 2 1/2 years. I was there, with the exception of one Christmas day, mostly from 7 a.m. to midnight. They used to tease me that I opened and closed the door. But that amount of work paid off very much."

Adunyah says his wife understands such dedication because, as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, she is a close companion of long hours and good, old-fashioned hard work.

Adunyah's research at Meharry centers largely on the function of cytokines -- small molecular-weight proteins produced mostly by immune response cells -- that play a crucial role in regulating cell growth and immune response.

"A side-effect of radiation therapy or chemotherapy in certain cancer patients is that they lose a lot of white and red blood cells, which can lead to some sort of immune compromise and/ or anemia," says Adunyah.

If, however, patients are treated with cytokines before or in conjunction with chemotherapy, the production of white blood cells can be stimulated, offsetting debilitating side effects like fatigue.

Since the birth of Meharry's 1999 partnership with Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Adunyah has been leading the charge to bridge the gap of "cancer disparity" between the Caucasian and minority communities.

Adunyah points to the rate of prostate cancer in African-Americans -- more than twice that of white men -- and lung and breast cancer mortality rates, which are considerably higher in African-Americans. And, he says, funds historically have not been allocated equally to various communities based on these statistics.

The Meharry-Vanderbilt allegiance is the brainchild of the National Cancer Institute, which strongly encourages its 41 Comprehensive Cancer Centers around the country -- Vanderbilt-Ingram is one -- to partner with minority-focused institutions to address these concerns.

Their cooperative efforts are reaping big rewards. Adunyah, affectionately known as the "money man" among some of his colleagues, recently penned a grant with Harold Moses, M.D., director of Vanderbilt's cancer center, that earned $7.5 million in funding over a five-year period.

As fulfilling as that is, however, teaching is perhaps the most rewarding part of Adunyah's job -- a labor of love sculpted at UofL.

"In terms of teaching excellence, I learned a great deal of it from the department of biochemistry in Louisville," he says.

"Some of my professors, like Dr. Mary Hilton, Dr. Margaret Fonda, Dr. Gray and Dr. Dean were all quite instrumental in impressing on me what it takes to be an excellent teacher."

Now Adunyah, whose portfolio is plump with teaching accolades, is using the lessons gleaned from his UofL mentors to spread the gift of knowledge.

"It's just like being given the Olympic torch," he says. "You need to run fast and be able to pass it on."