The Med School’s Sweetest Professor Wins Award

A self-proclaimed “salesman of science,” C. Ronald Kahn says he loves simplifying the complexity of Type 2 Diabetes in order to teach the general public about the disease.

“If people accumulate body fat in the abdomen—what we call central obesity, or apple obesity—those people are more at risk than people with fat in their hips or thighs—peripheral, or pear, obesity,” says Kahn, the section chief on obesity at Joslin Diabetes Center and a Harvard Medical School professor.

For nearly four decades, Kahn has utilized theory, molecular models, and animal experiments to elucidate the mechanisms behind how insulin functions in diabetes patients. And last month, Kahn was awarded the first annual Manpei Suzuki International Prize for Diabetes Research for the extensive work he has done “from the discovery of alterations in insulin binding in the disease state to the generation of tissue-specific insulin receptor knockout mice,” according to the foundation’s Web site.

Kahn will receive $150,000 and give a lecture at a ceremony on March 10.

Kahn began studying diabetes in 1970, when he started a fellowship at the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease (NIDDK). When Kahn began his research, it was known that insulin regulated blood sugar by binding to a specific receptor on cells. But Kahn’s lab was the first to discover the mechanism of this activation, which involves the addition of a phosphate molecule to the amino acid tyrosine.

Kahn has also researched insulin resistance, a phenomenon that is central to Type 2 Diabetes but about which little was known in the 1970s. Kahn has devoted his career to studying the various aspects of Type 2, which represents roughly 90 percent of worldwide diabetes cases. The condition is acquired due to interaction between genes and environmental factors like obesity, and it is spreading rapidly—the annual rate of new cases in the U.S. is 9.8 per 1,000 people.

“Without all those pieces put together, we’re really not going to be able to deal with what is an exploding epidemic,” says Phillip Gorden, former director of the NIDDK and one of Kahn’s mentors there.

Gorden, who co-nominated Kahn for the Manpei Suzuki Prize, says he believes his former colleague has been crucial to efforts to piece together the disease. Gorden’s nomination letter refers to Kahn as “perhaps the most creative and productive figure in diabetes research in the U.S. and possibly the international community.”

Kahn’s creative and productive career has included responsibilities as senior investigator at the NIDDK, chair of the congressionally mandated diabetes research working group, and, from 2000 to 2007, president and director of the Harvard-affiliated Joslin Center. Kahn said he decided to step down from the presidency in order to focus more on the research he finds “invigorating.”

Yet even when he was balancing administrative duties, Kahn still found time for the post-doctoral fellows in his lab.

“What I really admire is that he forces himself to put his postdocs first,” says Stephane Gesta, one of Kahn’s current fellows. “When I joined the lab he was president of Joslin, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to talk to him in the day to day about things on the bench.”

Gesta’s decision to leave his former position in France was validated, though—he soon learned that Kahn held weekly individual meetings with each of his 12 to 15 post-docs.

Sudha B. Biddinger, who has worked in Kahn’s lab since 2001, recalls that during her first years at Joslin, Kahn returned all of her e-mails—even between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. “He has a little plaque on his desk that says, ‘It can be done,’ and I think that’s true,” says Biddinger. “He just gets it done.”

Ron has mentored 150 graduate students and post-docs during his career, and he continues to recruit young researchers from around the world. Enxuan Jing, who came to the Joslin Center from China, calls his experience working with Kahn “probably the best time in my life.”

Steven J. Russell says he was attracted to Joslin by Kahn’s reputation as a mentor, and by his work with the recently developed fat-specific insulin receptor knockout mouse, a genetically modified animal whose fat cells are unaffected by insulin. The lean, long-lived mouse holds potential for treating diabetes and aging in general, and it is only one of the many topics studied in Kahn’s interdisciplinary, collaborative lab.

Through it all, Kahn remains low-key and modest. When asked about the lab’s reaction to the Manpei Suzuki Prize, Russell said that he and the rest of the post-docs had to find out the news on their own.

“He doesn’t really tell us that kind of stuff,” he said.