Baking soda started Prof. Gail Bellward’s career
by Hilary Thomson Staff writer
A box of Cow Brand baking soda started Pharmaceutical Sciences Prof. Gail Bellward
on a career that has spanned nearly 40 years and recently earned her Canada’s
top prize for faculty research, the 1997 Janssen-Ortho award.
Bellward, the daughter of a small-town Saskatchewan pharmacist, says she virtually
grew up in a dispensary. At her father’s side, she conducted her first experiment
at age three, pouring baking soda and distilled water into a beaker while her
father added a few drops of hydrochloric acid.
The result was a dazzling display of steam and bubbles, all the more impressive
since Bellward assumed from the picture on the box that she was adding powdered
cow.
“I was hooked with that experiment,” says Bellward, who is also the faculty’s
associate dean, Research and Graduate Studies. “I grew up knowing I was going
into pharmacy.”
When she became a researcher, Bellward was the only one in Canada working
on drug-metabolizing enzymes — specifically, a system of enzymes called cytochrome
P-450 — to predict when toxicities or drug interactions will occur. She is
still one of only a handful of researchers studying these enzymes.
Drug-metabolizing enzymes make chemicals more water-soluble so the body can
excrete them. When production of the enzymes is stimulated or decreased, however,
the process may alter significantly making a drug dose that would usually be
safe toxic, especially if combined with another drug.
Bellward investigates factors regulating production of these drug-metabolizing
enzymes. She has examined this process in relation to therapeutic drugs and
environmental toxins.
In a project she describes as the most societally important thing she’s done,
Bellward investigated the toxic effects of dioxin, a chemical found in pulp
mill effluent.
The great blue heron, a large bird near the top of the food chain, provided
the model for dioxin’s risk to humans.
A colony of herons nesting near Crofton, a mill town on Vancouver Island,
was failing to reproduce and scientists suspected an environmental pollutant
was the cause. When researchers tested heron eggs from the site, they found
that levels of dioxin had increased threefold in a single year.
Bellward and representatives from Environment Canada, the Canadian Wildlife
Service, other government agencies, and colleagues in UBC’s Faculty of Agriculture
Sciences studied how the chemical affected the birds.
Partly as a result of the study, the government drafted stricter regulations
concerning pulp mill processing methods. As a result, dioxin levels in the heron
eggs dropped by 97 per cent over three years. Bellward calls this outcome “an
amazing environmental recovery” that also holds real significance for human
health.
She has also studied how the envirotoxin benzopyrene, found in cigarettes
as well as wood smoke, and smoke from industrial and domestic incinerators,
binds to DNA in cells, resulting in permanent genetic damage and contributing
to cancer.
Bellward has also made major contributions to studies of how the enzyme cytochrome
P-450 metabolizes compounds such as fatty acids and acetone that build up in
the blood of diabetics. The enzyme, working in the liver, can respond quickly
to metabolize various toxins. If the body is processing multiple chemicals,
however, it may get what amounts to a busy signal from the liver.
This situation can produce negative side effects as toxins accumulate. Drug
metabolism in the diabetic state is the subject of Bellward’s most-cited paper.
Originally planning to be a community pharmacist, Bellward shifted direction
after completing an undergraduate research thesis at UBC. Her investigation
focused on how cell components called receptors can combine with a drug to change
the body’s physiology.
That introduction to research was her first real academic challenge, she says.
For the first time she did not know the answers but had to unravel the problem
step by step.
In addition to her fascination with the process of research, Bellward is committed
to its outcomes.
“The potential payoffs are phenomenal,” she says. “We’re finding the answers
to questions we’ve been looking at for generations.”
She became a permanent UBC faculty member in 1969.
“Prof. Bellward has made an enormous contribution to the faculty,” says Pharmaceutical
Science’s Dean Frank Abbott. “Not only is she a sterling researcher, she has
also excelled as a teacher.”
When Bellward started her lab, there were few women researchers in pharmacy.
She missed having a female mentor and felt she was starting from scratch.
“I didn’t have a test tube to my name,” she says.
After almost 60 research publications, 84 abstracts and four decades as an
investigator, she is clear on what it takes to be a researcher.
“You need a strong psychological make-up,” she says. “Science is a process
of seeking flaws, of disproving. You need to be tough to withstand continual
criticism of your work by both yourself and others.”
Her advice for students considering a career in research —
“If you need immediate gratification , forget it! You’ll be happier as a clinician.”
When asked about the work she is most proud of, Bellward has no answer. She
points out that each discovery is part of a series of steps and that no single
finding nor any one researcher holds the ultimate answer.
Her own achievements include a 1988 Isaac Walton Killam Senior Fellowship.
She has also served as the first woman president of the Pharmacological Society
of Canada and the Society of Toxicology of Canada.
The opportunity to make a difference keeps Bellward motivated. Whether teaching,
lobbying or conducting research, she says that you just hope something you do
will help alleviate pain and suffering.
Bellward’s next major project is to co-ordinate a large interdisciplinary
group of colleagues in the faculties of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Medicine
to create an advanced drug research centre for women and children — the first
of its kind.
“Overall, I do feel that I’ve made a difference. I feel enormously lucky.”
