T racy Gunrud: Cow Cell Engineer
by Richard Currey

Chemical engineer and Ph.D. candidate Tracy Gunrud.

According to chemical engineer Tracy Gunrud, the best thing about being a scientist is that "you can do some very cool stuff—stuff that helps people, that really makes a difference."

She ought to know. At age 29, she has several years as an industrial scientist under her belt, and is well on her way to earning a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. She has, among other things, studied how to power cars with hydrogen, constructed a computer-controlled fermenter to brew up yeast cells that have been genetically engineered to produce human hemoglobin, and helped implant cow cells into patients’ spinal columns in an attempt to ease their pain.

Gunrud grew up in Tuftonboro, New Hampshire, where she attended Kingswood Regional High School. "I was kind of a jock in high school. I ran track and played soccer and field hockey," she says. "I had no idea I’d end up being a scientist. I was more interested in being outside."

As for school, Gunrud says she enjoyed reading and writing, and even thought she might like to teach English or become a writer—an interest she attributes to the influence of her mother, a librarian. But, she says, her father, a mechanical engineer, "gave me his fascination with how things are made and how they do the job we want them to do—and how we can make them work better. That was certainly a beginning for me as a scientist."

Gunrud (left) works with her lab partner in her high school.

But to get her firmly headed toward science as a career, she needed another push. As high school graduation loomed, "I didn’t have a clue what I’d study in college," Gunrud recalls. At this critical point, her guidance counselor offered a simple and sensible suggestion: just keep studying what you enjoy most in high school. That, she readily admitted, was science, but she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to make a career of it. "Having fun in a high school course was one thing, but I didn’t understand what scientists really do," she says. "I got the big concepts in class, but what did it all mean? What could I do with it? I worried that college science would be dry and boring."

Worried or not, Tracy enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston as a chemical engineering major. "At first it was just what I was afraid of—dry and boring. But I hung in." But sometime in her second year, she says, "I had a light-bulb moment—you know, when the light bulb goes on over your head and you really understand something." She had always enjoyed cooking—especially creating experimental dishes to tempt her friends. "Suddenly, I realized that chemistry is just cooking on a very large scale—mixing ingredients and cooking them up, all to create something useful. Once I figured that out, I got really excited about all of science. It’s not just a lot of rules and lists. It’s about making things that people need or want, and whether it's cars or hiking boots or ice cream, there’s a scientist in there somewhere who figures out how to make something useful—or fun."

Gunrud in Northeastern University Lab. (Courtesty James Ceavitt)

After she finished up at Northeastern—where she was a member of the varsity rowing team—Gunrud went to work for CytoTherapeutics, a biotechnology firm in Lincoln, Rhode Island. There she applied her freshly minted "cooking" skills to finding new ways to relieve pain for people with cancer or other diseases. "I put cells from cows’ adrenal glands—which have pain-relieving qualities—into tiny containers that look like those little coffee-stirrers," she says. "The containers were then implanted into the spinal fluid of patients. The containers protected the cow cells and kept the patient's body from rejecting the cells. We were searching for a way to stop pain without people having to take drugs all the time." As it happens, that effort didn't pan out—the cow cells survived in the patients but didn't help with the pain. But what the researchers learned about implanting living cells will likely prove useful in the future, says Gunrud.

After five years at CytoTherapeutics, Gunrud went back to Northeastern part-time to get a master’s degree. She is now in school full-time, working toward a Ph.D. For now, this suits her just fine. She still manages to be plenty athletic, and competes occasionally in bicycle and running events that help raise money for medical research. But best of all, "I’m not just sitting in a laboratory, repeating textbook exercises," she says. "I’m part of an effort that really matters, that makes a difference for real people. That’s a great feeling. And there’s always an unanswered question, a new possibility, a challenge to meet. There’s not a lot of jobs around where you get paid to be creative and help people have better lives."

Although she enjoys her work in the lab, she also thinks she’d like to teach someday, either in high school or in college. "I always thought scientists were some sort of ‘special people,’ and then I found out I could do science, too—not only do it but have fun at it. It would be very gratifying if I could get other young people excited in the same way, and motivate them to give science a try."