UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 16, Page 3
January 7, 1993
On the Board; Professor combines academic, trustee responsibilities

     It took a gubernatorial appointment to lure Patricia DeLeon, professor
in the school of life and health sciences, out of her lab in McKinly
Laboratory. Since July, she's been leaving her microscope at least once a
month to attend meetings as the only faculty member on the University's
Board of Trustees. She still seems a little bemused at the turn her life
has taken.
     "The appointment was a surprise," she says. "I spend a lot of time in
my lab. I like my lab and enjoy my students. I've spent my life in the
acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and really have no personal
vision-political or otherwise. I have never considered myself a political
animal but I do consider it a privilege and honor to serve the University
at this level."
     DeLeon is a human geneticist whose research focuses on reproductive
genetics. Some of her work has been supported by the National Institutes of
Health, (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) which fund her
studies on the role genes play in sperm function.
     She and her graduate students are tracing chromosome abnormalities in
sperm and their effects on fertization ability.
     She also is interested in the Human Genome Initative, a massive
project to study and map how human genes are organized. DeLeon has done a
small amount of mapping in mice and rabbits and this month she is on
sabbatical to work further with the animals at the University of
Pennsylvania's Human Genome Center.
     "The hope is that mapping genes and looking at their organization in
animal models will expedite work with humans. Due to a shorter generation
time we can more readily gain information from animal models," DeLeon said.
     Mapping genes, she said, has direct applications to health care
research in that once a gene is found and isolated it can be purified for
use in gene therapy, where a healthy gene is used to surplant the function
of a defective one.
     DeLeon, serving as a member of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee
(RAC) to the NIH, reviews protocols for human gene therapy trials.
     DeLeon did not start out to be a geneticist. "I never took a genetics
course in high school or college," she said. "I was a chemistry and zoology
major leaning toward biochemical study of plant alkaloids.
     "When I was studying at the University of the West Indies, a professor
who was studying chromosomes wanted a research assistant. I could see
practical implications in her work, and I have always had a desire to do
something that would be intellectually stimulating and have a component to
it that could help humankind. I like that sort of two-edged sword.
     "I do believe in knowledge for knowledge's sake, but at a university,
I think taxpayers want to see research that is not just self-serving but
can have a more immediate impact."
     One area of DeLeon's research, for example, looked at the high failure
rate of in vitro fertilization. She and her graduate students looked at
sperm age to see if that could be a contributing factor in failure rates.
     A current project, funded by the National March of Dimes Foundation,
will try to determine if environmental and job-related factors can alter a
man's genes and cause birth defects in his offspring.
     In the early l980s, DeLeon's work focused on the parental origins of
chromosome diseases such as Down Syndrome.
     In that research she found that in mouse embryos with an extra
chromosome, similiar to the case of Down Syndrome, the extra chromosome is
often contributed by the male when the sperm population is old. Thus, aging
sperm is a physiological factor that could predispose to Down Syndrome.
     DeLeon was raised in Jamaica and earned her honors undergraduate and
master's degrees there.
     She earned her doctorate at the University of Western Ontario. She
studied at McGill University for three years as a postdoctoral fellow in
the department of genetics and taught there for a year.
     In 1976, an ad in Science Journal prompted her to get out a map, find
Delaware and apply for a job here. She and her husband, Winston, a
financial consultant, have two children Ruth, a sophomore at Princeton, and
Jeoffrey, who is 14.
     Of her role on the Board of Trustees she says, "It is exciting to see
a more global picture of the University. I don't 'represent' the faculty
but I do bring an inherent perspective with me. I am learning a lot. It's a
view I never had before, sitting in my lab."
                                        -Beth Thomas