Douglas L. Coleman: - The Jackson Laboratory

Douglas L. Coleman:
Vanished But Not Gone
A Celebration of Life
Presented by Tom Coleman
Sunday, August 3, 2014, 3-5 p.m.
The Jackson Laboratory
Introduction
Good afternoon, I am the youngest son of Douglas and
Beverly Coleman. I am also pleased to be the husband
of Sarah Fashena. Together Sarah and I are the proud
parents of the only grandchild, Benjamin John Coleman.
As I considered what to say at today’s celebration of
Dad’s life, I came to realize that I viewed it nearly equally
as a celebration of Mom’s and Dad’s lives. As many of
you know, this pair was incredibly close, having lived
together for over five decades. In Dad’s words, they were
“attached at the hip.” Indeed, they were so close that I
did not get to know Dad until Mom began experiencing
executive function issues and ultimately died of
Alzheimer’s disease in 2009. I am happy to say that
during this time, following Mom’s decline and death,
Dad and I became quite close.
In fact, for the past two years I spoke with Dad every
day until his death and we spoke about everything.
One of the topics was whether or not there should be
a memorial service. Dad was firmly against having a
memorial, and I was equally firm in my belief that we
must have one. I told him that, ironically, the service
was not for him. Around this time, and independent of
my desires, representatives from The Jackson Laboratory
offered this space for a celebration of life, and this idea
tipped the balance. Dad agreed that a service here at The
Jackson Laboratory felt correct. I would like to thank
President Ed Liu and the many who worked behind the
scenes to make this possible—it feels right to me as well.
Death with dignity
I would like to start at the end, as I feel that Dad
died with great dignity. He was in significant pain
since the fall. He complained but never what you
might expect. He was existing in that horrible
phase of life that Samuel Beckett so shockingly
and accurately describes as where “the boredom
of living is replaced by the suffering of being.” He
wanted to die and I think that it is important that
you know that he wanted to die. His body had fallen
apart but his mind remained sharp.
Yet, throughout this phase, I admire the fact that
he continued to work out three days a week at the
Laboratory until he could no longer drive. I admire
that fact that he gracefully gave up driving when
he feared that he might be a danger to others.
I admire the fact that he heated the house with
wood through the long winter. I admire the fact
that he took up travel after Mom died – it took
several years and a lot of courage but not only did
he travel but he went to some unusual destinations:
Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica, and Africa, where
he zip-lined over Victoria Falls. I admire the fact
that he baked bread weekly and proudly took this
bread with him as a housewarming gift when he
was asked to dinner. And I especially admire the
fact that he applied humor to his deteriorating
condition. I would like to relay two humorous
stories that capture this spirit.
As many of you know, Dad had significant surgery
to his face and his “good” eye ultimately fused
shut. One morning he fell; his ear was essentially
necrotic and a large chunk of his earlobe fell off.
During the transition to blindness, before the eye
fused shut, he saw double for a period of time. One
day I asked him how that was going and he replied,
“Oh, it’s not so bad—I find that I now have twice
the number of friends that I use to.”
While growing up I never thought of my father
as an optimistic person, but I truly feel that as
his body fell apart around him, with each further
insult, he appreciated what remained even more.
So how do we celebrate my parents’ lives? What
is their legacy? In considering this question I
am reminded of a quote from William Faulkner,
who in a short story had four insightful words to
encapsulate the aftereffects of death. Faulkner said
that the deceased were “vanished but not gone.” I
will use these words as the theme for the remainder
of my talk. How are my parents vanished but not
gone? I would like to answer this question by
focusing on three topics:
There was blood everywhere; I ultimately tracked
him down when he had returned from the
emergency room. Once I had heard the story, I said,
“Boy, you have had an exciting morning! How is
it going?” He replied, “What with my fused eye, I
use to be a pretty good pirate, but I find that I now
have no place to put my earring.” The thought of my
father even wearing an earring is pretty humorous
but where he came up with this quote under these
circumstances is beyond me.
1. The scientific discovery that obesity is not just
a behavioral problem. I am a scientist and I
happen to think that Dad performed some pretty
elegant experiments and I suspect that many of
you may not know about this work.
2. Several charities that Dad and Mom worked
on together and later some he founded to
commemorate himself and Mom.
3. The offspring.
Scientific discovery
Here at The Jackson Laboratory, Dad became
fascinated with several obese strains of mice. I am
going to illustrate these mice with balloons. If a
normal mouse is about this size (holding up balloon),
the Obese or ob mouse is two or three times as
large (holding up balloon). A second mutant, db
for diabetic, was also two or three times the size
of a normal, wild-type (wt) mouse, essentially
indistinguishable from the ob mouse (holding
up balloon).
From some early crosses, Dad had a suspicion that
these two mutations, though present on separate
chromosomes, functioned in a common pathway.
ob
db
wt
Dad wondered whether some circulating factor
might control the obesity. If such a hypothetical
factor was present in the blood, he reasoned that
he could test for its presence by linking the blood
supplies of the animals. One such means to link
blood supplies involves surgically joining the mice,
essentially making a Siamese twin – a technique
termed parabiosis. I remember seeing these mice as
a young boy when I would come to the laboratory
with Dad on the weekends, and frankly I was
horrified but as Dad correctly pointed out, mice
wt
wt
ob
db
db
wt
wt
wt
ob
1) The wt-wt pair displays no problem, each
mouse in the pair remains active and healthy
throughout experiment; this is the so-called
negative control.
wt
2) In the ob-wt pair, the ob loses weight but
survives for duration of experiment. So what
does this tell us? It suggests that there is, in fact,
a blood-borne factor, which Dad called a satiety
factor, and this factor can allow the obese mouse
to lose weight. Therefore, the downstream
machinery is present in obese mice. It is as if the
ob mouse was simply lacking the satiety factor.
wt
ob
3) Things get really fascinating with the db-wt
pair. Unlike the obese mouse, the diabetic
mouse continues eating and gaining weight. In
contrast, the normal mouse loses weight and
ultimately dies. When Dad did an autopsy on
the normal mouse he discovered that it had no
food in stomach, no food remnants in intestine
and no fat stores. It is as if the diabetic mouse
produced a blood-borne factor so powerful that
it could cause the normal mouse to starve.
wt
db
db
tend to stay close together and these twins appeared
to be active and happily doing whatever mice do.
So what happens when you join two mice together?
I will walk you through four pairings.
ob
Taken together, the parabiosis experiments clearly
indicated that the ob mutant could respond to,
but could not produce, a blood-borne satiety
factor, while the db mutant overproduced a bloodborne satiety factor, but could not respond to it –
4) Finally, in the db-ob pair, the db keeps eating
and gaining weight but the ob loses weight and
ultimately starves to death.
perhaps owing to a lack of the necessary receptor.
These experiments were published in a series of
experiments in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, but
they were largely dismissed at the time because they
disagreed with the dogma of the day. The leading
thinking of the day was that mice (or people) are
overweight because they overeat (behavior) not
because of a genetic predisposition (physiology).
This was the way things stood until 1994, when
Jeff Freidman and colleagues at Rockefeller
University cloned the ob mutant and discovered
that it encoded a hormone that he named leptin.
As of last week, over 26,000 publications contain
leptin as a key word. Essentially every prediction
that Dad made proved correct: the obese mice
lack functional leptin and the diabetic mice lack
a functional leptin receptor and, therefore, overproduce leptin in a vain attempt to compensate.
In recognition of this work, Dad and Jeff went on to
win many of the prizes that you see on that table.
You may wonder what role Mom played in Dad’s
discovery. Indeed, it is possible that Dad may
have done these experiments had he never met
Mom. But I happen to believe that behind many
creative people, an underappreciated support staff
frequently exists. Mom was that staff. She was the
one who provided the uniform and rigid home life
that Dad demanded. It was largely Mom who ran
the household and kept the books; it was largely
Mom who raised the three boys; and it was largely
Mom who nursed the middle son, John, during his
seven-year struggle with cancer. Significantly, John
died at age 11 in 1971, precisely when this obesity
work was ongoing. I believe that Mom played a
huge role in this work.
But you do not need to take my word. Let me tell
it to you in Dad’s words. Several books recap the
discovery of leptin and Dad gave Benjamin and me
one of these in 2001. Benjamin will not remember
this since he was only three years old at the time.
But let me read you from the inscription: “Dear
Tom and Benjamin, If when you read this you feel
that I have made some contribution, know that it
was only because of the unstinting support of many,
most importantly your mother and grandmother
Bev. Love, Dad and Grandpa Doug.”
Dad will go down in history as one of the pioneers
in the discovery that genetics can play a significant
role in obesity. Returning to Faulkner’s words, I
think this is a good demonstration of how he may
be “vanished but not gone”.
Charities
When Dad turned 60, he looked at his retirement
account and realized that Mom and he could
enter a comfortable retirement. He made a clean
break from science, and they traveled around the
globe: Galapagos Islands, Mayan ruins, bicycling
in Provence, celebrating their 40th anniversary on
Machu Picchu. But Mom and Dad always like a
purpose in life, and they became advocates for land
preservation. In part due to their volunteer work
at various conservancy and forestry nonprofits,
literally thousands of acres of Maine coastline and
wetlands have been preserved. Later in life with
these scientific prizes, Dad received considerable
monetary awards. He decided to donate essentially
all of this prize money to various charities. When
he informed me of this design I remember, with
tongue firmly in cheek, reminding him that charity
began at home. But Dad felt that David and I were
established, and he wanted to give back to the
world and memorialize Mom and himself.
As many of you know, Dad made significant
contributions to The Jackson Laboratory; Ruth
may speak to this philanthropy. Dad also recently
made a seed donation to the Capital Campaign
at the Wildflower Gardens, a place where Mom
volunteered for decades; David MacDonald may
speak to this philanthropy.
I would like to speak to his education charities.
Dad’s family was quite poor. Not only was he the
first Coleman to graduate from college and graduate
school; I believe that he was the first Coleman to
complete high school. And this was not because his
parents were stupid or unmotivated; it was because
they had to work. Mom and Dad met at McMaster
University in Hamilton, Ontario, and it was at
McMaster where Dad established several bursary
accounts to assist students in need. I always knew
that he had done this, but it was only recently, as
I have been going through his papers, that I began
to appreciate the magnitude of these donations. In
aggregate, these bursary accounts are now worth
nearly three-quarters of a million dollars and they
have assisted nearly 80 students since inception.
The magnitude of this assistance has been up to
nearly 20% of tuition, depending on the need.
I am proud to say that I played a larger role in a
second education charity. Several years ago, Dad
discussed with me his desire to set up a charity
to help local high school students attend college.
I suggested that, rather than reinvent the wheel,
he pool his resources with the Northeast Harbor
Library Scholarship Fund, which has been doing
exactly this mission since the 1950s. This idea
immediately resonated with Dad, as not only had
this fund assisted my attending undergraduate
studies at Dartmouth College, but also Mom had
volunteered at the Northeast Harbor Library,
archiving documents for more than 20 years. In
2010, Dad and I established the Beverly Coleman
Scholarship Award of the Northeast Harbor Library
Scholarship Fund to assist the higher education
of local high school students. Significantly,
both of these education charities are evergreen
funds – they will continue assisting students in
need for perpetuity. I believe that this is another
good example of how Dad may be “vanished but
not gone.”
Offspring
I am not going to dwell on this topic as it seems
self-serving, but clearly the offspring of any parent
is, perhaps, their greatest legacy. I happen to believe
that life can be desperately hard for many, and that
I have led a privileged life. Suffice to say, I sincerely
hope that my brother David, son Benjamin and I
will continue in this tradition of helping to make
the world a better place.
Conclusion
Finally, I would like to thank the many of you who
helped make my parent’s lives more enjoyable. It
takes a village to allow a person to die with dignity
and Bar Harbor is an exemplary village.
I would also like to single out one person for
special commendation: Beth Bishop. Beth Bishop
is a force of nature, a force of compassion and a
force of great love. Beth started working for my
father as a house cleaner three or four years ago,
but as his health deteriorated, she began to use her
considerable nursing skills. As many of you know,
Dad had a nasty cancer drilling into the back of his
head. When I first saw this wound, I was quite sure
that Dad would die of an infection. For nearly two
years, Beth cleaned Dad’s wound every day. I still
consider it somewhat of a miracle that during these
two years, the wound never got infected. But Beth
is not just a great nurse; she is equally handy with a
hammer and nail or fixing a phone that won’t work
or getting a computer to do what you want. Recall
that all of these skills are of immeasurable value
when you are dealing with someone who, like my
father, does not see. More than anyone else, Beth
allowed Dad to die the way he wished, which was at
his home in his bed.
In fact, Beth had made a solemn vow to help Dad
die at home, and she fulfilled this vow. When Dad
took his final fall, I was in Indiana on business, but
Beth was by his side very shortly. She could not get
him into bed and engaged the county ambulance
to assist her. Of course they wanted to take him
to the hospital, but Beth would hear none of this.
They persisted, and Beth showed them the “do not
resuscitate” and last wishes taped to the refrigerator
door. Yet they continued to maintain that Dad had
to go to the hospital. So Beth politely yet firmly
informed them that they could either help her or
they could leave. They helped her. During the final
10 days, brother David, his partner Kelley and I
were with Dad, but we were not alone. Many of you
came to visit, offering support and meals. Most
critically, we had Beth Bishop. Without fail, Beth
came every morning to give Dad a sponge bath,
clean his wound and see how the night went. She
returned every evening after work, sometimes
remaining until midnight. She was also with us
all day on most of her days off and she was with us
when Dad’s body finally gave out, and would not
leave until the hearse had. Perhaps the highest
praise I can give Beth is to express the hope to all
of you that when your family has a crisis of this
nature, that you too will be blessed with an angel
like Beth to help hold things together.
Thank you for coming today. Whether it is the
science, the charities, the offspring or perhaps the
humor in the face of adversity, I do believe that a
positive legacy lives on from my parent’s lives. They
may be vanished but not gone.

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