Christina B. Marney

Presented by Robert B. Darnell
B.Sc., University of East Anglia
RNA Deregulation in Metastatic Breast Cancer

Tina was a top honors, straight A student as an undergrad at the University of East Anglia, which turns out to be just beneath a place called the Twenty Acre Wood, likely where Tina got her Winnie the Pooh-like thoughtfulness and her questioning nature. For example, Tina is exceedingly smart and consistently polite when she doles out absolutely penetrating and sharp questions at our weekly lab meetings.

She has Pooh-like ambition, not for honey to eat, but for the honey of science, discovery. Tina has boldly climbed the tree of science projects in our lab, going out on branches ranging from comparing Nova regulation in human and chimp (relating to her days working in Charles Gilbert’s laboratory), to Nova regulation of splicing in breast and ovarian cancer.

Perhaps also Pooh-like, Tina has always been creative and willing to buck dogma. She has not been afraid of changing her hair radically every year or two, and she was ambitious enough to make, by hand, a wonderful mermaid suit for a parade. In science, in the same way, Tina developed a brave and creative project to tackle the very hard question of Ago/miRNA in primary versus metastatic cancer. This work has potentially explosive implications, and was done with terrific support from the laboratory of Sohail Tavazoie.

This work then segued to the study of a new RNA binding protein, RBM47, which Tina found, together with her collaborators at MSKCC, is a suppressor of breast cancer progression. Tina did an enormous number of experiments, generating voluminous data using new, state-of-the-art technology. This led to a discovery exploring an entirely new frontier — mRNA regulation in metastatic versus primary cancer — and culminated in a first author paper published jointly with Joan Massagué at MSKCC.

Finally, Tina has been patient, has worked incredibly hard, through tough times and good times, always putting her deepest effort and commitment into the lab. She has truly been one of the most wonderful graduate students I’ve had the fun to work with, while developing the wisdom of a graduating Rockefeller Ph.D. student. She has not only developed the skill of listening to advice, but has also taught me the importance of listening to her wisdom.

As Pooh once said, and as Tina has taught our lab, if the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.