The body makes it seem so simple.

You take a bite of supper, and the black-box machinery of metabolism hums into life, transforming food into fuel and building materials. It’s the most primal biology: Every living thing must find energy, and must regulate its consumption.

But for an alarming and ever-increasing number of people, the machinery breaks down. The diagnosis? Diabetes.

Alan Attie, a CALS professor of biochemistry, has been peering into the black box for two decades now, trying to identify the pathways in our bodies by which the disease is formed. “You can’t find a better excuse to study metabolic processes than diabetes,” he says. “It’s very, very rich.”

Type 2 diabetes, caused by an inability to produce enough insulin to keep the body’s blood glucose at normal levels, is a global health crisis that has accelerated at a frightening speed over the last 20 years—roughly the same time Attie has been studying it.

It’s an enormously complex disease driven by both genetics and the environment. A DNA glitch here, an external variable there, and the body slides irretrievably out of balance. But only sometimes. Most people who develop type 2 diabetes are obese, yet most people who are obese don’t actually wind up diabetic.

Tracking this riddle has led Attie and his lab to several major discoveries, chief among them identifying two genes associated with diabetes: Sorcs1 and Tomosyn-2. Through years of elaborate experimentation, Attie and his team teased them from the genetic haystack and then relentlessly deciphered their role in metabolic malfunction.

Science has uncovered more than 140 genes that play a role in diabetes, yet genetic screening still has little value for patients. As with any part of a large and complicated puzzle, it’s hard to see precisely how Sorcs1 and Tomosyn-2 fit in until we have more pieces. The biology of diabetes is so complex that we can’t be certain what the discoveries may ultimately mean. But both genes have shed light on critical stages in metabolism and offer intriguing targets for potential drugs.

Attie need not look far to replenish his motivation. His own mother suffers from diabetes, and she used to quiz him weekly about when he would cure her. “The painful answer is that translation of basic research into cures takes a long time,” Attie once told the American Diabetes Association. “The most important clues that can lead to cures do not necessarily come from targeted research or research initially thought to be relevant to the disease.”

Alan Attie grew up an expatriate in Venezuela, where his father, Solomon, originally from Brooklyn, New York, ran a textile factory (Attie’s mother had family in South America). Poverty and then World War II had kept Solomon from traditional schooling, but he managed to put himself through high school at night, and he nurtured a deep passion for literature, poetry, history and politics. At home he ran the family dinner table like a college seminar. “Our evening meal was like a 20-year course,” recalls Attie. “It was the most stimulating part of our day growing up. I was reading Shakespeare with my father and my siblings when I was 10 years old.”

Still, Attie wasn’t quite prepared for the academic rigor of UW–Madison when he arrived in 1972. He’d never had to work particularly hard in high school and was shocked by how much time and effort college required. His grades were poor and his introduction to chemistry lackluster.

But the BioCore curriculum—an intercollege program focusing on doing science, not memorizing facts—turned Attie’s natural inquisitiveness and enthusiasm toward science. During a cell biology course where his lab reports had to be written like journal articles, Attie decided he really wanted to be a biologist. Following graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, he found himself back at UW– Madison as a young assistant professor. Ten years had passed since his freshman matriculation.

Attie’s first research focus was cholesterol metabolism, but his curiosity led him elsewhere. Until 2001 he held a joint appointment with the School of Veterinary Medicine, where he taught an introductory class in biochemistry. While preparing for the class he read broadly in metabolism and found himself continually drawn toward the quandary of diabetes.

Increasingly he found himself suffering from “discovery envy,” he says. “And then I finally decided one day I do want it to be me.” Midcareer course changes are never easy, but Attie plotted a careful transition that gained momentum with hard work and good fortune.

In 1992 Dennis McGarry, a prominent diabetes scholar, published a provocative thought experiment in Science. It had been observed for centuries that diabetics had sweet urine, and one of the earliest researchers in the disease, Oskar Minkowski, had surmised that diabetes was therefore a dysfunction of sugar metabolism. McGarry speculated that if Minkowski had had no sense of taste and had relied instead on the smell of a diabetic’s urine, he would have smelled ketone bodies, a hallmark of lipid metabolism. Might he have concluded instead that diabetes was a defect in lipid metabolism?

Soon afterward, McGarry and Attie wound up at the same research symposium in Edmonton and shared breakfast every morning. “I’m really interested in diabetes,” said Attie. “Is there room for someone like me who has been working on lipid metabolism for 20 years?” McGarry encouraged Attie, a pep talk that gave him confidence that maybe he wasn’t committing career suicide.

Gradually Attie’s new focus gathered steam. When another UW diabetes researcher left for Washington state, Attie was able to bring on researcher Mary Rabaglia from that lab. She was highly skilled in the lab manipulation of pancreatic islets, the home of the beta cells that produce insulin. Her arrival jump-started Attie’s efforts. “It was an unbelievable stroke of luck because she brought all that expertise,” says Attie.

Attie also felt he needed a new analytical toolbox, and he saw real potential in using mouse genetics to study diabetes. With one small problem: He didn’t know any genetics. So he went to the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine—a global center of mouse research—and took a mouse genetics course (which he now teaches there).

The learning soon paid off. Gene chip technology was just becoming available, and industry pioneer Affymetrix was looking to commercialize the expensive technology. The company was interested in funding labs to demonstrate that the power was worth the price. Attie proposed looking at how genes were turned on and off in the fat-storing cells of diabetic mice, and Affymetrix approved the project.

Exploring gene expression—which genes get turned on and off—was an important first clue in figuring out which genes might contribute to diabetes. With thousands of proteins and a still unknown quantity of genes in play, diabetes is vexingly elaborate. Gene chip technology brought previously unimaginable power to the equation. “The reason for doing genetics is we can’t imagine the complexity of these processes,” Attie explains. “We really do need the serendipity of genetics to find our way.”

Attie sent Sam Nadler, a new M.D./ Ph.D. candidate, off to Maryland and California for training. It was an ambitious project, and the old analytical tools broke under the mountain of new data. Enlisting the help of Brian Yandell, a CALS professor of horticulture with a joint appointment in statistics, they were able to interpret their data.

In late 2000 the team published the first paper on genome expression changes in diabetes using gene chip technology. It was premature to get too excited—they were, in effect, translating a book of unknown length, and had only finished the first of many chapters.

But it was an important demonstration of the power of their new tools. And Attie and his lab were now a known quantity in the world of diabetes research, and part of the conversation.

Attie’s team could now assess any DNA they got their hands on, but there was still too much static hiding the working genes. Only by basing his experiments on other, more tangible clues could Attie find anything useful.

He decided to tackle the obesity link. “Most people who have diabetes are obese, but most people who are obese don’t have diabetes,” he notes. To get at the problem, Attie’s team took two strains of lab mice: a standard control strain known as “black 6” (B6) and a diabetic strain (BTBR) that, when the mice became obese, were diabetic. The team intercrossed the two strains for two generations, testing the second generation of mice for diabetes. Offspring were strategically bred to enable the lab to pinpoint the genes responsible for diabetes susceptibility.

The collaboration that had begun with Brian Yandell now expanded to include Christina Kendziorski, a professor of biostatistics with the School of Medicine and Public Health. Teasing conclusions from large data sets was an exciting new field, and the team saw real potential for developing new techniques— and they had the statistics grad students to do it. Some even took up residence in Attie’s lab to be closer to the puzzles cascading from each successive experiment. It was like game after game of Clue, only with a half million possible rooms, a half million possible murder weapons, and a half million possible suspects. And as many homicides as you wanted to look for. Some computations took days.

Ultimately they were looking for genes, but what they found at first were just general target zones, located on chromosomes 16 and 19. That was a big first step, but chromosomes are constructed of many millions of base pairs—the building blocks of DNA . Considered relatively small, chromosome 19 still runs to about 61 million base pairs. The first round of sifting reduced the search zone to a neighborhood with only 7 million base pairs, an almost 90 percent narrowing of the field.

Pinpointing the gene required a constant shuffling of the genetic deck, counting on the random nature of sexual reproduction to winnow away the chaff, revealing the kernel of the gene. It’s a process that can take years, measured in mouse generations. Finally, in 2006, they were able to pinpoint the precise location of Sorcs1. It was a triumph, but it also set the stage for heartbreak.

Meanwhile, other projects kept rolling. Sushant Bhatnagar, a postdoctoral scholar in biochemistry, was working on the other target zone—chromosome 16. In 2011 he zeroed in on Tomosyn. “It was crazy,” he says of the work needed to sift through so many mouse generations.

But in the end they discovered that Tomosyn-2 played a critical role in diabetes. Tomosyn was also more willing to give up its secrets. Most of the myriad proteins in a beta cell are positive regulators, which means they facilitate flipping the insulin switch to “on.” Tomosyn is an off switch—one of very few known to exist.

Though mouse and human diabetes are different, the lab confirmed that the human version of Tomosyn plays a similar role. Now the challenge is using the clue to develop a targeted therapy. “Loss of insulin secretion leads directly to diabetes,” Bhatnagar explains. “If you can fix insulin secretion you can fix the majority of diabetes.”

Finding Sorcs1 had been difficult enough, but unlocking how it worked would prove devilishly complex. Two students tried and failed, and eventually left research altogether, demoralized by the dead ends. Attie felt terrible. “I always feel responsible for everything that goes on in the lab,” he says.

Then, in 2012, Attie welcomed a new postdoctoral scholar. The only problem was that Sorcs1 was a beta cell problem, and Melkam Kebede did not come to Madison to work on beta cells.

A child prodigy from Ethiopia by way of Australia, Kebede was through college by age 18 and had her Ph.D. at 23. After spending most of her career on beta cells, she was looking for something  different in her second postdoctoral position. Able to go almost anywhere, she chose Madison, and Attie.

“Of all the places I interviewed, Alan was the most passionate about teaching,” Kebede says. And she liked the way he encouraged people. She’d always been told that she was exceeding expectations, and nobody challenged her during interviews. Except for Attie. “I wanted someone to push me more, so I can do more than what I’ve been doing,” she says.

Pushing people, of course, is a delicate process, and easily fumbled. Attie instead seems to pull with a magnanimous curiosity. And with Kebede he was patient but persistent. Attie would keep asking: Why were the Sorcs mice diabetic? “You still have the parents of these mice waiting in the hallway at the hospital,” he would say. “They are buying so many coffees. You’ve got to come up with a reason why they are diabetic.”

Finally, Kebede couldn’t resist the puzzle—the opportunity to find the link between obesity and diabetes. While the lab hadn’t cracked Sorcs, they had narrowed the focus. And Angie Oler, an invaluable technician with 20 years of experience, would help her get the end game rolling.

In an obese person, cells do not respond completely to normal insulin levels—this is called insulin resistance. To compensate, the body typically produces more insulin. Type 2 diabetes develops when the insulin resistance outpaces the body’s attempt to make more. Sorcs seemed to play a role, but how?

“There are so many things in the body that contribute to controlling glucose levels in the blood,” Kebede explains. A beta cell has to sense an increase in glucose and secrete insulin, which then triggers other reactions that lead, ultimately, to glucose being removed from the blood and absorbed by the cells that need it. Sorcs1 could work anywhere in this great game of cellular call and response.

Despite all of the genetic and biochemical tools at Kebede’s disposal, it was ultimately a simple observation in a microscope that yielded the key. Insulin is manufactured in advance and stored by beta cells in the pancreas, then released as needed. Typically only 1 to 4 percent of the insulin is released at any one time, and a healthy beta cell would simply reload and release more insulin as needed. Examining hundreds upon thousands of cells, Kebede realized that the diabetic beta cells were partly emptied of insulin—but not enough to reveal an insulin secretory dysfunction.

The problem was that a standard lab testing for insulin production was a one-shot deal. The Sorcs1-deficient cells could handle that first test, but not a second test. Finally she understood: The diabetes was caused not by a lack of insulin, but by a failure to reload in a timely way.

The team had the answer—but after their first submission to the prestigious Journal of Clinical Investigations, they were asked to do 22 more experiments.

Kebede had been thinking along the same lines and had already begun the additional work. “We wanted to make sure we got the story right,” she says.

It took an extra eight months, but in August 2014 the paper was finally released. It was an exciting and novel find. In type 2 diabetes, it often seems as if the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells are wearing down. The Sorcs1 discovery suggests a possible explanation for that, and also provides an important change in how to work with beta cells.

Around the same time, a related discovery came from, of all things, a single-celled organism called Tetrahymena thermophila being studied at the University of Chicago. Attie and Kebede went down to brainstorm with Aaron Turkewitz, a professor of molecular genetics and cell biology. It was an inside-baseball connection, the kind that might take pages to explain and doesn’t show up in grants or co-authored papers. But it personifies the role of a researcher like Attie in an endeavor as complex as decoding diabetes.

“His interests at the most basic scientific level have immense medical implications, and in that way, he connects to a large swath of investigators,” explains Peter Arvan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Diabetes Center. “There are few like him, but he is a model investigator for the 21st century. As the science gets more complex, the field needs investigators like Alan to connect us.”

Once upon a time, Alan Attie had a bumper sticker that said, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

And Attie thinks about so many things. He makes very good wine and is an accomplished amateur photographer. As much as he loves research, he’s passionate about teaching. Conversations glide from the unification of Germany and money in politics, to Ebola and science funding, to income inequality and student debt.

Attie’s not the happiest of scientists right now. As the United States has reduced its lead in science funding, he’s become acutely aware that the kind of midcareer leap he made into diabetes would be impossible in today’s funding environment. He’s got fewer mice in inventory than at any time in recent memory—and to him that means discovery is languishing.

“We can’t pursue all of our good ideas. We can’t pursue all of our bad ideas, either. But we don’t know which ideas are good or bad until we try. The thing is, we’re not trying as much,” he concludes, frustrated. He worries that we’re losing our edge.

For example, he has a lead on a protein that appears to be involved in both Alzheimer’s and diabetes—perhaps the two greatest challenges to health care financing. “I won’t write the grant because it has zero chance of receiving funding,” Attie says. I

In an age where science seems so often a political pawn, it’s refreshing to hear it talked about as a human ideal.

In Attie’s vision, scientific thinking isn’t just running the numbers and picking the ones you like. It’s about “being self-critical, being introspective about how you think and what algorithm you’re using to arrive at a conclusion about anything in the world,” says Attie. “If that were a widespread value, I think our society would be different, better. We would have less hatred, less racism. We would be more nuanced in the way we judge other people.”

Meanwhile, there are mice to study and students to train. Attie’s been involved in the Collaborative Cross, a massive multi-institutional effort to refine mouse genetics to better allow the study of human disease. Using new mice strains, his team is beginning a major fishing expedition, a multiyear project focusing on insulin secretion and beta cell biology in general—utilizing brand new genetic techniques that already are being hailed as game-changing.

Attie knows there will likely be moments of eureka as well as dead-end heartbreak. The team that he loves so much will grow and change as members adapt to the shifting landscape of discovery. He’ll miss the old students and technicians as they move on, but he’ll gain new students and collaborators as he keeps asking the questions that come so naturally to him.

“Being in science is very humbling because I’ve been wrong about a lot of things over time,” says Attie. “That’s part of learning to be a scientist—and yet I think it’s also part of learning to become a better human being.”

This article was posted in Features, Health, Spring 2015 and tagged Alan Attie, Biochemistry, BioCore, Brian Yandell, Christina Kendziorski, Comprehensive Diabetes Center, Dennis McGarry, Diabetes, Erik Ness, Grow Spring 2015, Horticulture, Melkam Kebede, Oskar Minkowski, Peter Arvan, School of Medicine and Public Health, Sushant Bhatnagar, Type 2 diabetes.