This spring, Brian Jordan will tell 10,000 scientists at the International Congress for Human Genetics about his research on the role of the gene WNT-4 in human sexual development. Not a small accomplishment for someone who will just be finishing his second year as a UCLA graduate student.

And there's more good news. The congress is in Vienna, Austria, and Brian and his wife, Kathy, will celebrate her graduation from law school by "taking a little vacation" in Austria and Italy. Some might see this as a treat for Kathy, but from another perspective, she earned it-in fact, she made it possible.

It was Kathy whose acceptance at USC Law School brought the couple from the University of Notre Dame, where they met as undergraduates, to Los Angeles. More important, it was Kathy who drove her husband to UCLA, took him by the hand, and walked around campus with him knocking on doors until he found a job.

Their timing was fortuitous. When Brian saw the word genetics on a door and inquired about work, the person inside the office said, "I know a guy who's hiring." That guy was Eric Vilain, just arriving to join the faculty of the Medical School's new Department of Human Genetics. Professor Vilain was setting up a laboratory, and Brian soon had a job helping him.

"It was amazing how everything fell together," Brian says. "It was clear to me that it was supposed to be like that." In a year or so, Brian made the transition from lab technician to graduate student.

Before he came to UCLA, Brian had decided that he didn't want a research career. As it turned out, he just didn't like research as he had experienced it in other places. In the Department of Human Genetics at UCLA, Brian began to thrive, and he credits the small but "utterly approachable" faculty. Not just his adviser, Professor Vilain, but all the principal investigators are "so helpful about teaching all of the students in whatever way they can," Brian says. Department Chair Leena Peltonen is "an accomplished and well-known scientist, who finds the time to pull me aside and asks me how are things going and how's the wife."

The research Brian reports on in Vienna involves his work on the sex determination cascade in mammals, "all of the genes involved in deciding whether somebody's going to be male or female," Brian explains. "It's much more complicated than just having a Y chromosome or not."

One of those genes is WNT-4. Research has shown that when WNT-4 is missing, female mice develop ovo-testes, the kind of ambiguous sexual organs characteristic of sexual determination gone awry. Using preserved DNA from a male infant who had a Y chromosome but ambiguous sexual organs, Brian found that the boy had too many copies of that same gene.

As Brian explains it, both males and females start out with almost identical genes. It's the patterns in which those genes are turned on or off that determine gender. In this case, too much WNT-4 appears to create abnormalities in males, whereas too little creates abnormalities in females. Brian's research will also appear in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Brian is also engaged in a related project that won him a predoctoral fellowship from the MIND (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorder) Institute at UC Davis. The institute studies problems of the central nervous system. As it happens, many of the genes involved in sexual development are expressed in the brain, and Brian is studying how those genes might affect the way brains are structured. For example, he says, males usually navigate using the directions north, south, east, and west, whereas women usually use landmarks.

Brian hopes to get through his PhD research quickly so he can move on to the next step, medical school. Taking his model from Professor Vilain, Brian wants to be both a PhD researcher and a physician.

"He didn't choose the easiest path," Professor Vilain says of his protégé. "He wanted to do the research first because that's what he's passionate about, but because he's a humanist, he also wants to apply research to medicine, to try to transfer his scientific knowledge to the bedside."

Brian was inspired in his career choice by accompanying Dr. Vilain to the hospital rooms of his patients, most of them infants and young children whose ambiguous genitalia are just one expression of abnormal development. "These people socially have just terrible, terrible problems because they don't fit in anywhere," Brian says. Besides their physical problems, they are often "devastated by their own situation, and it's not something they could do anything about."

But science is already doing something about many genetic diseases-prescriptions as simple as dietary recommendations and as complicated as sex change surgery. Using the resources of his laboratory as well as knowledge of medicine, Brian looks forward to joining the team of researchers and doctors who are offering a hopeful future to people with genetic problems.

Published in Spring 2001, Graduate Quarterly