A Conversation with Dr. Patricia Sobecky 
by Andrew Kerr
January 2008

Dr. Patricia Sobecky has sat at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by worms--something I'm willing to bet most of you have never done. We talked with her last fall about this and other aspects of her research, plus life growing up in a steel-town in Pennsylvania.

Q - What was your own college experience like?

A - I was the first person to go to college in my family. I commuted to the University of Pittsburg at Johnson (I lived at home). I graduated when I was 22, and then I went straight to graduate school.

Q - That makes you something of a trailblazer. What did your family make of your going to college?

A - My family was incredibly supportive. I think what was strange to them was going on to grad school. "You go to college and now you have to go for more schooling, Patty?" It took four years of college and then six and a half, almost seven years of graduate school, and I still didn't have a real job because then I had a post-doc. So finally, after fifteen years, it was like, "Oh you have a job now. Really, Patty?"

The hardest thing was leaving a small, tight-knit family community in a small town, saying, "I'm going to (University of) Georgia," which was like going to Mars. If you lived in Pennsylvania you didn't go south. You'd maybe go to New York or Jersey.

But I couldn't go back, now. I couldn't go back to a small town and not have the kind of thing you have in the big city.

Q - What was it like growing up in the steel-belt in Pennsylvania?

A - You knew everybody. It was blue collar steel workers. Incredible work ethic. You were just not lazy. If you were sitting down for five minutes you were passed out!

My father was a steelworker. He became ill around about the time he was 35. So he went on disability and was sick and on an oxygen machine until he died at 51. And my mother was a homemaker, would sort of do some odd jobs. There were four of us (I was the oldest) and there was 12 years in age between myself and my youngest brother. I started to work when I was about 14. So it was tough. But it didn't occur to you. There were a lot of people around you like that.

My sister went to college. But my brother, who was a baseball nut, kind of didn't make it to class. So I use that now in my classes. I had a slide up on Monday, and I made them read the slide. Every other sentence was like, "I WILL attend class." I can't tell them how important that is. If you look at what's been done for surveys on campus, probably the highest correlation of having students fail classes or not do well is the lack of attendance in class. Their lack of attendance directly correlates to a poor grade. My brother didn't go. He was either at baseball practice or, "Oh, I forgot to get up; my alarm clock didn't go off." So he didn't finish.

Q - As a child, did you always plan to go into science?

A - I was always a bookworm. In ninth grade I formed an astronomy club with my other nerdy friends. And I remember right around 11 or 12 we were given an exam. I can't remember the name of that test--it was a national test, an aptitude test or something. I remember I was either a physician, an astronaut, or...I can't remember what the other choice was. But I remember them saying my math skills were sort of..."Don't pick rocket scientist!" I wish I had saved that! And it said, "You're well-suited for the sciences."

My father had started a volunteer ambulance service when I was older, so we were always around medical stuff. I started to be pre-med when I went to college.

In my sophomore year of college I did research. We did work with acid mine drainage and food-webs and things with a professor who turned out got his PhD at the University of Georgia. So that's how I wound up there. He came to my university and he was a new faculty member and I did research with him. So I did that for a full three years I was a college student, and gave a poster-presentation at the American Society for Microbiology as an undergrad.

Microbiology--as soon as I started that as an undergrad that was it. The moment I looked under a micrscope it was over. I couldn't see how anybody wouldn't want to look under a microscope for the rest of their lives. But I didn't know when I finished graduate school if I was going to be a college professor. I certainly never started out with that concept.

Q - Did you consider going down a more corporate line?

A - I considered both companies and universities. But Georgia Tech's offer...You knew, the vision was here. It was clear they knew exactly what the path was. I never had a doubt after that. Corny as it sounds, I never thought that I was at the wrong place.

Q - I tried wrapping my head around your research on containing uranium. Is the idea that microorganisms can transform the uranium into something less harmful?

A - No. The Department of Energy is funding projects for using bacteria to keep uranium and the other radionuclides sequestered and not moving too far in the soil. That's all you can do. There's no way to transform them. You're stuck with it. The metals are easier; the metals some microorganisms will completely convert. Mercury you can completely convert to a volatile gas and it will dissipate from the site. But not these radionuclides, like uranium. So you just have to keep it physically contained some way so that you don't have it threaten water supplies and move off-site.

Because of the Cold War there's a 50 year legacy of nuclear waste that has been generated. The nuclear reactor sites would typically produce tens of thousands of gallons a day. They basically just warehoused it on site, meaning they would dig trenches, pour the liquids or the solids, encase the solids maybe into concrete bunkers. But the liquid, that would go into basically open, unlined trenches. Then it migrates into the water table and migrates futher off the site. So what that work is doing is to devise strategies to essentially keep the contaminants, keep the uranium in place. You can't change it; there's nothing you can do. It's there. It's not like jet fuel that you can remediate by taking a microorganism and letting it essentially eat it, mineralize it. Uranium is here to stay. All you can hope to do is to somehow have the microorganisms essentially immobilize it or sequester it and keep it in place so that it doesn't move any further off from the site and into the water table.

Q - Most high school students reading this are familiar with chromosomal DNA (the double helix described by Watson and Crick). But the DNA you're looking at is a little bit different, isn't it?

A - Yes. If you look at a typical bacterial cell you've got the chromosomal DNA, and that's a big chunk of the cell. But then plasmids are these accessory (DNA) molecules that are typically much smaller than the chromosomal DNA. But they pack a wallop because on those plasmids are things like antibiotic resistance genes. These guys can move to a completely new host. They have the ability to transfer a copy of themselves to a new bug. So that's this issue with antibiotic resistance. If you start with E. coli that has resistence to penicillin it takes only a few minutes for salmonella to pick up these plasma genes. And then you start spreading penicillin-resistance genes all the way through microbial populations. That's one of the drivers for why antibiotic resistance is so widespread now. These guys have four and a half billion years of evolution on us. They're moving these genes, they're mixing they're matching they're transferring genes back and forth between the chromosome, between themselves, so you basically get this hodgepodge of genes back and forth and then all you have to do is have selection act on them.

That's why you always hear people fuss about how you need to take all of your course of antibiotics and everything. If you don't do that then some of these guys escape the effects. People also worry about antibiotics in animal feed and in the environment. They worry that once you excrete antibiotics after you've taken a course those antibiotics don't change, they go back into the wastewater stream, they get released out into the environment, the cycle is just continuous. So there's this issue of transfer, in one fell swoop, one step, in a matter of minutes you can completely change another organism and give it completely new capabilities that it didn't have to resist treatments.

Q - Kind of like cockroaches developing resistance to poison.

After 20 years of studying them, I like to look at the plasmids much more positively (laughs). But they are parasitic right? So essentialy they're self-replicating accessory DNA and they've evolved to make sure they continually replicate and they move around. So things like the stapharius, that's methicillin resistant, you're now starting to see vancomycin resistance show up. So in hospitals now you've got to worry about picking up nosocomial infections that are not treatable by available drugs right now. So that's the negative side right now.

But on the positive side, let's say you have a metal that's contaminating soil. You also have plasmids that carry a lot of metal-resistance genes. So if you've got to get rid of mercury then all you have to do is promote the transfer of the mercury genes to other organisms in your soil. The more mercury you dump on the site, the more you're going to select for those organisms that have those capabilities.

So there's good and bad. If you can harness the activity, you can make a prediction as to how you can promote this transfer. Then you might have a better understanding of what's going on in your system or how to try to attempt to control it.

Q - Your website says you've gone out in the field to some interesting places as well.

A - We had a collaborative project from the National Science Foundation where we did gas hydrate research. The Gulf of Mexico was a life in extreme environments project we had funding for and that was, the gas hydrates there in the Gulf of Mexico, it's frozen methane. So you can hold it in your hand and light it. And apparently that's the big thing to do. We tried not to let them do that on the ship! (laughs)

We rented a sub from Harbor Branch. You see these big, football field-length tubeworm bushes (these are the ugly cousins to the deep-sea hydrothermal vent worms). Once you spot those you know you're near a hydrate deposit. We'd bring up the hydrates and freeze them on the ship. We'd collect RNA and DNA out of this stuff and look at who was there. It was just up and down, two sub dives a day.

The Gulf was wild. Of all the places we've done field work that had to be the most bizarre. You'd go down there and one of the sites has a brine pool. So there's a lake on the bottom of the sea floor. And the hydrate mounds...the pictures don't do it justice.

I did at least four or five dives in the first year. Same number in the second year. It's just like riding a Volkswagon.

Q - Why do you travel so far to collect these organisms? Why not just dig for organisms in your own backyard?

A - Partly because there are ecosystems that are very unique and they also have ramifications for life on other planets, and the issues of adaptation, how microorganisms are dealing with a site that's really bizarre and very toxic in terms of this hydogen sulfide down there, and the ways to make a living are limited so that was a sort of theme that was uniquely funded through NSF for that particular program at the time.

Q - What advice would you give to kids reading this?

A - Take advantage of some of the programs that some of the universities offer for getting involved while you're in high school. I had two high school kids here. One is now an undergrad here at Tech.

If you're really interested in doing science or engineering, get a hold of somebody and see if they can find a spot for you to do internships.

I also judge the Siemens math/science competition on campus. Do that stuff. It's tough. You do need to get some sort of networking and have some help with connections to get to the facilities and get to the labs. But people will do it. If you contact the faculty, if they have a spot in the lab, we'll make a space for the students if they're really interested.

And go to class!