Medicine: Dr. Hustle

On a Friday night in late summer, I travel down Chestnut Street in Giordano’s kid-friendly maroon van to Mimosa for dinner, a rare night out with the Sbarro Institute’s bare-bones administrative staff. Giordano puts in 10- or 12-hour days, then heads home to see his wife and three young children. This excursion — maybe in honor of our
interview — is a treat.

At the restaurant — dark and still half-empty at six o’clock — Giordano is restless and eager to please, tapping fingers on the white tablecloth, chatting with the provocatively tattooed waitress, checking his cell to guide a few other staff members to our table, all the while keeping me apprised of the chef’s history, asking what sorts of pasta I like, insisting on placing my order. It’s not macho — Giordano, who travels to Italy for a third of the year to work at his Sbarro-funded lab in Siena, simply likes to make people happy and talk up Italian culture.

“My love of science,” Giordano says, “comes from my father, Giacomo, a noted cancer pathologist in Naples, Italy. The truly important part — my social skills — is from my mother, Maria Teresa.” Both still live in Naples.

Giordano’s interest in obtaining independent resources emerged directly from his own tangled experiences as a young immigrant post-doc in the early ’90s, when he worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, run by James Watson, who, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, won a 1962 Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA. It was there that Giordano first moved from pathology to molecular biology — particularly intrigued with the workings of the cell cycle and how cells communicate. It was also where he met his wife, Mina, then a summer student at Cold Spring.

“We met over the adenovirus,” she recalls. “We had to work in a cold room to keep the virus chilled, and he stayed there for hours. The only time he left was to eat.”

But despite Giordano’s dedication, the charm and hard-won street smarts of his Naples upbringing proved little match for the networking of his Ivy League colleagues. It’s a memory that still stings.

“I was enthusiastic, I did good work and made good discoveries, but I was extremely frustrated by the intellectual snobbism,” he says, and leans forward across the table. “Look,” he says. “University of Naples” — where he graduated summa cum laude with an M.D. and a Ph.D. in pathology — “was no Caltech. But what bothered me was that if you weren’t part of that blue-blood network, your discoveries might go unnoticed or left behind.”

Giordano’s complaints would seem self-serving if they weren’t borne out by statistics. A glance at the top 20 list of universities receiving the most science funding reveals all the usual suspects, including Johns Hopkins at number one and Penn at number four. Large and prominent research institutions such as the University of Washington and the University of California rub elbows with Harvard, Stanford, Duke and Yale.

In part, the familiar names can be attributed to how funds are distributed. Grants from NIH and the National Science Foundation, for example, are determined using peer review, in which two separate panels of supposedly objective overseers determine the value of each proposal. If a project survives these reviews, it moves to the next and final review, with about one in four projects actually attaining funding.

“Reviewers do tend to take into account the track record of a scientist and, yes, the institution,” says Kei Koizumi, who, as administrator for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, keeps close track of where the money goes. “Sometimes it’s valid. Top-tier universities do tend to attract top researchers. But other times … ” His voice trails off. “Let’s put it like this. It’s like democracy — it’s a bad system, but it’s better than the rest.”

At Mimosa, with tables starting to fill both inside and on the street, our desserts — ricotta cheesecake and yet more espressos — arrive. Giordano reaches across the table to clasp my hand, as if we’ve figured out something big together. “Science and business,” he says, “have this in common: When you get the result you want, you forget all the frustrations.”