Supporting The Jackson Laboratory a family affair for Trustee
Seventeen-year-old Bill Harwood’s ambitions for the summer of 1969 were simple: hang out on the beach with his buddies and drink beer.
His parents had other plans.
"As good parents should, they said, ‘We'll take over,’” recalls Harwood, now 55.
His parents at the time happened to be friends with J. Frank Gerrity II, a Trustee of The Jackson Laboratory (and the father of Peter Gerrity, a current Jackson Trustee). “I suspect that at some dinner party they discussed, ‘What should I do with my son,’” Harwood surmises. That discussion led to his enrollment in the Lab’s Summer Student Program.
Harwood’s shiftless summer suddenly turned into a season to remember in Bar Harbor.
There he joined 27 of his peers from throughout the United States and abroad. The high school students worked at the elbows of world-renowned Jackson scientists, attended lectures, went on field trips – including a climb up Mt. Katahdin – and made new friendships, all while living in Highseas, Jackson’s oceanside mansion.
“I very quickly realized I was at the heart of something very special,” Harwood remembers. “To be 17 years old and have that sense of spreading your wings . . . and to have all these people serious about science, plus a gorgeous building, just all hit you in a very powerful way. Being in that environment was an eye opener for me.”
Harwood was assigned to do work on red blood cells in anemic mice with Seldon Bernstein, a researcher in the lab of Elizabeth Russell. It was Russell who, in the 1960s, pioneered the use of bone marrow transplantation to cure a blood disorder in mice, leading to the procedure’s use in humans.
"I just didn't have an appreciation of the importance of the work she was doing,” Harwood remembers. “When you're 17 you don't have that sense of history.”
Harwood does recall one lecture on cancer at Highseas that left him feeling confident that “we're going to figure this out.” Says Harwood: “We will have a breakthrough some day, and I’m optimistic that The Jackson Laboratory will have a role in that breakthrough.”
Harwood, admittedly “not a great student,” returned from the Summer Student Program to his home in Newton, Mass., more serious about studying and learning. “Most of my teachers noticed a significant change,” he says. “My grades improved significantly. I really enjoyed science and math."
After graduating from a private boys school near Boston, Harwood enrolled at Harvard College intent on studying medicine. But when the demands of organic chemistry – a daunting milestone for pre-med majors – became overwhelming at the end of his freshman year, he decided to pursue his love of economics, government and politics instead.
He went on to earn a law degree at Fordham University and moved to Portland, Maine. Today he is an award-winning public utilities attorney and a partner in Verrill Dana LLP, one of Maine’s larger law firms.
While his experience at the Summer Student Program grows more distant, Harwood’s enthusiasm for Jackson has only grown stronger over the years. He became a Laboratory Trustee in 2003 and is a founding member of the Portland chapter of the National Council, a new volunteer network of Lab supporters.
“The Jackson Lab is one of the crown jewels of Maine,” he says. “We really need to cherish it, support it and help it to grow. It is doing cutting-edge research. It is without doubt a world-class research institution.”
Such enthusiasm for the Laboratory pervades Harwood’s family. His nephew, Bartlett Harwood, completed the Summer Student Program in 2006. At Christmas Bill Harwood and his five siblings sometimes give donations to the Lab instead of gifts to one another. When his father-in-law, Joe Alderman, passed away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease) – an affliction studied at the Laboratory – the Aldermans designated memorial gifts to the Lab in lieu of flowers. And Harwood’s mother, Nancy Leeson, 85, has donated to the Lab for decades.
"She is a huge fan of the Lab,” Harwood says. “She really believes in it."
Like mother, like son.
