This profile is adapted from "Love and Medicine" by BOBBIE COLLINS, originally published in HM News on Feb. 1, 2023.
Tomas Kirchhausen, professor of cell biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital
Stephen Harrison, the Giovanni Armenise – Harvard Professor of Basic Biomedical Science in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital
When they met: 1978, at the University of Chicago, where Harrison gave a seminar about the first atomic structure of a virus visualized by X-ray crystallography
When they married: 2013, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied a range of benefits to legally married gay couples.
Combined years in medicine: 97
Do you mingle medicine and science within your marriage?
Harrison: We certainly talk a huge amount about our science all the time. I grew up in a family in which my father was a physician and my mother a biochemist, and they had a joint laboratory. So, I grew up with conversations at dinner about what happened during the day in experiments, but my parents were very good about making sure they asked us about what happened at school first. One's science and one's daily life had always seemed inseparable to me, just because that's what I knew. Science was the way you functioned in the world, not something divorced from daily experience. And I think Tommy and I hit it off that way.
Kirchhausen: I can say that we've been doing this since we met. We mingle science with life, politics, art, culture, traveling, everything — it's a continuum. And it's amazing. It's an incredible relationship.
Harrison: I think both of us tend to interpret our daily experience in the world in the same language, and the same analytical framework, that you use in the lab. Tommy will use words that have technical meaning, like resonate, to describe something every day. And I do the same.
Kirchhausen: We have our own interests in science, but there are some intersections, and some things that we do together.
Harrison: Tommy has built up a quite remarkable instrumentation facility in his lab that is an extraordinary resource for some of the goals I've had for many years. Right now, we're collaborating closely on a problem that I've been working on for a long time involving how viruses get into cells. That's built on decades of work on virus structure in my own lab and is at the next stage of a collaboration. We had already published together on this subject in 2014, and this is a key stage, too.
Do you have any examples of how you have celebrated each other’s successes in your scientific endeavors?
Harrison: I tend to be someone who doesn't celebrate scientific successes and just starts thinking about the next question.
Kirchhausen: I’ll give you an example. [Holds up a champagne bottle with a faded label.] Here I have a bottle.
The text says ‘structure of clathrin,’ and the date is Jan. 21, 1999. Now, this is the first and the last time I had a bottle of something that I opened. This was to celebrate solving the atomic structure of an important protein. Steve taught me, you go to the next problem. So, I don't have any more bottles.
What do you do for fun outside the lab?
Kirchhausen: We like to travel and visit nice places that have cultural value — cities in Europe, interesting museums, for example.
Steve loves to cook and he's a very, very good cook. So well, that I don't cook anymore. Every night we have, in my opinion, a gourmet dinner. And he doesn't let me clean afterwards, which is perfect deal. Right? And Steve plays the piano extremely well. Every night I ask him if he could play a little bit. And he will play also.
Harrison: We also enjoy going to concerts. We have a symphony subscription and a Celebrity Series subscription that includes chamber music and piano soloists.
Kirchhausen: And Steve is an amazing gardener. He actually can think how the garden will look in 10 years. And sure enough, that's how the garden looks 10 years later.
Harrison: We have a house in Woods Hole on the Cape. So there's a garden there, and a garden in Brighton where we live. And that's time enough, but I've tried to plant them in such a way that they need relatively modest attention most of the time.