Anna Randi

Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine

Part of Making Waves by Helen Johnson

Anna Randi is a Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Head of the Vascular Science Section at the National Heart and Lung Institute.

The best job in the world

I think the inspiration for my career choices came mainly from a family friend, a Professor of Haematology in Milan, Italy, where I grew up. He was caring for patients, doing innovative research and all this whilst travelling the world. It seemed like a wonderful profession! So, I chose medical school, and from the second year I started to attend the research labs and learned the very basics. I think I enjoyed the 'playing' aspect of the lab (pipetting into small tubes, boiling solutions etc.), together with the vague sense I was involved in something important, even if in those days I didn’t understand science much! And for a few years, I was still torn between this choice and one of my other interests - music, architecture… In the end I am happy that I chose this profession, hopefully there will be time to explore my other interests at some point.

The more I understood the essence of research, the more I realised how fortunate scientists are - our job is to solve tiny sections of the immense multi-layered jigsaw puzzle that is the natural world. The feeling of discovering something that no one has seen before is extraordinary. Dante Alighieri, the great Italian poet of the 15^th century who wrote the Divine Comedy, understood the need for human beings to pursue discovery. Ulysses, burning in Hell (Inferno), explains how he encouraged his crew to travel for years and years, facing untold danger: “fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute and canoiscenza”, which means “you were not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge”. This sentence is on the wall in my office and is my team’s motto.

Blood vessels have been my area of research for 30 years. They are relevant to just about every disease – blood vessels are everywhere"

My mother was a role model, an unstoppable and positive force, she supported business women all over the world"

When I started doing research few people outside science understood what we were doing. Now scientists are expected to communicate what they do, which is incredibly important and fun!"

Object one: 3D model of a blood vessel

In my time as a scientist, I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with some incredibly talented people. One of my talented PhD students, Josefin Jansson Edqvist, produced this image for me as a leaving present - it is a bioengineered blood vessel. Blood vessels have been my area of research for 30 years. It is an area relevant to just about every disease, because of course blood vessels are everywhere. Blood vessels are not just a distribution system for blood, although that clearly is a key job, the small ones, the microvasculature, reach nearly every cell in the body and exchange molecular signals with the cells of the organs they inhabit to influence their function. They are formed by pretty much just one type of cell called endothelial cells – the flat cells you see in the image. These are different in every organ, because different organs have different tasks. So the heart doesn’t work properly without this two-way communication between cells, and the same is for the brain, the lung and every organ in our bodies.

This was not where I started my research career - I am a Haematologist, and I was working on blood, in particular on the mechanisms that stop bleeding. But during my PhD, I spend three years at Washington University in the United States, and one day I went to a seminar on blood vessels. I saw the first videos of blood cells rolling on blood vessels, back then a cutting-edge technology, and I was hooked. There and then I decided that I wanted to work on cells and blood vessels. The message from this story is that curiosity may lead you in unexpected directions. Going to seminars on different topics, even ones unrelated to your own project, can prompt new ideas that can change your career.

I find my area of research fascinating because it centres around cells, from the cell, the basic unit of life, you can go inwards and understand the intricate mechanisms within it, and you can go outwards and understand how a cell works within the framework of the rest of the body. The science of communication between cells is fascinating. Often when I talk to non-scientists I use the analogy that communication and teamwork between the cells is required to keep us alive and healthy, and that is similar to what human beings need in society.

Object two: Portrait

I had a very lucky start in life. I had amazing parents who taught me that we all have a role to play in society, that we should all work to make the world a better place. Paraphrasing the famous quote from JFK’s inaugural speech “Ask not what your society can do for you – ask what you can do for your society”. They taught me that you can do this whilst enjoying life and retaining a healthy sense of fun. I think that this approach is more likely to make one feel fulfilled and therefore happy, instead of worrying only about one’s happiness which is hard work!

My mother was a feminist, without ever defining herself as one. She was an unstoppable positive force. She started working young, graduated in Business Studies when heavily pregnant with her third child, and enrolled in university again at the age of 60 to study law. She believed in empowering women to become independent, and supported women in business all over the world. My father was always supportive and immensely proud of her achievements.

I have always been a feminist. I used to go to demonstrations as a teenager – in the ’70s, Italy was a very politically lively place. I don’t understand how anyone who believes in human rights cannot be a feminist. Women’s rights are human rights, so unless you are against the basic principle of equality on which our civil society is based, you are a feminist. I used to get really angry when a few years ago people said “women have got equality, what more do they want?”. Equality is not a 'steady state' so that once you have achieved some goals, you can’t sit back and relax. We can see in the news that this is not the case, from the reversal of Roe vs Wade in the US, the right of women to make decisions about their bodies and their health, to the re-introduction of the ban for girls to go to school in Afghanistan. If we wish to continue to live in a civil society that respect all people, we must never take our eye off the issue of the oppression of women. After all, women were oppressed for millennia, and the feminist revolution is about 100 years old. People forget that in some European countries women got the vote as recently as the 1970s. Women and men who believe in equality must always be vigilant and proactive.

At this stage of my career I feel it is very important to support the young people coming through. As a feminist I have a particular interest in supporting young women and women of every age, it is one of my top priorities.

Cushion that is embroidered with blood vessels

Object three: Cushion

When I started doing basic research, very few people outside the scientific community knew or understood what we were doing – there was no outreach, no Imperial Festival to show kids how heart and blood vessels work. I remember my amazement when in the late 90s a car company used the image of a DNA sequencing gel to add a taste of new technology to their ads. Now scientists are expected to make outreach and science communication a priority. I think this is incredibly important, and I have been privileged to work with very talented individuals in my team who were excellent at this. The cushion pictured in my portrait was made by Dr Neil Dufton a former member of my team, with textile artist Rachael Pilston, as part of an outreach project called Blood Lines run by the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI).

My main outreach activity was a collaboration with my sister, the Director Paola Randi. This came about because at the time I was studying a gene that regulates cell migration, whilst she was working on her first film, which happened to be a quirky clever comedy about migrants. Paola was excited about the concept that cell migration could be a metaphor for human migration, and that abnormal (cancer) cell behaviour could be used as a symbol for aberrant human behaviour (in her case, mafia criminals). We provided her with videos of migrating cells, and she used then in the film titles. The main character in her film was a scientist, she even made him work on the same gene we work on, which was incredibly funny and a bit surreal – scientists and their projects do not often make it to the glamorous world of the movies!

It was wonderful to involve my team in this project too. The film (“Into Paradiso”) was shown at BAFTA, in London, everyone in my lab came and we found ourselves in a different world. I think my team will never forget the night they saw their work shown in this alternative world. The film was very successful and travelled the world to independent film festivals, collecting many awards. It was also selected for the Venice Film Festival, going to that Festival was a lot of fun, a very glamorous and a truly unique experience – a far cry from scientists’ conferences!

It was very interesting to see my work through the eyes of an artist. As an artist, Paola asked different questions, such as “what noise do the cells make?” which nobody's ever asked before. Do cells make noise? Maybe that’s a project for the future.

The NHLI is international, the mixture of cultures provides a unique and exciting dimension to our lives"

View out of an aeroplane window down to the ground

A global outlook

I am very proud of working at Imperial College London and travelling the world to represent Imperial, it is a great brand. The NHLI is international, the mixture of cultures provides a unique and exciting dimension to our lives. The environment also favours the interaction between basic scientists and clinical academics, which allows basic and translational researchers to exchange views and collaborate. The environment at Imperial is very impressive, there is excellence in many areas, including chemistry, engineering, medicine, and of course basic science. The students are an essential part of what we do, I really enjoy having bright young people around and watching them progress, learn and develop a passion for what they do. It is not always plain sailing – generally a PhD student will panic halfway through, and our role is to make sure they believe that there will be an enjoyable ending and to guide them towards it. It is a very gratifying role.

A major challenge of the last few years has been Brexit, which has had an enormous negative impact on the scientific community. I have been looking for ways to minimise the negative ripples from Brexit, by engaging in more collaborations with Europe and encouraging more visiting studentships. Brexit was and still is very personal for me and many other European colleagues. Scientists are an open community and a mobile crowd, most of us have opportunities around the world. People like me made a choice to live in the UK because of the work opportunities but also because we loved the open and respectful society we found in the UK - we all could have chosen somewhere else to do work and live. I have now lived in Britain longer than I've lived in Italy, but the message from Brexit was that we Europeans do not really belong here. It has been very upsetting, many European colleagues left, and very few new scientists, either early career or established, are choosing to move to the UK. I hope this will change because it is a major challenge for the future of science in this country.

A look to the future

Scientific research is of great value to society, we have seen this more than ever during the pandemic. In medical research, the focus is increasingly on rapidly delivering medicines and treatments. This is not possible without the background work of basic research. Many days and years are required to work out how the body works, before we can start to fix it. Research requires funding, and there is a danger that funding bodies increasingly prioritise projects that claim to be able to deliver treatments in a few years. But if we do not fund basic research we will reduce our capacity to understand and treat disease.

Sadly, I see many excellent scientists that choose to leave academia, because of the real or perceived challenges of a career in academia, such as lack of stability and the struggles of grant funding. There are more and more companies that are only too ready to offer jobs to the best brains. We have to be mindful of this and start to provide alternatives. A healthy exchange between academia and industry is very important, but if all the best scientists migrate to industry, who will do the basic research to identify the potential therapeutic targets that industry is interested in? We have a responsibility towards young scientists and towards society to find solutions which will make an academic career attractive to scientists of the future. Perhaps a different kind of partnership between academia and industry? At the start of my career, I worked in a large pharmaceutical company. It was an interesting experience, but my heart and my ethos were always in academia. It took an enlightened academic, my mentor Professor Dorian Haskard, and an open-minded industry boss, to create a joint appointment for me, which I held for a few years, before finally transitioning back to Imperial. Perhaps similar partnerships could be developed to ensure more security for young scientists, without reducing the pool of bright minds that drive academic research.