National award caps distinguished career spent almost entirely at U of G
BY ANDREW VOWLES
In a post-Walkerton world, it may be difficult to imagine that only a few decades ago, scientists knew little about the pathogenic role of Escherichia coli. But that was the situation when Prof. Carlton Gyles, Pathobiology, began his studies of the bug at Guelph more than 35 years ago.
Indeed, he was among the first researchers to pinpoint how a toxin produced by E. coli — one similar to an enterotoxin made by cholera bacteria — could cause illness in pigs. More than three decades later, having traded his lab coat for suit and tie during a current stint as interim dean of the Ontario Veterinary College, he points to that early discovery as a formative point in an academic career spent almost entirely at Guelph.
His career, including that early finding and subsequent accomplishments, will be feted this summer by microbiologist colleagues when Gyles accepts a top research award from his Canadian peers. Around the same time, he will vacate the OVC corner office and begin preparing for retirement this summer — although, as his colleagues will likely attest, “retirement” will be an entirely relative term.
A self-confessed workaholic, Gyles says: “I'm looking forward to retirement. One of the beautiful things about retirement is that you don't have to worry about what you'll be doing.”
Five years ago, the Guelph professor's lifelong work with E. coli earned him a measure of public recognition as an expert commentator on the Walkerton crisis. In spring 2000, a deadly strain of the bacteria entered the Ontario town's water system, killing seven people and leaving more than 2,500 others ill.
Following that disaster, Gyles was among several Guelph faculty who were consulted by media and health agencies. Recalling the incident today, he says: “So many things had to go wrong.” Poorly sited wells were only the beginning. He ticks off compounding factors, including improper maintenance that allowed contamination by runoff, lax monitoring and communication of results and incompetent operators. Today, he says the Walkerton experience “highlights the contribution that veterinary medicine can make to public health,” from bacterial pathogens to SARS, West Nile virus and mad cow disease.
His work has focused generally on understanding how bacteria cause disease and especially on controlling the risk of contamination through food, water and human contact with animals. He's particularly interested in plasmids, DNA strands existing separately from bacterial chromosomes. It was Gyles's work that found these bits of genetic material could carry both the genes for enterotoxins, such as the one that makes E. coli pathogenic to pigs and cattle, and the genes conferring resistance to antibiotics.
Another key discovery was the role of another class of pathogenic E. coli that produces shiga toxins or verotoxins associated with animal diseases such as edema in pigs and important human food-borne illnesses. Gyles and his co-researchers were the first to sequence the toxin genes and purify the toxin itself.
“That was exciting,” he says, explaining that the information could be used to develop vaccines against these diseases in pigs.
It was those and other achievements that earned him this year's Roche Diagnostics/CSM Award, considered the most prestigious prize of the Canadian Society of Microbiologists. In her nomination letter for her colleague, pathobiology professor Eva Nagy wrote that Gyles “has been widely recognized for his outstanding contributions to research on E. coli diseases.”
Prof. Reggie Lo, Molecular and Cellular Biology, who chaired this year's CSM awards committee, describes Gyles as “a gentleman. You call someone a gentleman and a scholar, and that's Carlton Gyles.”
The committee initially included Lo, his departmental colleague Prof. Cecil Forsberg and a third member from Alberta. With a Guelph candidate among seven nominees this year, Lo invited two other CSM members to serve on the committee. Still, he says, the five-person group was unanimous in selecting Gyles for the award.
(Three faculty members in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology have won the award previously: Prof. Chris Whitfield in 2003, Forsberg in 2000 and Prof. Terry Beveridge in 1994.)
Lo has never worked with Gyles but says his colleague enjoys an international reputation. “When people find out I'm from the University of Guelph, they ask me whether I know Carlton Gyles. He has represented Canada very well.”
In a supporting letter for his nomination, Dr. James Brunton, director of the infectious diseases division of the University of Toronto's Department of Medicine, wrote: “I believe it is fair to say that Dr. Gyles stands among the top two or three veterinary bacteriologists in the world.”
Gyles's nearly lifelong career here at Guelph began as an undergraduate student. He earned his DVM in 1964 — the year the University was established — before completing a master's degree in 1966 and, two years later, his PhD.
He had arrived from his native Jamaica in 1959 for what was then a five-year program. “I expected to go back to Jamaica to practise,” he says. But by graduation, he found the idea of working in a large-animal practice less appealing — and probably too routine.
Although other islanders had enrolled at vet schools in the United States, he chose Canada because of its Commonwealth connection to his home. Guelph itself had been widely viewed as “one of the best places for getting a good undergraduate education in veterinary medicine,” he says. “That's still true.”
He ended up being the only Jamaican in his class of about 80 students, although a few classmates had arrived from overseas. (That wasn't his first taste of Canada. He'd visited in 1955 as a 15-year-old to attend a Scout Jamboree in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Mid-summer or not, he says, “What amazed me was that people would go into the water at those temperatures.”)
Guelph's agricultural side would have resonated with Gyles as well. In Jamaica, he had boarded at Clarendon College, a high school with an agricultural focus. Years later, he remains involved with other Clarendon graduates through a Toronto alumni chapter. On the school's website, he's listed as head boy for 1957 and 1958; the list is headed by an inscription as follows: “Clarendon College has been blessed with talented and dynamic student leaders whose leadership abilities were recognized in their formative years as evidence of contributions to society in their later life.”
After completing his PhD, Gyles did post-doctoral work in England and Denmark before returning to OVC in 1969. From 1981 to 1986, he was Guelph's dean of graduate studies; later he chaired his department. He's a founding member of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at U of G and associate program leader of the Canadian Research Network on Bacterial Pathogens of Swine.
Further afield, he helped teach at the then-fledgling school of veterinary medicine at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad in 1991. That's where he met his wife, Jennifer Ogeer-Gyles. Having done her DVM at Guelph in 1995, she will complete a master's degree in clinical studies this spring; she's studying antimicrobial resistance in E. coli from dogs.
Gyles will serve as interim dean until the arrival of incoming OVC dean Elizabeth Stone June 1. (He'll actually serve a few weeks longer as Stone attends a conference within days of her arrival.) Then he'll head back to his lab until retirement in August.
With that date imminent, he recalls the husband-and-wife advisers he had during his post-doc in Denmark, who offered not just scientific training but also lessons about balancing life inside and outside the lab — lessons he had trouble absorbing.
“Science can be addictive. Pretty soon it leads you rather than you managing it.”
He moved to Cambridge in 1998, partly to distance himself physically from work. “In Guelph, I was in the lab all the time.” He pauses to consider the result of his move before allowing, ruefully, that “it didn't help too much.”
There's always hope, not to mention that long-deferred stack of works by Canadian writers he plans to explore, including writers with Caribbean roots such as Austin Clarke.
