Profile: Alex Ritter, Ph.D.
A compulsion solidifies into purpose
Most science artists I know have practiced art in some form since childhood. Many had to choose between science and art but eventually found their way back to the one that got away. That is not Alex Ritter.
Alex knew he wanted to be a scientist before he even knew what the word scientist meant. He was of the closely-inspecting-nature variety of budding scientist—forecasting his future in microscopy—and never had any particular interest in making art. The entire natural world was a work of art for him to explore, his need to see ever smaller brush strokes driving him to invent new microscopy techniques during his Ph.D. work at Cambridge University. Alex’s art practice instead spawned from a compulsion fueled by hours a day (and night) spent alone in dark rooms looking through microscope lenses, watching immune cells kill cancer cells. He likens his growing obsession to Richard Dreyfus’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, modeling his troubled visions out of mashed potatoes at the dinner table.
It’s hard to imagine Alex in this state. When I met him at a conference last December in Boston, he couldn’t have seemed more at ease, even when giving his talk. He wore a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and a persistent but genuine smile. His palpable positivity appeared to levitate the young scientist. His steps seemed less subject to gravity, as though he were walking on the moon while the rest of us trudged around on earth.
To understand how such an easygoing person could succumb to an obsession that invaded his waking and dreaming thoughts, you just have to see the close encounters he was experiencing for yourself and imagine waiting hours alone in a dark room for them. The following scenes of T cells killing cancer cells aren’t any the less mind-bending for being under a microscope instead of arriving from outer space.
The immune cells here—literally called killer T cells—recognize unique features on cancer cells, sticking to them like velcro, then releasing membrane-piercing weapons and other toxic menaces from their arsenals. T cells are built to distinguish “self” from “non-self”, skin cells from bacteria for example, or even skin cells from another person’s skin cells, as in rejected skin grafts.
Alex began compulsively drawing what he saw but he struggled to translate the images in his head onto paper. “It was pretty feeble, to be honest,” he confesses. No matter though. Alex had put himself in the way of artists by choosing to live in a housing collective in the Castro district of San Francisco near his day job as a senior scientist at Altos Labs and far from his childhood in North Dakota. He says his cooperative living arrangement, common in San Francisco, tends to attract creative professionals. So he was scrawling his visions alongside an artist and gallery-owning roommate who was more than happy to look up from her own sketchbook to give him tips.1
Ensconced in this bastion of utopian creativity, he ultimately found his medium when he discovered glass blowing—the molten liquid a perfect proxy for the lava lamp-like behavior of cells, the beautiful colors befitting their drama.
And that might have been the end of the story. But as it happened, the father of one of Alex’s best friends was undergoing immunotherapy for his cancer. While the immune system can dispense of cancer cells in principle, the “non-self” features of cancer cells—sprung from normal cells after all—are often well hidden. Cancer cells can also acquire immune-evading advantages, like when their rapid proliferation leads to mistakes in hastily copied DNA. These mutations might do nothing or they might, for example, lead to changes that trick the immune system into seeing the cancer cells as “self”, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, giving themselves free rein to grow into tumors.
In the arms race between cancer and the ingenuity of biomedical scientists, immunotherapy was a stunning advance—perhaps most notably brought to the public eye when it sent Jimmy Carter’s Stage 4 metastatic melanoma into remission. Scientists had discovered a way to make the immune system deploy its arms more indiscriminately, side-stepping its typical checks and balances. It’s the desperate commander telling the troops to fire at will. Alex gave one of his glass-blown sculptures of a T cell killing a cancer cell to his friend’s father, who used it to literally visualize the war underway in his own body.
“I think when people get a diagnosis like this, they feel like everything is out of their control, and that they have no agency in their outcome,” Alex explains. “And I think that it can really help people just to have the feeling that they can do something, you know, even if it's just having positive thoughts that give them a little bit of hope, and maybe brightens their day a little bit.”
Talking over zoom, his smile only fades when he describes the video his friend’s father made for him, showing Alex how he touched the glass to the parts of his body where the immunotherapy should be working. To his lymph nodes when it spread. It’s not the video that saddens Alex, it’s that the video is all he has now to remind him of the warrior. But he finds it a heartwarming reminder that he was able to give this man the dignity of understanding what was happening in his own body, and the positivity that made him a collaborator in his own care.
Alex has given these pieces to other patients and is scaling up his operation. Soon he’ll launch a website where people can order them for themselves or loved ones. He wishes only to recoup his costs for materials and to pay his assistant, and even then he will donate 10% to cancer research.
He knows that there is no clinical trial evidence for the power of positive thinking, but he has visualized every goal in his life and he believes it played a part in his achieving every one of them. “It can’t hurt,” he allows. While immunotherapy has been a miracle for some, it still only works for about 20% of patients. And removing the checks and balances is as risky as it sounds—some recipients have succumbed to total organ failure as a result of their unleashed immune systems attacking otherwise healthy tissues. Alex will just keep doing what he can in the lab and in the studio. “Being a scientist for 18 years has taught me that humility is always the best answer.”
To see more of Alex’s work you can find him on Instagram @cells_invitro.
Though this artist got her own house recently, Alex currently lives with six creative people including a machine learning scientist and an artistic physician who is now Alex’s fiancé.