Background
Rea, Philip Arthur (birth name Cooper, Anthony Paul) was born on July 1, 1957 in Buxton, England. Adopted son of Allen Arthur and Jose (Florence) Rea, he is Professor of Biology in the Department of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences, and Rebecka and Arie Belldegrun Distinguished Director of the Life Sciences & Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his D.Phil. in Plant Biochemistry from the Department of Plant Sciences and Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK. Shortly before joining Penn’s faculty, he was a Group Leader in the Department of Biochemistry, Rothamsted Research (formerly known as the Institute of Arable Crops Research), one of the oldest agricultural research institutions in the world. He has published more than 100 papers and co-authored two books, was awarded the President's Medal of the Society for Experimental Biology, UK for his pioneering investigations of membrane transporters, specifically a proton pump that uses pyrophosphate (PPi) instead of ATP as an energy source, has been a corecipient of the National Academies Cozzarelli Prize for the publication of a paper of outstanding scientific excellence and originality, and has recently been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for outstanding fundamental research discoveries on the membrane transport and detoxification of xenobiotics, and for distinguished accomplishments and creativity in science education. He is a National Academies Education Fellow in the Life Sciences whose teaching has been recognized by the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching, the College of Arts and Sciences’ highest teaching honor, the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching, the University's highest teaching honor, and three times by the Department of Biology’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Dr. Rea’s primary research has been directed toward understanding a broad range of transport and related phenomena with special emphasis on alternate energy sources and cellular detoxification processes. He and his group have made major contributions toward understanding a remarkably broad range of biological transport and related phenomena through their foundational investigations of vacuolar proton pumps, plant and yeast ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters and the enzymological basis of heavy metal detoxification. Dr. Rea's secondary research at the interface of life sciences and their implementation focuses on case studies that highlight the difficult transition from discovery in the laboratory to success in the market and/or toward the expansion of humanitarian efforts. Examples of such case studies are ‘Statins: From Fungus to Pharma’, ‘Ivermectin and River Blindness’ and 'Can Skinny Fat Beat Obesity?', three feature articles aimed primarily at the educated lay reader. The impetus for preparing the statins article was a sense that material of this nature would be of immense interest to educated members of the general public because it is an example of how our understanding of cardiovascular disease has undergone radical revision, and in so doing given us a better understanding of how statins do what they do (something that would not have happened if not for the introduction of these drugs) and how a serendipitous discovery with striking parallels to the discovery of the penicillins is quite possibly one of the most significant biomedical accomplishments of the twentieth century. The need for the second feature article on ivermectin came from the realization that despite the immensity of the river blindness problem very few of us in this part of the world know of the existence of this disease, and even fewer know of the connection between it and something that most of us know something about, the ‘deworming tablets we give to pets and livestock to protect them from heartworm and similar parasitic infections. The third feature article is an up to date account of the roles played by brown and beige fat ('skinny fat') in keeping white fat, a surplus of which is associated with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome, at bay. Whether the readers are themselves overweight or know others who are, this article is of general interest because it encompasses several unprecedented discoveries made only in the last few years (some only in the last few months) which when explained provide readers with a platform for better understanding the role played by classical brown fat in newborns and hibernating mammals, how beige fat was discovered in animal and human adults, what it is and does, the biochemical basis of thermogenesis, and recent advances in the identification of a new class of therapeutic agents that might eventually be used to combat obesity.
An extension of these research activities is the book Managing Discovery in the Life Sciences: Harnessing Creativity to Drive Biomedical Innovation (2018, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom). In this book co-authored with health care economist Mark V. Pauly and behavioral sociologist Lawton R. Burns, case studies of biomedical innovations are presented whereby the reader comes to better understand how the science actually played out through the interplay of personalities and cultures within and between academic and corporate entities and the significance of serendipity not as a mysterious phenomenon but one that is intrinsic to the successes and failures of the experimental approach. The fundamental economic underpinnings of investor-driven discovery management are considered, not as an obstacle or deficiency as its critics would contend or as something beyond reproach as some of its proponents might claim, but as the only means by which scientists and managers can navigate the unknowable to discover new products and decide how to sell them so as to maximize the likelihood of establishing a sustainable pipeline for still more marketable biomedical innovations.
'Basic understanding' is Dr. Rea's watchword for his teaching as exemplified by LSMP 121 – Proseminar in Management and the Life Sciences, and BIOL 204 - Biochemistry. He has a reputation as a dynamic and compelling lecturer, involving students in problem solving and the struggle to extract meaningful information from the incomplete data sets that inevitably confront researchers. At the outset of Rea’s undergraduate career, the thing that most inspired him was the realization that the people who were teaching him were active scientists who had directly contributed to the subject they were teaching through their research. This discovery, hand in hand with recognition that even his teachers, though active in the field, could not answer many of the basic questions and were prepared to admit to this, filled him with admiration for their humility and impelled him to learn more so that he might have the opportunity to tackle some of these questions himself. Rea would like to think that a few of the students with whom he comes into contact are similarly affected by his efforts and those of his colleagues.