SIU Medicine's Donor of the Year, Dr. Andrzej Bartke

Time, talent, treasure

Dr. Andrzej Bartke shares knowledge and rewards throughout an illustrious career

Andrzej Bartke, PhD, is a distinguished scholar and research professor in the departments of Internal Medicine, Physiology, and Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Cell Biology at SIU School of Medicine. In 2024 he achieved two milestones: He celebrated a 40-year anniversary as a member of the SIU faculty and he was honored as the SIU Foundation’s Donor of the Year. The recognition was announced at the 40th annual Harbinger Society Dinner on May 16 in Springfield.

The world-renowned scientist is a walking advertisement for his preferred field of study: aging gracefully. Bartke’s research on reproduction and the genetic and hormonal effects on longevity has generated more than 45 years of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other private foundations.

Animals raised in his lab tend to live much longer and healthier lives, protected from common age-related diseases. Cognitive and agility tests indicate mental and physical functions are superior to their normal littermates. They show little signs of slowing down.

Like those mice, Dr. Bartke remains remarkably active and mentally agile, keeping up a hectic schedule of laboratory research, writing and speaking engagements, the latter often involving travel to international events. His autumn workload included: a presentation for Medical Polonia, a conference attended by 700 physicians educated in Bartke’s homeland of Poland who are now working abroad; lectures in Brazil; and virtual class discussions with students in the Netherlands.

In April his lab was awarded a new $1.05 million grant that will keep the benches busy for another four years. The Hevolution Foundation is funding his study to test early life dietary interventions that have shown promise at boosting longevity in animal studies. Bartke’s team will gauge the precise time windows and nutritional restrictions that produce the biggest gains, using dietary patterns already popular among people (e.g., intermittent fasting). His mice could yield clues to reset the pace-of-life clock for us humans.

Bartke has also been incredibly prolific throughout his long career, a firm believer in the researcher’s axiom “publish or perish.” To date, he has contributed 871 research papers, review articles and book chapters to the scientific literature. Authors have cited his research an average of 800 times per year since 2004.

SIU colleague Don Caspary, PhD, a professor of pharmacology and fellow distinguished scholar, put it in perspective. “Andrzej’s output and impact are off the charts. He is the highest cited SIU scientist and likely in the top 10% nationally, certainly within his research field.”

When you spend your lifetime doing good work, others are bound to notice.

A land of opportunities

Andrzej Bartke was born in Krakow, Poland in 1939, a few months before the start of World War II. He earned a master’s degree in biology at Jagiellonian University, the second-oldest university in central Europe (Copernicus was one of its students). As a young man, he set his sights on coming to America to further his education. When an opportunity arose to study abroad, he grabbed it. At the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Bartke discovered an environment quite different from Poland and from the expectations set by films and novels about America. He found the change refreshing and idyllic.

He earned his doctorate and returned to Poland in 1965 but longed for the freedoms he’d experienced stateside. In 1967 he was invited to a training program at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. The Worcester group had become world famous in 1960 as the lab that created The Pill, an oral contraception that revolutionized human reproduction. Bartke had hoped to study with biologist Gregory Pincus, but the scientist inventor died at the age of 64 as Bartke’s ship was crossing the Atlantic.

At Worcester, he began an intensive study of reproductive physiology. His group’s research into the hormone prolactin garnered widespread interest. Prolactin enables female mammals to produce milk and is influential in more than 300 separate actions in vertebrates. When discoveries and methodological advances involving prolactin were made in humans in the ’70s, “people became very interested in our work,” Bartke said, and his speaking invitations took off. “To this day our most cited papers are in prolactin, not in aging,” he said.

Bartke joined Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in 1984, as professor and chair of the Department of Physiology. His laboratory work focused on reproductive endocrinology until a fateful collaboration started with Dr. Thomas Wagner at the University of Ohio in the late ’80s. Wagner was one of the pioneers in producing transgenic animals that over-expressed growth hormone. The animals Wagner produced were huge, with various interesting characteristics and potential translational uses in the animal livestock industry, but they had reproductive complications that would interfere with practical applications.

Wagner sought Dr. Bartke’s help, and the lab group very quickly discovered the problem. Then curiosity set in. Bartke was intrigued that the animals looked so robust and impressive when they were young, but seemed to “self-destruct” at a relatively early age and went downhill quickly. It got the group interested in the relation of growth hormone and aging. Dr. Bartke had worked with much smaller mice — dwarf mice — throughout his career, dating as far back as his doctoral dissertation, when a new genetic mutation was discovered that blocks the production of growth hormone.

The group designed a simple experiment to find out how long the dwarf mice live. An equal number of dwarfs and their normal siblings were set aside. About two years later, Dr. Bartke and his post-doc Holly Brown-Borg, PhD, were looking at the mice, and most of the normal mice were gone, while almost all the dwarfs were still alive. They started checking more often and became gradually more excited by the emerging data. At the three-year mark, it was apparent the dwarfs had gained a strong advantage in longevity. Their research, published in Nature in 1996, was the first to show that a mutation of a single gene had extended lifespan in a vertebrate.

One of the mice raised in the Carbondale lab still holds the world record for longevity. Mouse GHRKO 11C, better known as the Methusaleh Mouse, lived 1,819 days. The dwarf died a week shy of its fifth birthday—roughly twice its normal lifespan—the equivalent of a human reaching the age of 180.

Around the globe, the scientific community took note and Dr. Bartke’s research focus shifted into new, uncharted territory.

Live long and prosper

The thrill of discovering answers to questions is foundational to science. Bartke’s research achievements made him a sought-after presenter and co-investigator. In 2009 he was awarded the largest NIH research grant that SIU School of Medicine ever received: an $8.6 million five-year grant from the National Institute on Aging. The project included collaborators at four other institutions studying the effects of growth hormone on aging and longevity.

Erin Hascup, PhD, director of the Smith Alzheimer’s Center at SIU Medicine, counts on him as an investigative teammate. “We have had many fruitful research collaborations that have resulted in millions of dollars in grant funding, and we’re continuing to work on more grant applications.”

“I sometimes say that Kevin [Hascup, her husband and colleague] and my expertise traditionally focuses on studies above the neck, while Andrzej covers everything below the neck. He has helped us to expand our knowledge and scientific inquiry so that together we can gain a full-body understanding of the changes that occur with aging and Alzheimer’s disease.”

Dr. Bartke’s lab experience and creativity have paid off handsomely for many of the grad students and post docs he has mentored. Dr. Holly Brown-Borg launched her academic research career in the wake of their landmark discovery. She is a now a distinguished professor of biomedical sciences at the University of North Dakota.

Bartke recently dined with former graduate student Crystal Hill, PhD, an assistant professor and NIH-MOSAIC Scholar at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, where she teaches and runs a lab. Hill came to Springfield in 2009, blissfully unaware of who Bartke was and what his contributions were to the academic research field. She discovered his multifaceted knowledge of endocrine systems made him an ideal teacher, as he focused her interests in diet and metabolism to mesh with the lab’s work.

“Over five years I was soaking up as much information as possible, about research models, lab techniques, how to give a presentation, and meeting others in the field,” Hill said. “It was momentous.”

She admired Dr. Bartke’s motivation to mentor and teach.

“There was no judgement of your base of knowledge. If you didn’t know about a particular subject, you could learn. It seemed like every day a printed abstract was waiting on my desk for me to read, sometimes two or three,” she said. “Ultimately, I was being mentored and trained for my career path without even knowing it. Learning about aging research seemed as natural as anything could be.”

Giving back 

As a research professor in multiple departments, Bartke knew graduate students within basic science departments can be paid for teaching assistance while they matriculate. However, PhD students guided by faculty in clinical departments face tougher hurdles without income stipends. Through philanthropy, he aimed to correct this.

“I believe we should provide an equitable environment for graduate students to blossom, study and begin their careers,” he said. “We’ve done it in our lab here in Springfield. I thought if this can be made somewhat easier across the university, other students will have a chance to succeed.”

Bartke met with department leadership and SIU Foundation officials to figure out an annual level to accomplish these goals and establish an endowed stipend. For the past three years he has watched it working.

The altruism seems logical to Dr. Bartke. “I think I've been treated well. And I’d like to give something back to the school, put money toward some good causes,” he said.

He targeted his support for graduate student programs, for both personal and practical reasons. “I remember my own graduate studies was certainly a life-changing period, and I’ve seen it do the same for others.” Bartke encouraged his second wife, Tracy, to capitalize on her love of biology and conservation and return to academia. He watched with pride as she obtained her PhD and was published in the journal Science “at an age when most people are retiring,” he said.

His hope is that others will recognize the value in financially supporting graduate students and be motivated to add to the fund. If you're interested in supporting Dr. Bartke, please donate here to the "SOM - Bartke Evans Doctoral Fellowship Endowment."

Likewise, Bartke believes aging research should be more widely supported for the most obvious of reasons: It is a human inevitability.

“Not everyone gets cancer. But we all get old,” he said.

Though clearly, not everyone acts like it.

View SIU Medicine's 2024 Impact Report here.