With a name like Britton Chance, you'd expect him to be riding a classic Raleigh.
"Too expensive, man," he says. Instead he pedals a Japanese 10-speed, a second-hander,
"a castoff from one of the kids." The bike is teal and has a basket and a cute bulb horn on
the handlebars.

He doesn't know its make so he steps outside his research lab to find out. "It's a Shogun,"
he says when he returns. "In Japanese, shogun means 'powerful person.' " He conveys this
with a grin, then succumbs to a chuckle. He can't help it - to think he rides a bike with
such an ostentatious name.

Chance lives in West Philadelphia and works at the University of Pennsylvania. The ride
to work is downhill and takes him seven minutes. The ride home is uphill and takes eight
minutes. He usually arrives at his lab in the weathered brick Anatomy-Chemistry
Building at 7 a.m and leaves 12 hours later, at 7 p.m. He works six days a week, except
when he schedules a long weekend to go sailing in Florida.

Officially, he is emeritus professor of biochemistry, biophysics and radiology. Usually,
emeritus means retired. At age 88, Britton Chance is anything but.

"Retire? Why would I do that?" he says. "I enjoy research and I work with a wonderful
crew. I like the excitement of new discoveries, moving ahead, finding out new things."
For Chance, it's not just rhetoric. Recently, he and other scientists developed a new way
to detect early-stage breast cancer. The technique relies on blood vessel growth -
angiogenesis. "It's a good marker for cancer," Chance says. "Tumors need nutrients, so
they commandeer blood vessels to grow."

Here's how it works: Scientists inject a substance into the bloodstream. When it reaches a
tumor, enzymes in the cancer cells cause the substance to emit light. Then, when the
substance is hit by an infrared pulse from an imaging device, it becomes a veritable
"molecular beacon."

"It's like a lighthouse, man," says Chance, who, true to form, insists on crediting
collaborator Ralph Weissleder of Massachusetts General Hospital for his contribution.
Chance showed me a picture of a rat with cancer. The image resembled a photographic
negative. There was no doubt about the locus of the disease. It was concentrated under
the rat's left leg, and was signaled by a blazing patch of white, an unmistakable molecular
beacon.

Chance describes this new detection method as "a stealth probe." It is not yet ready for
prime time (it must still be tested and approved by the Food and Drug Administration),
but Chance is excited. "This is hot stuff," he says. "Mammograms require a highly skilled
reader. This doesn't, because the signal is so high and the beacon is so obvious. It's over
90 percent accurate, it doesn't involve squeezing the breast, there's no X-ray radiation,
and the imager is very portable, so we can reach the underserved population."
Chance is pleased by another aspect, too. His latest contribution to the health and welfare
of his fellow man represents a synthesis of his life's work, a merging of the two principal
paths of his research - enzymes and optoelectronics, or using electronics to "see."
Serendipitously, this contribution ties up the ends of his career in a neat bow.
To call his career distinguished is to verge on understatement. In his curriculum vitae, the
list of awards and honors fills a single-spaced page. Penn, his alma mater, named a
building after him (the Stellar-Chance Laboratories), and it seems that the only merit
badge Chance has yet to receive is the Nobel Prize.

All this you have to coax out of him, because he is not given to trumpeting his feats. He's
proud of himself, to be sure, but, in the manner of old-line WASPs, he keeps his glory to
himself. His demeanor is modest, his humor self-deprecating. In his ninth decade, he is
erect and trim, agile and athletic in both mind and body. An old-fashioned gentleman, he
dresses for the lab in sweater vest and tie. He is polite and courteous, patient with his
time, generous with his wisdom.

Yet he is also at an age when he can afford to be deliciously frank, and he enlivens his
stories and observations with iconoclasm. In the gleam in his eyes, you see a still-thriving
mischievousness - it takes no leap to imagine that in his youth he was some kind of rake
and hell-raiser. And it's easy to believe he had a pet monkey when he was doing graduate
work at Cambridge University: Occasionally, he would take it to lectures, hiding it under
his sweater. When the professor was looking his way, Chance would let the monkey peek
out its head. The goal was to see whether he could elicit more than a blink from the
famously unflappable dons.

First and foremost, though, Chance is still a professor, a natural, passionate teacher. In his
lab the other day, he pressed all sorts of desktop items into service - an empty juice
bottle, a pencil, a monocular - in a valiant effort to help me understand how electron
tunneling works in a biological system.

His bloodlines tell. He's an old-stock American whose forebears came from the
Manchester region of England. There, the Chance Glassworks manufactured lenses for
lighthouses. His father founded United Engineers, which built various power and
chemical plants.

Chance spent the early years of his life on the Jersey Shore, going to school in Ventnor.
When he was 11, the family moved to Haverford, and Chance began attending the
Haverford School, where he built up his upper body through gymnastics. He also evinced
a keen interest in chemistry and copped most of the science prizes.
Next stop: the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in chemistry ("I liked it
because it's a quantitative science: You did something, you got a result, a number"), then
proceeded to earn a master's in microbiology and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry.
Simultaneously, he was dabbling in a sideline - perfecting an automatic ship-steering
mechanism.

British General Electric made Chance an offer: If he'd install the gadget on one of its
tankers and go along for a three-month trial cruise to Australia, the company would pay
for a fellowship to Cambridge University.

Which is how Chance wound up at Trinity College, Cambridge, with his monkey, a
toilet-trained vervet that he adopted during a stop on the coast of Africa. At Cambridge,
Chance studied physical chemistry and consorted with some of the most accomplished
physicists and biologists in the world. He wrote his doctoral dissertation about the
behavior of enzymes, which are protein catalysts essential for metabolic function.
When the United States entered World War II, Chance was drafted by MIT's radar
laboratory - the "rad lab." There, he helped develop a radar system so blimps could spot
German subs off the Jersey coast. He also wrote a top-secret book about optoelectronics,
directed efforts to make integrated circuits (forerunners of today's silicon chips), and
invented a radar-directed bombsight for B-17s. "This increased accuracy and diminished
the killing of civilians," Chance says.

After the war, he continued his biomedical research at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm.
There, he found time to indulge another passion: sailing. He traded in a gas-guzzling
Lincoln Zephyr for a 5.0-meter sailboat and honed his skill by racing - and beating - the
local Swedes. "They're former Vikings," Chance says. "They're all sailors and very tough
competitors."

In 1951, when a 5.5-meter class was announced for the Olympics, Chance had such a
boat built in Sweden, christened it with a win at a regatta in Genoa, Italy, and then scored
the most points in seven races in Helsinki to capture the 1952 gold medal. It was rough
sailing. In the final race, skipper Chance not only had to beat the boat from Norway but
make sure Norway came in fourth - limiting its total points - by blocking its wind. Then
he and his crew had to zip ahead of the fleet and finish first.
During the '50s and '60s, as head of the U.S. Sailing Association, Chance promoted 5.5-
meter racing, training winning skippers and crews. His efforts paid off at the Rome
Olympics in 1960, when American sailors again won the gold. (The sailing gene got
passed on: Chances's son, Britton Jr., is a renowned sailboat designer, specializing in the
12-meter yachts used in America's Cup races.)

The walls of Chance's lab are adorned with photos of sailboats, their spinnakers straining
at full billow. Once a month, he spends a long weekend cruising in the Florida Keys in a
32-foot Fiberglas schooner modeled after a 1910 design. "She's a sharpie," Chance says.
"It's great fun."

This winter, just about every weekend he wasn't in Florida, Chance sailed on Barnegat
Bay in a 22-foot sloop he keeps in Oyster Creek, N.J. "It was crazy, man, cold as hell, but
also very good for the soul."

For Chance, sailing is not just sport and therapy but moral discipline. "In Sweden, sailors
have an expression - rein harig, 'clean hair.' It means to sail clean. In scientific research,
sailing clean means giving credit where credit is due, giving students time to solve
problems, and, when they're hot, not stealing the solution. It means sharing data with
colleagues and collaborators and being careful with people in experiments. Sailing clean
means playing by the rules. Play hard, play close, but don't go over the line, man."
If there's one word that epitomizes Chance's attitude toward life, it's enthusiasm. "I have
enthusiasm for my students, enthusiasm for my work, and enthusiasm for sailing," he
says. "In the lab, we operate as a family. I enjoy the pre-docs and post-docs. We've
recruited people from all over the world with the understanding that they'll return to their
country of origin."

During the summer, Chance pursues what he calls his "inner-city hobby." He runs a six-
week program for a dozen high school students that uses optical imaging technology to
study brain function. One aim: to improve the students' cognitive ability, problem-solving
skill and mental focus. Another passion is protecting the environment. For the last dozen
years or so, he's been reviewing applications for wetlands development for the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers. "I love shorelines and the sea," Chance says. He also cosponsors an
investigative committee of the Academy of Natural Sciences that seeks to preserve rare
and endangered species in the Pinelands.

Early in his career, Chance did science for the sake of science, to explore the unknown, to
find answers to questions. If an advance spawned a practical solution or benefit for
humanity - such as the radar bombsight that reduced civilian casualties - so much the
better. But now his purpose has shifted. The satisfaction of old age, the late
psychoanalyst Erik Erikson said, comes from "generativity" - leaving a legacy, doing
something for posterity. Chance embodies the notion. He looks at his lifetime labors - on
optoelectronics, enzymes and substrates, mitochondria and cellular metabolism, magnetic
resonance imaging, and near-infrared spectroscopy - and wonders: "How can I apply this
to help my fellow man?"

Says Chance: "In all my work, I'm committed to doing something good for health care."

Article posted on the internet 04/17/2001 by Art Carey acarey@phillynews.com