An Interview with

W. Thomas Boyce
TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF AND
THE KIND OF RESEARCH THAT
YOU’RE WORKING ON NOW.
I’m a pediatrician by training. I’ve
always worked in an academic setting,
so I am now an emeritus professor of
pediatrics and psychiatry at UCSF.
Early in my training, I had an interest
in stress and trauma in kids’ lives and
how it may affect their biology and
make them more susceptible to both
physical and mental illness. That’s really
what I’ve studied for thirty, forty years.
We realized early on that there was a
lot of variation in how kids responded
to stress in their lives and we tried to
operationalize that, and measure it
by bringing kids into a lab and having
them go through a series of mildly
challenging tasks. Then, we measured
WHAT IS YOUR MOST RECENT
aspects of bodily function: autonomic
RESEARCH FOCUSING ON? HOW
nervous system responses and respons-
IS IT RELATED TO THE CONCEPT
es of the adrenocortical system. We
OF TIME?
found that there was a subgroup of kids
We’re essentially working on how to
-- about 1 in 5 -- who had these really
transform the practice of pediatrics to
exaggerated responses, biologically, to
help pediatricians and other healthcare
the things that we were asking them
professionals who take care of children
to do. When we studied those kids, out
to be more aware, more sensitive, and
in the real world, we found that they
more responsive to the trauma and
either had the worst illness histories
the stressors that kids experience.
of any of the children that we studied,
And we’re trying to understand more
or they had the best. The sense that
about where this business of resilience
we made of that was that these are
versus vulnerability comes from. We’re
children who are extremely sensitive
convinced that it has something to do
and extremely porous to the things
with the interaction between genetic
that they experience in their external
variation and environmental variation,
world. And when they’re being reared
so-called gene-environment interac-
in stressful conditions, whether at
tions. The time element that comes
school or at home or in the community,
into this is that we’re also increasingly
they really have a lot of problems. They
aware that developmental time seems
develop behavioral and psychiatric
to play a role in how those gene-envi-
disorders; they have recurrent infec-
ronment interactions actually occur,
tions; and they have more injuries than
and the consequences of them. So the
other children. But those same kids, if W. Thomas Boyce is professor
time-work that we’ve been doing is to
they’re being reared in very supportive, emeritus of pediatrics and psychi-
try to understand these sort of triadic
predictable conditions, actually have atry at the University of California,
interactions between genes, environ-
better outcomes than the other chil- San Francisco, where he former-
ments, and time: time being the course
dren that we studied. So we used this ly served as the Lisa and John
of development that a child follows over
metaphor of the orchid and the dande- Pritzker Distinguished Professor
a certain trajectory.
lion. Orchid children are those that, like of Developmental and Behavior-
the orchid, are exquisitely sensitive to al Health. He previously taught
the conditions that they’re being cul- at the University of California,
tivated in. And dandelion children are Berkeley and at the University of
like dandelions: they grow anywhere British Columbia. He is the author
you plant them, and they do fine in a of the book The Orchid and the
whole variety of different conditions. Dandelion: Why Some Children
So the book that I published last year is Struggle and How All Can Thrive,
based on that work. which was published in 2019.
26 TAUG

AS MEASURED BY THE DAYS OF
DEVELOPMENT? OR HOW DO YOU
MEASURE TIME?
Well, that’s a good question. We mea-
sure in part by chronological age, the
sort of linear time of each of us getting
older by a day everyday, and thinking
about it not just in childhood but over
the lifespan as well. But interestingly,
even at the cellular level, we age dif-
ferently from one individual to another,
and we’ve been developing a set of
measures that are called epigenetic
clocks, where we look at the epigenome
and how it evolves over the course of
a child’s childhood and adolescence.
We find that kids under adversity have
aging at the cellular level that happens
faster than kids who are not experienc-
ing that adversity.
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENC-
ES OF THAT AGING? ARE GENES
BEING TURNED OFF?
Genes could be turned off or on. We’re
particularly interested in the epig-
enome, which is kind of where genetic
variation meets environmental varia-
tion. It’s the part of the genome that
lies on top of the DNA sequence, and it
can change from day to day, month to
month, year to year. And we find more
of those changes in the kids who are
sustaining these kinds of traumas.
ARE YOU ABLE TO DETERMINE IF
THE CHANGES ARE PERMANENT?
We think they’re not permanent. We
thought, thirty years ago, that once
a gene was methylated that that was
a permanent mark; it turns out that’s
not the case at all. These marks, and all
the different kinds of epigenetic marks
on the epigenome, can come and go
depending upon one’s experience day
to day, week to week.
WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF
THAT? HOW MUCH CHANGE CAN
THERE BE LATER IN LIFE, AND
WHAT’S THE TIMING FOR THAT?
We think that when a child has an
epigenetic clock that is accelerated and
that is aging faster than it should be
for the child’s chronological age, there
are certain kinds of developmental
landmarks that happen earlier than in
other kids. An example: It’s now well
known that young girls growing up in
families where there is a lot of conflict,
sometimes when a father is absent,
or a father that’s mean or aggressive,
seem to go into puberty and experi-
ence menarche earlier than girls from
families where there are two supportive
parents. So we think that those kinds of
early developmental changes are hap-
pening at a rapid rate among kids who
are experiencing threat and potential
harm.
HOW DO YOU VIEW YOUR WORK
AS A CHRISTIAN?
At one level, one of the benefits of
studying the incredible, extraordinary
intricacies of human biology, and
biology in general, is just a sense of
awe at the creation and the reality
that we are creatures created by God.
Every year we get a finer and finer
vision of how unique and idiosyncratic
and complicated the creation actually
is. That, as a Christian, is a wonderful
thing to behold. Unfortunately, it’s not
something that all scientists are aware
of or interpret in that manner. I think
one of the things that I’m vividly aware
of in my field as a scientist and doing
research is how little appreciation and
awareness there is of the creation and
what a wonder it is as we explore it and
learn more about it.
ARE THERE WAYS IN WHICH YOU
SEE YOUR SPECIFIC RESEARCH
CONNECTING TO WHAT GOD
CALLS US TO DO?
So I mentioned these so-called orchid
children who have this exquisite sen-
sitivity to their environments. One of
the things that we’ve learned clinically
about these children is that they’re
very responsive to what the Bible calls
steadfast love. They are kids who, even
within a given family, if the parents are
able to offer this kind of steadfast love
and care for those kids, they are exqui-
sitely responsive to those experiences
of love. So that’s one example of how
what we learn through the Bible and
through the teachings of Christ get
played out in the lives of children.
The other thing that our work has
made me aware of is just how extraor-
dinarily diverse the human population
is. It is diverse in every way. One sort
of diversity that I’ve focused on is the
business of stress reactivity and how
huge the divide is between children
who have a lot of stress reactivity and
those who have less. But the human
population is diverse in all kinds of
ways, and it’s given me an abiding
sense that that diversity is loved by
God. There’s a love within the universe
that not only celebrates that diversity
but also in some way created it. That’s
been helpful to me especially in the
last two years because two years ago I
developed an invasive skin cancer that
grew from the skin into my forehead,
down into my face, and into my facial
nerve, and it required me to go through
a huge surgical procedure and then
chemotherapy and radiation. My peace
and confidence and hope about all of
that derives directly from my sense of
God’s love and his abiding care for me
even with half of a face that works,
and half of a beard instead of a whole
beard. As you go along in life, the kinds
of Christian teachings that we know
about and receive from the Church and
from others is a way of dealing with the
vicissitudes and difficulties that life
brings.
TAUG 27