Things might have gone very differently for Dr. Judith James had she not learned to milk a tarantula. A fifth-generation Oklahoman, she grew up in a family of farmers and entrepreneurs on a farm outside the small community of Pond Creek.

Fewer than 900 people call Pond Creek home, and, when James was growing up, few kids in her class aspired to be doctors. But one definitely did. “I always knew I wanted to be a physician,” Dr. James says.

Dr. Judith James is the Vice President of Clinical Affairs at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. She’s also the Lou C. Kerr Endowed Chair in Biomedical Research, Associate Vice Provost for Clinical and Translational Science and professor at the Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center. She’s a board-certified rheumatologist and internationally acclaimed researcher best known for her work in the prediction and prevention of the autoimmune disease, lupus. Her research has resulted in OMRF being named a National Institutes of Health Autoimmunity Center of Excellence, one of only ten nationwide.

She’s grateful to her wonderful high school science teacher, Charlie Wille, for mentoring her and helping her realize that she could indeed become a doctor. “I was really fortunate in that I had a fabulous high school science teacher. He taught all the science, from earth science all the way through physics. I really wanted to do anatomy and physiology and he told me if I’d find eight kids to take the class he would teach it. He was also our senior class sponsor, and helped with the musical and drove the bus.” 

Wille helped set her dream of becoming a doctor in motion. “I searched all over and found the college I thought would be best because they had the highest acceptance rate into medical school, and then they told me I needed to get a research experience because I kept asking all these questions,” she says. Her family’s physician had also been kind and encouraging to her, allowing her to go on rounds with him, and he also thought getting some research experience was a good idea for the young woman who was so interested in knowing why one patient could respond to an illness or a treatment so much differently than another. 

She applied to the Fleming Scholar summer research program at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation but had to do so three times before she got in. “The first two times I was turned down. The first time they told me that I needed to apply when I was in college. The second time, they told me I needed to get some research experience before I could get this research experience,” she says, laughing.

By then a student at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, she found a rather ingenious way to use an undergraduate zoology course to fashion some research experience for herself. In this particular class, each student was assigned a fish, a snake or a tarantula to study. James was hoping for a fish, because, as a chemistry major, she saw lots of research opportunities with the fish. She did not want a snake. Not a fan. She bluffed a little bit, acting really interested in the snakes, talking about the snakes, all in an attempt to sway the universe into sending a fish her way. She got a tarantula.

Her tarantula turned out to be her eight-legged ticket to a research project. James had heard about a scientist at Oklahoma State University who was looking at different kinds of toxins. She and her tarantula took a little road trip to Stillwater where our heroine learned to milk venom from it, which was then analyzed for an academic research project. Tenacity and creativity are two traits every researcher must have. “And that’s how I became a Fleming Scholar,” she says.  

James wanted to become a physician in the first place because she has terrible asthma and wanted to figure that disease out. “It made me really interested in medicine and in how we could do better.” Living on a farm, many of her biggest allergens were right outside the door. 

The newly minted Fleming Scholar was ready to tackle asthma research. At the time, though, there wasn’t any asthma research happening in Oklahoma. “I met a physician-scientist, an MD/PhD, something that I hadn’t even heard of before, who was a board-certified allergist and immunologist who was doing autoimmunity research,” she says. So she’d decided to learn all she could from him about autoimmune disease, thinking that because asthma might have an autoimmunity component. Instead, she found a career path, thanks to a pair of patients.

“During that summer, he took me to the hospital to see some patients, and two of the patients I met were both 19 years old, and I was 20. And one of them did really well and one of them unfortunately passed away in the ICU. It was really striking to me that, even though we had known about his disease for hundreds of years, we still really didn’t understand why some patients did well and others didn’t.” After medical school, James ended up taking care of the patient who’d done well.

Around the same time, she also met patients with lupus and that cemented her determination. “Autoimmunity tends to affect predominantly women, and young women, between 15 and 45 years old, so during their peak years to have children. Autoimmune diseases afflict between 1 and 7 to 1 in 12 people, so I became really passionate about figuring out how we can improve the lives of patients who have autoimmune diseases. My research has really focused on what are the first things that will go wrong and if is there any way that we could actually prevent the transition to these autoimmune diseases.”

A research partnership with the Department of Defense led to an important discovery:  A genetic predisposition toward autoimmune disease occurs in families and abnormal antibodies can be present a decade before the disease presents. A huge breakthrough. “We thought ‘Wow, this is where lupus starts.’” 

Discoveries like the one above are crucial to solving the puzzle of complex disease, and they’re so exciting that they’ll move a scientist to the scientist’s version of giddiness. As she puts it, “There’s nothing cooler than being the first person to know something.”