Office Artifacts: Gustavo Mostoslavsky

Click on the icons above to see more of what Gustavo Mostoslavsky displays in his Medical Campus office.

Growing up in Argentina, Gustavo Mostoslavsky did almost everything alongside his twin brother. So it’s little surprise to him that both ended up in similar fields—Gustavo is a professor of gastroenterology and microbiology at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, his brother, Raul, is the Laurel Schwartz Professor of Oncology at Harvard Medical School.

Mostoslavsky has a theory for why he and his brother are both researchers: “We are the product of the same stimuli,” he says, referring to their mother’s work as a psychologist and their father’s as a dentist. “We were almost always together, so I think it’s not that crazy that we ended up with the same desires and responses to life.”

Today, Mostoslavsky’s Medical Campus office is decorated with lots of things that remind him of his family (like his father’s dental name plaque), his Argentinian roots, and his numerous interests, which include motorcycles, diving, chocolate—and his research work.

In 2010, he cofounded BU’s Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM), with George Murphy, a Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine associate professor, and Darrell Kotton, BU’s David C. Seldin Professor of Medicine. CReM—which focuses on diseases affecting the lung, blood, liver, neural, cardiovascular, endocrine, and gastrointestinal systems—practices open-source biology, disseminating its discoveries for free rather than patenting them. “The more you share this research, the easier it is for others to make advances,” Mostoslavsky says. “And we all need all the advances possible because science is so hard.”

He is honest with his students about the difficulties of the research field. “I tell them, ‘You need to have a special love for what you do, because when you do [experiments], you need to do them many times. And once in a while, you get a great result that you can enjoy. So that requires a special personality and a special passion for what you do.’”

His hope is that his own passion for the work is infectious, and that he can show students that their “work has a greater good.”

In our Office Artifacts series, BU Today highlights interesting artifacts professors and staff display in their offices. Have a suggestion about someone we should profile? Email amlaskow@bu.edu.

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