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Why did you get into research?
Actually, I ask myself that all the time because I have to keep reminding myself why I keep doing this and why I got into this.
How did you get into science?
I went to a real small liberal arts college and I had absolutely no research experience going into graduate school. I went to graduate school to become a teacher. It turned out that I loved working at the bench. So that was a happy coincidence. I would have liked to have known that earlier- I've got an undergraduate now who really loves to work at the bench, and he's going to graduate school next year and I'm sure that this experience has taught him that he can do it every day, that he enjoys it.
But I'll add to that that when I went to graduate school, I happened to be in the first class of a new program where there weren't any set rules as to how me or any of my classmates were going to obtain our degrees. And I found that very liberating in that I was able to design my own course of study, my exams, how my thesis was going to go. I didn't have to jump through a lot of pre-ordained hurdles, which is unfortunately not really the case very often anymore. I think graduate students need to be treated entirely as adults and not as undergraduates. But I'm afraid that that doesn't happen very much anymore- but that's wrong because eventually you've got to go out there and do it on your own. And jumping through these hoops and getting the grades and coddling them- I think it's a disservice to not encourage them to take control of their career fate.
I think that, frankly, I wouldn't pay any particular credence to someone who's gotten through graduate school with straight A's, as opposed to somebody who has just barely gotten by in their courses and who has done good work, as evidenced by publications and that kind of thing.
The smartest people succeed in this business, just like most other fields. So generally I think the most successful scientists did very well in their coursework, but it's not the case that people who do well in coursework as a rule are very successful scientists. And I did OK in coursework- but it wouldn't have bothered me to get a B or a C if I thought I really learned something- or worse. I don't think there should be grades, I think you should either pass or not.
Where did you get your undergraduate degree?
College of Idaho, B.S. Zoology
What's your philosophy of teaching?
I don't have a formula. I wasn't ever trained to teach- and that's true of a lot of Ph.D. students. I did a little teaching in graduate school but I didn't even have to do that. So I feel like I've been kind of fumbling along, trying to find effective ways to do it. What I try to do, first and foremost, is to make the students feel comfortable and at-ease. I'm always very informal, and I'll always kind of try to be a smart-alec, to demonstrate that I'm not going to take this too seriously. And then I try to emphasize that it's not names of molecules or specific reactions that I want them to remember, but concepts regarding the topic at hand, and how one could approach that experimentally.
And I'm not sure that a didactic series of courses or lectures is really going to be useful, in the long run, for someone who's focused at that time on doing independent research and generating a thesis and defending it. I'm not so sure that we should be teaching graduate students how to teach- but I think that it's incumbent upon faculty to try to be the best teachers they can, thereby to set an example. I think far too many faculty members don't really care whether they teach well or not, or at least apparently not.
I like to hear students say "that's really cool." When those sort of lightbulbs go off, that's what I really enjoy. For the students in my lab, there is kind of a graduation when they're able to stop looking at the protocol and following each step, to thinking about: 'OK, how could I do this better, how could I be more efficient, or how could I ask this question a little bit differently.' And then I think they really have got a handle on what it's really going to take to be a productive scientist.
What's the most exciting new thing to come out of your lab?
We've recently discovered that a mitochondrial protein which is important for providing atp to the cytoplasm is upregulated following brain injury. And we know that the cells that increase the expression of this atp transporter are a special cell type whose business it is to respond to brain injury. It's a glial cell type. So we think that we now have a functional handle on the response to brain injury. And we are trying to figure out how we can exploit that to try to modify the ultimate outcome of brain injury, in a positive way.
My collaborator, Bob McKewan on that project is a trained physical therapist, and the reason that he got into this business was that he had been working with people with spinal chord injuries and quadraplegics and he realized that we just knew so little about it, so his work is centered on brain response to injury. And the reason that he and I got together is that, using a model system that he and his colleagues had developed, wanted to start looking at specific gene expression following injury, to try to identify genes that might get turned on.
This is one of them- it turns out to have a very important cellular function.
What are your research goals?
I guess things are kind of up in the air right now- I've got my hand involved in a number of collaborative projects, partly because I'm trying to expand my funding base. I'm hoping that this glial scar project will pan out. I'm thinking that I'll concentrate on the glial scar and on examining a class of molecules called neurotropins and the physiological properties of motor neurons, which control muscles.
What are the most exciting areas in your field?
With regard to nervous system development, there are now hundreds of mouse mutants that are missing one specific gene. In many cases these have some sort of neurological phenotype. But in most often it isn't immediately obvious why that phenotype presents. So if you knock out this atp translocator that I discussed, which has been done, the brain is apparently normal, although these animals are more subject to oxidative stress insult. And there are other things about the animals that are of interest. By using the animal that lacks that gene, one can go in and determine with a great deal of precision exactly what that protein that the gene codes does.
So that's what I would do if I was going into it right now. I'd try to identify specific mutants that were apparently important. I would work on designing experiments that allowed me to say with certainty: "this protein does this for brain development." That hasn't been done for almost all of these mutant animals. I think that's really where we're going to learn a lot in a hurry.
Describe the life of a teaching research scientist.
The main positive thing about it is that there's a great deal of freedom with regard to your everyday life- so there's no set schedule, you can where what you want to wear, you can go on vacation whenever you want. But having said that, I've found that, in my case at least, it's very difficult to get anywhere if I don't work very long hours. It's not true of all of my colleagues, but a sixty hour week is a short week. So I'm usually here even longer than that. And that can get to be very tough on the family. In addition to just the practical concerns about how much time you're at work, the main reason that I decided to stick with it and put up with all the difficulties in getting funding and the vagaries of what gets published and what doesn't, is that I enjoy the unlimited intellectual freedom.
I can pursue anything I want to pursue, I can read papers in any area I want to read, and I'm not directly accountable at the end of every day or every week for having done something with some system. So I like that ability- there's no limit on what you can pursue intellectually. I can't think of another job that's like that.
What about the pressure of getting grants? Does that make the science difficult?
It's a big problem I think. It's really been a problem for me because I have a tendency to think more home-run ball rather than just getting on base, and that can be fatal- may be fatal in my case. It's a concern that's being raised more and more often, and there are a lot of programs being instituted by various universities (not here, I don't think) to try and protect people early in their careers and to try and take some of that pressure off. I think those are just window dressing and I think there's a fundamental problem, and that is that we're probably producing too many scientists for too little public money. And I don't know how to get around that. I think the way to get around it is that a lot of scientists are going to quit.
I know of people who have just up and quit- even tenured faculty members, just because they got tired of that rat race. I think that if that happens, if 15 or 20 or 30 percent of Ph.D.s decide not to continue to work in academic settings, I don't think that the advance of science will suffer proportionally. I think it will suffer a little, but not much.
The great thing about this business is that it doesn't matter how you look or what your personality is like and as long as you do the work, you're going to be rewarded, in most cases. In most cases, whether you're a nice guy and you schmooze or not, it doesn't matter- there are some exceptions of course. Advancement is very much based on what one has done and you're judged by your work. And so the best people are going to stay in it because they want to and they can. And the other people maybe never should have been in it in the first place.
I hate to discourage people from going into it, but I frankly think- I'm not brilliant or anything like that. Probably, knowing what I know now, I would not have opted to go this route, because I think there's a very real question of whether I'll survive in this setting.
But having said that, I think even if I don't, I've enjoyed it so much that I think that if I had that opportunity I would still take it and hope for the best.
I tell people now: 'If you don't love working in lab, and you don't love working hard and working long hours, then you really should consider doing something other than getting a Ph.D. in biomedical research, and I think there are a lot of other options out there now.
I think that the job prospects for technicians are great. I could make almost what I'm making now as a technician. And hey- it's basically a 40-hour week, and you're not accountable for getting the grants and whatnot. There is some insecurity with regards to whether your boss can keep his funding and whatnot. But at Emory right now a decent molecular biology tech could get a job in an hour, and do that again and again if they had to. And that's probably true of any major metropolitan area.
I think that there's also a growing journalism side to this business, trying to communicate advances and whatnot to the public- I think that's kind of a house of cards. I wouldn't necessarily suggest that someone pursue that. So far I don't think that education in general has caught up to the point that the average person thinks it's very important what kinds of things are being done, unless it's some kind of gee-whiz advance that anybody could report about.
So most of the scientific journalism is for scientists now, and that's not a very good market I don't think. The other thing I would like to see more talented people do is to teach at different levels, especially starting in junior high and highschool- because that's where you can really get people turned on to the possibilities of science, and that's where I think we're failing.
One option that I might opt for now is to try to get a master's in biology and try to teach high school students, I think that would be a lot of fun and a lot less pressure and hassle.
You can't do that with your current degree?
It's kind of funny- even to go from medical center/biomedical research job to an undergraduate teaching job is very difficult right now because the undergraduate institutions are skeptical of someone who has been in a lab, they don't think they're going to be a very good teacher, they know they don't have much teaching experience, and they really need someone who can put in the time and effort to be a good teacher. So it's actually very difficult to even get looked at for a job like that. That's less so if you want to go teach at a public school- but there you run into the bureaucracy: if you don't have your teacher's certificate, or your degree in education, even if you've got a Ph.D., you may still run into trouble. And I think that's reasonably easy to solve- you just take a course or two.
Do you think that science educators are failing to produce the science-literate masses that pundits claim we need to become?
I think it's always been a problem, but I think it was less apparent, because the pace of research has historically been much slower than it has been in the last 15 years. Things are moving so rapidly -in no small part because there are so many people doing it now- that it's very difficult to keep up in any kind of a way that makes sense. I'd say 99% of the teachers in highschool and junior high have any kind of grasp on what's being done, on what modern advances have come out in the last five or ten years, so they obviously can't pass that kind of appreciation on to students. So I'm not saying that people are dumb, but I'm saying that there is a lot out there and it really takes a lot of time to get to the point that you're comfortable with it.
Graduate students who have done nothing else for two years are just barely getting there, in terms of really appreciating what's available, what's been done, what advances are out there and that kind of stuff. So how do you solve that? You can't have the whole world take off a couple of years to catch up. I think it comes back to the working-bench scientists to say that we have to find ways to effectively communicate to our families, our neighbors, local school classes, that kind of stuff- what we're doing and why, if not the details. And that's hard to do in a 60 or 70 hour week.
One thing that seems to be true is that there's never been a time when that addition of knowledge has slowed. It's been picking up speed throughout western civilization. But we already see signs that the inability of different disciplines to talk to one another has resulted in redundancy as well as contradictory ideas, and even dogmas that have emerged. I think there's really going to be a cry for a coming-together of minds. But I think that's kind of built into the system because of the federal component of funding. There's a lot of smart people who are trying to keep track of things.
What are your interests outside of work?
(laughs)
I've got four kids. So basically work and my family occupy all of my time. I don't have any hobbies- I like to go camping and I play basketball three times a week and that's about it.
Do you have any more advice for undergraduates?
I try not to discourage people from pursuing a Ph.D., for instance. But I would say that exploring a lot of different ultimate career options would be a valuable exercise before you come into a Ph.D. program. And understanding that you might not be a major faculty member at a major medical center, or even at a college, is really important, because the chances are that you won't.
What other options are there for undergraduates in the biological sciences?
Technical jobs, working for industries is a common goal now among graduate students. And I think that the research public interface is something that is going to continue to grow in one way or another. Generally there are lots of opportunities available- it's just the question of finding time to pursue them I think.
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