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Research
I have three major research projects. In this day and age, in order to be successful in your area, and to ensure that you're going to have the support so that you can do what you want in science, you have to think ahead at a minimum in three-year blocks of time, and preferably five-year blocks of time. And the reason that's important to do is that those are training milestones for graduate students- successful projects often last 3-5 years for graduate students- and as it turns out those are the blocks of time that the national institutes of health support your research for.
One of the most exciting things I think we're currently doing is working on a new pathway for explaining how mutations in proteins can arise in cells. And this is a very non-traditional, and some might consider an unorthodox view of how that might happen. We just published a short paper in Science on it.
I think in my particular area, we have a possibility of understanding the development of cancer on a molecular basis. And once we get key pieces of information in that process, we can certainly more readily come up with more effective treatments for cancer. So anyone who is interested in cancer treatment or the causation of cancer, this is a great area to go into.
Also, this allows us to understand some of the key things that go on during the aging process- some things that happen in cancer and aging are in fact very closely related.
Education
My father was a professor of microbiology at the University of Maryland, and he was a bacteriologist. So I was exposed to science and thinking about science, and there was an emphasis on science in my family. My mother was also a microbiology major in college. So it was a big emphasis on science education in the family. Directly or indirectly, I'm sure that had an effect on my long-standing interest in science and my choice to pursue a career in science.
I'm fascinated by how the molecular interactions that take place in cells result in a living cell's biological expression. You and I having this conversation in many ways is the culmination of a myriad of molecular events. So if you go down to higher and higher levels in biology. Start with the organism, then the tissue, then the cell, then the components of the components, which are the macromolecules that have to interact. And I have always been fascinated by that last level of organization- how those macromolecules are interacting.
I have a long-standing interest in cancer research, and that's how I got interested in DNA damage and repair, because the damage of the genetic material in the cell is one of the critical initial events in carcinogenesis. Understanding the cell's response to genetic damage then allows us to understand one of the most important steps in the process that leads to the development of cancer in humans. Similarly, understanding when things don't work the way they're supposed to, and mutations occur in cells as a result of genetic damage, how those mutations are ultimately expressed, or how they are formed and ultimately expressed, in terms of the development of cancer, or a change in the physiology of that cell is also part-and-parcell another very important and fundamental component of the process of tumor development.
I was really interested in chemistry when I was an undergraduate. I didn't have to exert much of an effort to be good at Chemistry- much to my own amazement. I guess I found myself in a somewhat unusual position in that most of my friends, who were pre-med, hated chemistry, but took it because they had to, and even the ones who were good at it and studied hard at it really didn't like it. Whereas I liked it and I was good at it and I didn't even have to put forth a tremendous effort to reflect the fact that I was good at it. So I found something that I liked, much to my own surprise. I had no clue when I started my studies as a chemistry major that I was going to like it.
I said 'I think I'll try this, this sounds like a challenging major.' I started as a pre-med, and I think that about halfway through my junior year I decided that I was not going to go to medical school, that I liked chemistry, and specifically biochemistry.
Ironically, I got much better grades in my hard-core chemistry classes than I did in my biochemistry classes, even though I liked biochemistry better.
In the science component of my education, I would have liked to have seen a greater emphasis on independent research...
The situation really has changed now, especially if you're at Emory. Undergraduates have many wonderful opportunities to pursue independent research experiences. So most of my experience in the lab was actually these cut-and-dry cookbook chemistry labs, organic chemistry, biology, physics, where everything was set up to work, and everything was set up to be completed in a few hours. Thinking about science- that would really, in retrospect, give you a complete mis-impression of how science is done.
Teaching
I want to impart the knowledge of a particular area in a way that will be interesting to the students- that will be clear, so the students won't be confused, and by making it interesting you automatically stimulate, at least I have found, additional thinking on the students' part. You know that you've done a good job when a sub-set of the class starts asking questions about a third of the way through the lecture, and when they come up to you after class, and they ask you questions that are not exactly related to something you said in class, but is in fact related to a concept that you've tried to teach the students.
I teach first-year medical students biochemistry, and specifically I teach them things about replication and genetic material and some cancer biology- dna damage and repair. For graduate students I teach in the intro biochemistry of molecular biology course- much the same subject areas. I also teach a course in the structure and function of nucleic acids.
I am the course director for a very popular cancer biology course- and what's unique about that course here at Emory is that both graduate students and residents are taking that course. So we designed a course that would place basic scientists and physicians side-by-side with each other. And that's important to do because one of the most important developments in medicine today is to be able to have the basic scientists who spend all day in the lab working on their experiments communicate, and relate better to the clinicians who are out there at the beds, treating the patients, and vice-versa. This is called translational research.
So this is the first course, and maybe the only course currently at Emory that I'm aware of that emphasizes translational research. So we teach basic cancer biology to both physicians and graduate students.
On competition for grants
There's always the pressure to publish your results on the research that's being supported by these organizations- most of it is supported by the government. So there's a continual pressure to publish-or-perish as they say. And that can wear you out at some points, or wear you down- but again I can't think of a better system. If you look at the way that science is done and supported in some western-European countries where there is a vastly reduced competition for getting research funds, the quality of the science is vastly reduced.
So the fact that it's competitive and that it's relatively short-term compared to other systems, actually goes a long way towards ensuring the quality of the science that's being done. That's the positive aspect. The negative is, it puts pressure and stress on people. However, I think in some cases it's healthy stress.
Other interests
I do whitewater kayaking, and biking and hiking and camping. I like to spend as much time with my family as possible. It's a very important point to bring up: because I think that because I have these other interests, that makes me a much better scientist, because science is one aspect of my life, but it is not the only aspect of my life. And I'm a successful scientist, so the argument that you can't be a successful scientist unless you devote 100% of your time to your discipline I think is completely false. You learn what you have to do to become a successful scientist, a successful anything- I think the key is to wisely budget your time. It's not the hours that you put into your work, but the work that you put into your hours.
True grit and the life of a research scientist
It's highly variable. There's a great deal of variety. You're continually thinking creatively. You always have to think about new things. You're faced with new challenges almost every single day. You have to learn to become a good teacher, you have to learn how to be a personnel manager for the researchers in your lab, keeping in mind that you have people working for you who are at all different professional levels from undergraduates to graduate students to post-docs to visiting faculty. That you have different personalities that you have to deal with.
One of the things that I was absolutely unprepared to deal with when I became a professor was this personnel-management roll, and sometimes you have to be a career counselor, sometimes you have to be a psychologist. You also have to be a good writer- scientific writing is very different from other types of writing. You have to adopt a particular style that's going to be successful. So you have to know how to teach, you have to know how to write, you have to know how to manage a group of people, you have to think creatively about what you're doing, and you have to be able to execute a strategic plan for carrying out some kind of relevant research.
So that's a highly-variable, busy lifestyle. And it may be stressful at times, and it may be quite hectic, but it's certainly never boring.
On the glut of Ph.D.'s in the biological sciences
The issue has been raised that there are too many Ph.D.'s, that we're training too many for too few jobs, all of which are going to be highly competitive for the few good positions, that everyone else is just sort of going to become a terminal post-doc or get some low-paying job or completely not be able to use their training at all and have to completely change their career focus.
I think that you have to look at what we as a society intend to do with the development of different types of technologies, as well as medical research and how that impacts on disease treatment, the diagnosis and treatment of disease. So the number of professionally trained individuals required to do that is going to reflect how rapidly and on what scale we want to move forward in terms of medical research and the development of biotechnology. Biotechnology will continue to proceed forward, and it will continue to grow. That means that we're going to have jobs in industry; people are going to be needed to be trained for these positions, as well as taught, and even people who are not going into these professions are still going to need training in some of these areas, which is going to require a work-force of scientists.
So I guess my philosophy about this has always been, and what I tell my students when they ask me about this and related things, is that there are always great jobs out there for good people. So all you have to do is make sure that you're one of the good people. I don't necessarily think that all people coming out with Ph.D.'s are good.
Spring '95 Emory Medicine report: 'insights into cancer'
http://www.emory.edu/WHSC/HSNEWS/PUB/EM/EMSpr95/bio.html
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