- I think one of the hardest things that any of us does
is to be able to gain an accurate view
of ourselves.
So looking for ways that allow us to kind of drill down
to the essence of how we think about things,
what our values are, and how those values associate
with the way that we do our science in the case
of scientists is essential.
- When you get ready to ask a scientific question,
it's important to think about the kinds of problems
that you like, and this is not just what kinds
of biology do you like because most biologists I know
are pretty interested in a lot of different kinds of things.
I feel like this has more to do with the kinds
of experiments that you like to do
or the sorts of ways that you like thinking
about a problem, and this is why I think
graduate school is such an amazing thing.
I don't know many other careers
where you get to spend five or six years
figuring out what things you find really exciting,
how you work best, what things you find really challenging
and then sort of being given the opportunity
to overcome those things.
The most important thing for me to realize
was that I can be interested in pretty much
any type of science as long as it has
some visual component.
So looking back over pretty much every project
that I've done, it's had a big chunk of microscopy in it
which isn't surprising given that I also love to draw
and paint and I did photography and I've done
graphic design, so I'm clearly like a visual thinker.
And so the ability to do science by looking very carefully
at things is really satisfying for me.
- The project that I started and the second half
of my post-doctoral career that I ended up basing
my entire lab on came to me kind of fortuitously
in the fact that there's somebody else in lab
who was doing this really, really interesting technique
and I wanted to learn it, and that was it.
I really wanted to learn this technique,
it looked really challenging and really fun
and like I felt like if I could master that technique,
I would be incredibly proud of myself,
and so I was in the process of performing
a screen in drosophila and I began to focus
specifically on kinases just so I could
perform this one technique that had to do with kinases.
And that's essentially how it happened,
I was just so enthralled with this one method
that was developed by the Shokat Lab at UCSF
that I just really wanted to learn it
and that was a huge motivation for me.
- It's really important to recognize that you can gain
those insights about yourself, not just by looking
at your previous experiences in science,
but also just your whole life.
Like what are the things that you choose to do
when no one is telling you what to do?
because in science, nobody's going to be telling you
what to do a lot of the time, and so you should pick stuff
that just compels you to do it because you enjoy it
so much.
But by the same token, you want to make sure
that there are also things that are part of the mix
of requirements for your project that stretch you
because there may be things that you don't know
that you like.
You don't want to narrow what you're willing to do
just based on sorta what you know by yourself already.
- My deep interest was in puzzles, puzzle solving,
codes, and decoding, and I didn't really know what form
that would necessarily take.
Somehow I was convinced that understanding the brain
would be mathematical, that somehow mathematics
would be revelatory of what was going on in the brain
and when I started as a biology major at Cornell University
in 1984, I kept hoping that my biology courses
would take me to something mathematical
that would somehow reveal some key underpinnings
of the brain.
I had no idea what specifically I had in mind.
Finally, in my junior year actually, I got to a course
called animal communication, which when I heard
about it, I thought it might be something like dog ESP,
I didn't know what animal communication would
necessarily be but a friend told me that it was offered
at the right time and it might be possibly a good course.
But it turned out to be a course about how organisms
respond to the physical signals in the outside world
like light or sound or chemicals that are odors
or chemicals that are tastes and all those physical signals
would be transformed into electrical signals
that would then be processed by the brain
and then the organism could respond to those
signals in an appropriate way.
And to me this was the secret of life.
Suddenly he was showing us how the inanimate physical world
was transformed by the brain into the electrical signals.
This was the ultimate code and that's when I
realized I want to study something like this.
How do I find out more?
I just wanted to get the same lecture over and over again
like a favorite bedtime story, and so I discovered
an area of research that was nothing like anything
I could dream about before discovering it
through paying attention to something that I didn't
necessarily think was going to be interesting.
It was by being willing to take a class
that I didn't really know anything about,
ready to hear what this professor had to teach me,
by that process I was able to discover something
that I found fundamentally exciting.
- And so some of those things you might discover
along the way as you do your own project
like something is really fun for you,
or something's sort of uncomfortable for you
so you may or may not know these things as you get started,
I mentioned earlier that I really love microscopy.
I have an unholy tolerance for sitting in a dark room
by myself, staring at tiny, fluorescent glowing things
and listening to music.
I am happy doing that for days on end.
There are other people who are not, right,
and so you should accept the sorts of modes of things
that you like to do.
I have students that have an unbelievable mind
for genetics, which I do not, it is so abstract for me,
like I'm a biochemist at heart.
I like to take the purified things and mix them
in a tube and see what they do.
Genetics is a much more abstract reasoning exercise
that does not come easily to me but comes very easily
to some people in my group and they are extremely talented
at it and love it.
Finding these things that sort of resonate with you
and making sure that there are some piece of them
in your project, it's like exercising your talent, right?
In my mind it's less important what you work on
than how you work on it, and that you come out of
your experience as a graduate student
inspired and enabled to go do amazing work.
- Everybody has a different skillset and a different way
of thinking that can make them successful in different ways
and so there's no across the board tips really
except for I would still drive home the fact
that you need to be motivated and you need
to be interested.
For me, even though I have two kids and my time in lab
is restricted between nine to five,
you still think about science when you're outside of work.
You think about it at night and that type of interest
and that type of motivation is incredibly important.
And so it comes down to you just pursuing
what you're really interested in
and in knowing that that research is the most important
thing for you.