Follow the Dream As Long As It Lasts
I decided I wanted to be a scientist when I was about 15, attending high school in Fullerton, California. It was all due to my geometry teacher, who was so inspiring that I was persuaded to remain in the science math track that I considered abandoning after a thoroughly uninspiring experience with math in junior high school. My family is very artistic (both parents were art teachers and painters and my brother became an opera singer) and I almost became a ballet choreographer until a serious bout of pneumonia at age 17 knocked me out of dancing for a few months and I discovered I didn't really miss it and would much rather do science!
During high school in the late 1960s, I became very excited about the emerging field of molecular biology and read the first edition of The Molecular Biology of the Gene from cover to cover like a novel. Fired with enthusiasm, I was determined to get into research as soon as possible and I was fortunate enough to be able to persuade a professor at the local state college to let me work (free) as a junior technician there to get an idea of what lab life was really like. I also enrolled for some university classes in microbiology and virology, which I found fascinating. This early experience reinforced my love of the subject field and helped me to gain acceptance to California Institute of Technology (CalTech) to major in biology in 1971.
In college, I learned three things that have really made a difference: how to work very hard, how to learn things I wasn't interested in, and how to schedule play time to balance the workload. CalTech is a small private science school, notorious as a "hothouse" environment for students. However, the intellectual stimulation of working alongside both peers and teachers who are all fascinated by science is unparalleled and it certainly taught me how to schedule my time, get through work to meet deadlines, and still have some fun.
The honor system, whereby virtually all tests are open-book and taken in your own room, was also a good preparation for later life and helped to develop a strong sense of personal and professional integrity in everyone who went there. I look back on it as a hard time (particularly physical chemistry, which I hated but managed to pass ...) but I do not regret the opportunity to follow my dream of becoming a scientist and to work with and learn from some of the world's finest biological scientists of the early 1970s.
However, my research and teaching experiences at CalTech did make me reexamine my own talents in the scientific sphere. Working in the lab of Max Delbruck, a Nobel Laureate, was particularly illuminating. I watched with awe the insight he could bring to any scientific endeavor. I found I was able to absorb large amounts of information and organize it, which helped me to do very well in class-work, but I observed that many of my peers (and all the faculty members) were much better at seeing the core of a scientific problem and determining just what the next key experiment should be.
I may have lacked the necessary level of creativity for a really top-flight research career, but at that point I still wanted to try it. Indeed, I had little awareness then that there was any option for a trained scientist other than research; the only choice seemed to be whether to do it in an academic or a corporate environment. When I graduated in 1974, the biotechnology industry hadn't really begun and most molecular biologists thought only of a university environment. My father was a college professor and my mother was also a teacher, so academia was really the only direction I saw in which to go.
Among the choices open to me for grad school was a Churchill Foundation scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England. I had been very impressed by the English students I had met when I was a President's Australian Science Scholar. And so, in 1974 I went to England, not realizing at the time that I would not return to work in the United States for more than 20 years, if ever.
I worked in the lab of David Ellar in the biochemistry department on the structure of bacterial spore coats. In addition to doing my research (and having a lot of fun rowing for the university and my college), I gained insight into the process of obtaining grant funding and the academic rivalries that exist throughout the international academic world. With hindsight, I could see that similarly political environments had existed in all the other universities where I had worked, which somewhat tarnished my idealistic view of scientific research as the pure-minded pursuit of scientific achievement. I came to realize, as does any scientist, that one cannot separate scientific endeavor from the pressures of career advancement.
My research was interesting but of little commercial relevance and the biotechnology industry was completely unheard of in Britain at that time, but I still expected to pursue a scientific career after my second degree. However, by the time I finished the Ph.D., I realized that I had actually been working in labs for 8 years and I had had enough! I really enjoyed writing up my 400-plus-page thesis, which included an extensive literature survey, and once again I realized how much it was the desk research for information gathering that I enjoyed, not testing scientific hypotheses in the lab. My dream was changing...
For a variety of personal reasons, I wanted to remain in the United Kingdom after getting my Ph.D. Since it was very unlikely that I could get a permanent academic position or funding from a British source as an American, I began to seek a job in industry. I expected, as a newly minted Ph.D., to find a research job in the food or pharmaceutical industry, but I was surprised to find that when interviewed, I was always being considered for management roles. I guess my interviewers knew more about my aptitudes than I did!
I eventually accepted a position as Senior Scientist in the technology transfer department of RHM Research Ltd., the research center of a major food and agricultural company, and I have never touched a test tube or pipette again.
The dream of becoming an academic scientist had passed, but I felt I had evaluated it carefully as an option and worked long enough in labs to know it was not the best career for me. It is important to realize that finding a career that you like and work that you are good at and enjoy is more important than sticking to any childish dream or parental expectation. Changing careers is not failure; it often requires more courage than continuing in the expected direction and can lead to much greater personal development.
