Letting Things Happen

My father was an editor of scientific books and journals. So professors would sometimes visit our home in The Hague, The Netherlands. I received the message, early in life, that being able to contribute to science was the highest possible achievement.

I chose biology because this science seemed to be in the middle of a revolution. But part of the attraction today is also that, even if your studies are focused on a particular problem, the field interfaces with societal issues on many levels. It is exciting to be part of something bigger. I don't know if I would have liked doing inorganic chemistry, for example.

My Ph.D. work at the University of Leiden (The Netherlands) was on bacteriophage genetics. I started focusing on DNA transposition in bacteria as a postdoc at Caltech (Pasadena, CA) and then in Cae-norhabditis elegans in the laboratory of John Sulston in Cambridge, UK. Now my focus is small RNAs. What I have learned is that every time I deliberately try to make a drastic strategic choice, it does not work, and when I let things just go by natural evolution, then something wonderful happens.

For example, I had decided to study memory and learning in nema-todes. I took courses at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, and talked to people in the field. I did some preliminary studies using genetics and genomics to tackle the problem, but I never got anywhere. Meanwhile, the transposon work was becoming somewhat boring for me. But while trying to find mutants in the silencing of DNA transposition, we found what later turned out to be mutants in RNA interference. That was before anyone had described RNA interference in C. elegans! So we entered the field right from the start.

I have said before that I like the romantic phase of a research project—when you don't quite know what is going on and anything is possible. I admire people who stick with one project to the end; they start with a phenomenon, then solve the mechanism, find the responsible proteins, then become biochemists and crystallographers to study the structure, until the very last atom. I admire it, but have never been able to do that myself.

I am a columnist for the Volkskrant, a leading Dutch daily newspaper, and Buitenhof, a Dutch television program equivalent to Meet the Press in the U.S. These things happened by chance. About 15 years ago, I delivered a lecture at the University of Amsterdam. I knew there were non-scientists in the audience, so I tried to talk not only about my work but also about areas of genetics that specifically touch society, such as cloning and evolution. Someone from the university's newspaper liked what I said and asked me to write for them four times a year. After a while, I was approached by a second-tier daily newspaper and then later by the Volkskrant and the television show.

At first both my column and the television program were primarily about science. But you cannot write about cloning every week. So I started covering a wider range of issues. Nowadays, if I write about genetics, people think that I have run out of other subjects to talk about.

I have always had political interests. I was a member of the Dutch labor party as a student, but in recent years I have been mostly politically inactive. I did what many people do: I read the newspapers and followed the news. But now every Thursday, I have to file a story for the newspaper, and every other Saturday, I have to prepare for the Sunday-morning show. It has made me listen more closely to what is happening around me. I guess you could say I live in a more conscious manner.

Sometimes people have asked me “How can you explain things so well when you are a professor?” Isn't that funny? It is precisely because I am a scientist that I can do it. As a professor, I have to reach students with different backgrounds. I have to adapt what I say to what they can absorb.

Some people in The Netherlands think I spend all my time in television, but it is not a big time commitment. I am a full-time scientist—that is my passion—and then I do something on the side. I think I have more energy if I divide my time among different things. Yes, I also spend time with my family: we have two teenage sons.

I had an opportunity to move to the United States when I was looking for a faculty position in the late 1980s. But when I was offered a job that combined a good research environment with being in my own country, I took it. I don't think I have ever regretted the choice. I would have left if I could not have done good science here. But if you don't have to compromise your scientific career, there is extra value in having your roots somewhere. I think you can have a better life that way.