In an Endlessly Interesting Field

My great grandfather and grandfather were geologists. My great grandfather on the other side of my family collected butterflies in Hawaii, so there were definitely science genes there. My parents, who were family physicians, certainly encouraged my interest in science. Also, having pets and my love of animals as a kid were big influences. My science interest grew because I loved biology. I decided that biochemistry, and later molecular biology, was the way I wanted to study it.

I'm Australian (and now a U.S. citizen too). I did my Ph.D. in England with Fred Sanger in the early days of DNA sequencing. Sanger himself was at the bench developing the DNA sequencing method nearly everyone uses now—the dideoxy method. I was copying DNA into RNA and sequencing it by methods Fred and others had developed. He was a great mentor, setting an example as someone who was completely hands-on in the lab and loved his lab work. My postdoctoral mentor, Joe Gall, who was then at Yale, was another great influence. He's a remarkable cell biologist and scientist, and is also recognized as a terrific mentor because of the number of successful women students and postdocs who emerged from his lab. He mentored by being encouraging and fair; he always valued female scientists as much as male scientists. He received the Lasker Special Achievement in Medical Science Award in 2006, the same year I shared the Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research.

I had two very good examples of mentors, which was important, because I learned by example. I often check what I'm doing against how I think they might respond. They were good mentors for different reasons, but were similar in that they respected the people in their lab. After Yale, I joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. I was there from 1978 to 1990. I felt it was time for a change, and I always loved the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and I was able to make the move. I like being close to the data in the lab, but time constraints don't allow me to spend many hours pipeting, which I did for as long as I could. One of my postdocs has a beautiful result of very short telomeres that we've unexpectedly discovered in cancer cells. We had to score cells for fluorescent signals on telomeres in an unbiased fashion. I'm happy sitting and scoring all the micrographs of all the telomeres. I won't know what the samples are, they will be in random order, and I'll do them a number of times, so that we have a very rigorous scoring mechanism without significant bias. Analyzing data, looking at the data sets, what a treat!

I was the first to discover the molecular telomeric DNA structure. Carol Grieder, my graduate student at Berkeley, and I discovered telomerase. Everything I do involves the biological significance of telomeres and telomerase. The context varies from very basic molecular, where we still use yeast as a system, to collaborative human studies. The newest ones have to do with chronic psychological stress and cellular aging in humans, mostly with our UCSF colleague Elissa Epel. There are rigorously controlled, longitudinal clinical studies of chronic stress interventions, in which people might be able to change their behavior, where we are looking at the effects on telomerase. We know that genetic influences will interplay with non-genetic influences. I find that complexity extremely interesting. Telomerase has also been clearly implicated in the setting of malignant cancer cells. We're trying to target interference with telomerase to cancer cells. The question is, can we target it smart? I like that sort of puzzle. We collaborate with people who invent ways of targeting agents into cancer cells.

Sometimes I play the piano. I'm not sure it gives anyone great pleasure but me. I learned as a kid then stopped in college. After a 15-year hiatus, I started playing again and I'm amazed your neurons retain the ability. I just discovered Sudoku, the only other hobby I have. People who love their work don't need hobbies; work is your hobby. My field is endlessly interesting. I love surprises. We can make telomerase that is dead and has no catalytic activity, or we can delete the entire gene. You might say they should be one and the same, but you can compare those two situations using a systems approach and find that they are not the same. The genes that interact are totally unexpected. I love the way the science of biology and tools and technologies are changing, because there are so many unanswered questions and you can bring in new technologies and apply them.