Vytas Bankaitis has been in the scientific field for 25 years. His successful research career in lipid-mediated signal transduction caught our attention. Curious to know more, BioTechniques contacted him to find out about the ambition, character, and motivations that led to his success.

The Pathways to Success

How did you first become interested in science?

My father was in the air force, so I spent my childhood at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert of California. When I was 5 years old, I remember leaving my bedroom on Christmas morning and finding a telescope underneath the Christmas tree. The desert sky is amazing at night. I spent hours with that telescope out in the desert and became completely obsessed with astronomy. That was my introduction to science and I have never left it.

What are your most significant scientific insights and how did they come to you?

When I was a graduate student, I worked on bacterial protein export. The idea at that time was that the signal peptide was the sole determinant of whether a protein remained in the cytoplasm or was transported to other extracytoplasmic locations.

I was never able to get clean immunoprecipitations of wild-type secretory proteins whenever I used a bacterial strain expressing a protein with a mutant signal peptide. I knew this was not incompetence on my part because my other experiments were very clean. One day it came to me that the protein with the mutant signal peptide might be interfering with the wild-type proteins to make them appear dirty. This indicated that the mutant proteins with dysfunctional signal peptides still had some recognition element that was communicating with the export machinery. That turned out to be true and led to one of the first demonstrations that chaperones were required for protein export across membranes.

What was your biggest professional obstacle? What did you learn from it?

I had two of them. When I first started graduate school, I entered a lab environment that was brutal. I had to make a decision to fight or quit and do something else. I chose to fight. That experience taught me two things: one, you have to be a fighter and two, science was right for me because I had every opportunity to choose something else.

The second obstacle came when I became an assistant professor. We were in a terrible funding cycle, so securing grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was extremely difficult. It was very discouraging. But, from that experience I learned that if you have good ideas, you will learn the pathways to success.

Although I was having trouble getting NIH funding, I was able to secure National Science Foundation (NSF) funding, and I was put in a study section very early in my career. It was a complete eye-opener. It was actually evaluating other grants and comparing them to mine that taught me how to succeed.

I feel so strongly about this that I developed a year-long course that requires students to look at real grant proposals. In the first semester, faculty provide their grants to the class. The purpose is to look at grantsmanship, rather than science. The students will see the progression from initial submission through the funded grant. In the second semester, I acquire grants from outside the university through friends and colleagues, who are very kind in sending them. The students score the grants and discuss them just like in study sections at NIH.

Will you share your best grant-writing tips?

The first is get to the point. The second is brevity equals clarity. The third is have people outside your immediate area of study read it before you submit it, and then listen to what they say.

Who had the biggest influence on your scientific career?

Phil Bassford at the University of North Carolina did. The experience I had in his lab validated to me that science is a great profession, especially after the rocky start I had. I owe him my professional career. Randy Sheckman (University of California, Berkeley) is another: while I was a post-doc at the California Institute of Technology, I approached Randy and asked if I could work on one of his SEC genes. I wasn't in his lab, but he agreed and he gave me the chance to follow my interests.

I think that senior faculty members have a choice: are they going to promote the careers of young scientists or compete with them? That crossroad came for me and Bill Dowhan (University of Texas, Houston) because our research intersected. He really helped me by standing aside in some ways to let me pursue my interests. I will never forget that. If one were to ask what an ideal scientist is like in terms of the professional and scientific components, I think he or she would be a lot like Bill Dowhan.