The Rockefeller University is home to many gifted scientists. We all know about their scientific achievements, but often we don’t know much about the people behind the science. Natural Selections recently interviewed some Rockefeller professors to find out more about what science means to them, about their journey to become a scientist, and about their life outside the laboratory. Some highlights of the interviews are presented here.

Natural Selections (NS): As a child, what did science represent to you?

Paul Greengard (PG): It was something I did well. And people tend to do the things that they do better than other things.

Cori Bargmann (CB): The thing that was special to me about science compared to everything else in school was the lab itself: the practicality of it, the fact that you did it instead of passively learning about it. My formative scientific experience was in the 8th grade in earth science class…our teacher told us about how sodium would burn when you put it into water. This galvanized my little friends and me. We stole all the sodium from the earth science class and we flushed it down the toilet and we blew the toilet off the wall (laughter). This was very affecting to an 8th grade mindset when blowing things up is really cool. It’s the idea that you would learn something about the world and that you would have powers and abilities and unexpected experiences.

Günter Blobel (GB): I was always passionately curious, even as a child, but I did not know much about science then. In fact, in high school I was only marginally interested in science, perhaps because the teachers failed to make the subject fascinating.

Jeffrey Friedman (JF): I always did well in science, but I didn’t have any particular attraction. I certainly didn’t imagine that I would have made my career out of it.

Elaine Fuchs (EF): Ah. That’s an easy one: butterflies and a butterfly net and tadpoles and frogs and crayfish, definitely…my mother made me a fantastic butterfly net…and in addition, she allowed me to use the back porch for the pollywogs, caterpillars, snakes and other animals I caught in the cornfields…I remember reading once that thyroid hormone could accelerate the metamorphosis of amphibians, so I pleaded with my father to get me some thyroid hormone. He obtained it for me, and lacking an understanding of molar concentration, I dumped it all in. The next day, all the tadpoles floated on top of my pollywog pan—their metamorphosis was permanently stunted. At this early age, my experimental design and controls needed honing, but I knew from my interest and desire that I was destined to be a biologist.

NS: Have you always known that you wanted to be a scientist?

PG: As far back as I can remember I thought I wanted to be either a mathematician or a scientist.

CB: By the time I finished high school I was pretty sure that some sort of science was what I wanted to be doing.

GB: I ventured into science only after I completed medical school and my hospital internship in medicine, and more as a default pathway. Somehow, I was frustrated by the practice of medicine at that time. For many diseases, symptoms—but not the causes of the disease—were treated. I thought that it should be interesting to find out more about the causes of diseases. It was then that I decided to come to the US and to go to graduate school to get a firmer basis in science.

Fernando Nottebohm (FN): I didn’t want to particularly be a scientist. I thought it would be much nicer to be a writer. I tried my hand at poetry and it wasn’t easy, but I loved it. I also admired actors, their ability to make people laugh and be entertaining, and it gave me great pleasure to be [like] that.

NS: Can you talk about your experience in graduate school?

PG: In college, I studied mathematics and physics, and I thought I might become a theoretical physicist. But at the time I graduated from college, I wanted to get financial support and all the financial support in that area came from the Atomic Energy Commission—this was just a few years after dropping the atomic bombs in Japan. So I decided I didn’t want to go into that field, and I learned about the nascent field of biophysics…There was virtually no activity in the area in the area of the biochemical basis of nerve cell function, and I thought that would be an interesting field to study, so that’s what I did.

CB: I went to graduate school having gone to public schools and then to a state college, the University of Georgia. The University of Georgia is a good school, and what was nice about being interested in science there is that I felt that I got a lot of attention from the faculty because it was kind of exceptional. When I came to M.I.T. as a graduate student, all of a sudden it was a change to a whole different level of thinking, a whole different level of colleagues, and, in particular, I was very intimidated by my graduate school classmates. They all seemed to come from Ivy League schools and to have worked in the labs of these famous people. They just seemed so much more knowledgeable and polished than I was at that point. So I was very timid when I arrived (laughter). So if I were to contrast [how I was then compared with now], I was equally excited about science but I was very insecure and tentative. I have to say that this was completely self-generated—never something someone else ever tried to make me feel. In fact one of the very first people I met at M.I.T. was David Botstein who was on the faculty there at the time. He pulled me aside and said, “You know you might think that coming from the University of Georgia that you are coming in at a disadvantage.” At the time I had a deep southern accent and it was like coming from a different country. He said, “You should know that it is not true. We do not accept anyone here that we don’t think can make it. We are an educational institution and we take educating people seriously. Anything that you don’t know that we think you need to know we are going to teach you.” So it was a very positive experience.

GB: In graduate school there was a lot of emphasis on courses and less on enhancing one’s analytical and integrative abilities. I was better trained to do science, but I was still not overly excited about it. It is only during my postdoctoral training with George Palade here at Rockefeller University that I really caught fire.

FN: Oh, I loved it! I was very involved in what I was doing. I think I wasn’t giving it much thought about how it all would end. There was a vague cloud of optimism that everything would work out, but I think if I had thought carefully about it I’m sure I would have had goose pimples (laughter), but I didn’t. Because what’s the future of studying bird songs, face it (laughter). I mean, how many places can you go with this?!