drawn by Doruk Golcu

Natural Selections (NS): Who do you admire as a scientist, either living or deceased, and why?

Elaine Fuchs (EF): I have been fortunate to have many important role models in my scientific life. As a graduate student at Princeton, I learned molecular biology through one of my professors, Bruce Alberts. He gave us confidence to ask questions and focus on learning rather than worrying about embarrassment. Later at UCSF, Bruce initiated programs to bridge high school biology with UCSF biologists and also edited Molecular Biology of the Cell. Subsequently, Bruce accepted the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences and made outstanding progress both nationally and internationally in improving science education in K-12 [Kindergarten through grade 12] schools, in government, and in developing countries. He is a scientific leader in the true sense, and he has always led by example. I also have tremendous admiration for a trio of women. Janet Rowley won the Lasker Award for her work on chromosomal breakpoints in cancer, raised four children, and yet always sent me a handwritten note of congratulations whenever I accomplished something which was insignificant compared to hers. She taught me the importance of mentorship. I also greatly admire Shirley Tilghman, who taught in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, became a world-renowned scientist and a pioneer in mouse genetics, and is now president of Princeton [University]—she set the standard for a great compassionate leader. Last but not least is my admiration for Susan Lindquist, who became my close friend and colleague as we struggled through the ranks of professorship for twenty years at University of Chicago.

Hironori Funabiki (HF): I admire my two former supervisors, Mitsuhiro Yanagida and Andrew Murray. Yanagida is like a strict traditional Japanese father, who has been a role model both scientifically and personally. His strong opinions always helped me clarify complicated issues, and probably he is one of the most self-disciplined scientists with a great sense of humor. Murray is an amazing collector of knowledge, which is well organized in his brain to create novel ideas all the time. I am also a fan of an anonymous scientist, Mole, who has been writing insightful essays about scientific papers in Journal of Cell Science.

Anonymous1 (Anon.1): Rod McKinnon. He identified a really important scientific problem, realized that it took a different approach from what he was doing, abandoned his safe and successful ongoing work, and committed himself to solving the important problem no matter what it took. And succeeded.

David Solecki (DS): I would select, as a group, the trailblazers that created with limited tools, shrewd observation, and great imagination many of the fields that we study today. For instance, many of the founding tenets of developmental neurobiology, my field, were postulated by Santiago Ramón y Cajal during the 1880-90s using only Golgi stained tissues. Many of his theories, such as those concerning axon guidance and neuronal migration, are still the subject of active and cutting-edge investigations today.

Joseph Dougherty (JD): Darwin. He looked at the same natural world as everyone else, but he looked at it in such a way that he was able to infer general principles that no one had noticed before. He was also able to communicate his ideas with such clarity and such a body of evidence as to change how life itself was understood.

Megan King (MK): I see Tom Pollard as a personal role model for how to approach cell biology. Tom effectively uses defined, quantitative assays, but always addresses biological relevance by returning to the intact cell to bridge the in vitro/in vivo divide. Although I am irrevocably drawn to cell biology, my training is really in biochemistry and biophysics, so this approach appeals greatly to me.

Huidong Wang (HW): Marie Curie for her tremendous achievement both in physics and chemistry, for her advanced thinking beyond her time as a woman, and for her ability to inspire many young scientists.

Anon.2: Gary Struhl epitomizes what I think a scientist should be. Despite being a full professor, he still works on his own projects at the bench, and designs new ways to test and substantiate his basic hypotheses. If wrong, he alters his hypothesis without ever being married to his ideas. Mendel and Morgan also personified great scientists that tinkered with biology. But Peter Mitchell, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize for the chemiosmotic theory, caught my attention back then from the fact that he came up with the idea by reading the literature, a habit severely lacking in scientists today.

Anon.3: I was a big fan of James Schwartz back when his series of elegant papers on long-term potentiation, published in the late 90s, sparked my interest in molecular neuroscience. I also admire John Sulston who painstakingly mapped out the fate of every cell in C. elegans from embryo to adulthood with nothing but a microscope (and a graduate student).

Jaclyn Novatt (JN): Anita B. Roberts. She worked at National Cancer Institute and studied TGF-beta signaling. It was when she came to accept an award from the FASEB in 2005 that she concluded her engrossing talk with a photo of her children and grandchildren, and a heartfelt statement about how much they all mean to her. She exemplifies a woman scientist who has combined success in science with a happy family.

Omar Ahmad (OA): The economist Mohammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. His ground-breaking research led him to found the Grameen Bank, an innovative financial institution that by offering loans to the landless poor has improved the living standards of millions of people in Bangladesh.

NS: What is your definition of a “good scientist?” How would you evaluate scientific quality of a given individual?

Cori Bargmann (CB): A good scientist combines imagination with rigorous experiments. Sounds easier than it is.

EF: A good scientist has the ability to ask an important question, design well-controlled experiments to address the question in multiple ways, while knowing how to interpret the experiments in the most interesting ways and yet without going beyond the boundaries of what the data justify. A good scientist also has the ability to effectively communicate his/her results, orally and in writing to other scientists, would-be scientists, and non-scientists. Finally, a good scientist shares ideas and reagents openly with the scientific community and mentors his/her lab members throughout their training.

MK: In order to define a “good scientist,” we need to acknowledge that there are different ways of “doing” science, and as an endeavor, we need all types to be successful. Particularly, hypothesis-driven science is overemphasized (although it is the type of science I enjoy most). We also need scientists who use unbiased approaches, such as carefully designed genetic screens, which often facilitate the greatest (often unanticipated) leaps in understanding. We also need scientists who are more like engineers in the sense that they focus on developing new technologies and assays that we all need, but most of us are not capable of inventing. But at its simplest, good scientists are emotional and enthusiastic about their work until it is time to analyze the data, at which point they become objective and critical.

OA: A good scientist, to paraphrase Aldous Huxley, is someone who has discovered something more interesting than sex. By this measure, it’s pretty damn hard to find a good scientist.

NS: Do you have any opinions on the emphasis placed on publications in top journals and citation indices in evaluating the performance of a scientist?

CB: In the short term, a high-profile journal is more impressive to those outside the field, and brings the work to a larger audience. In the longer term, the quality and importance of the work transcend the journal. In my field, the most important papers for which Sydney Brenner and John Sulston won the Nobel Prize were one paper in Genetics and two papers in Developmental Biology.

EF: In utopia, what is relevant in evaluating performance is spending a substantial amount of time and effort to read a scientist’s work thoroughly, read the related work in the field carefully, ponder the relative importance of the scientist’s work in the context of the field, contact others within the broader field to obtain their opinions, and discuss the merits of the case. In utopia, there is some merit in a candidate’s ability to publish in “top” journals, since better journals should have a more rigorous review process and higher standards with respect to the quality of the data and the ability of scientists to articulate the importance of their work to others. I think it is better to aspire to what should be and work harder at making the system better.

HF: If you choose science for occupation, this is the game you have to play. It is not different from the race of restaurateurs in trying to get listings in Zagat survey or Michelin. It is a good practice to think why your work should be published in top journals and why your paper should be cited in future. It is, however, critical for scientists to control the quality of papers published in the journals as it is easy for non-experts to use these factors to form judgments.

JD: It is somewhat artificial. We all know of papers in the highest journals that later came to be seen as faulty, as well as strong papers in lower journals that changed the direction of entire fields. However, as long as citation indices are seen as only one more piece of data in an evaluation, I think they are alright. I cannot see another practical alternative.

NS: If there was one thing you could change about the current practice of science, what would that be?

DS: I would like to see changes in peer review. I know that all endeavors involving people are going to include some measure of politics, but it seems to me that peer review is the most subjective aspect of a process where quantitation and reproducibility are highly valued.

JD: I think the review of manuscripts and grants should be double-blind as much as possible so that the merit of the proposal or the paper is first judged on its content, and then on its authorship.

MK: I have an inherent fear of cronyism. While I recognize that science is carried out among a group of peers with whom you have relationships (good, bad, or indifferent), I wish that one could be judged on one’s talents and accomplishments alone. I have a hunch that many female scientists feel similarly, because cronyism is something that rarely benefits women in science.

Anon.2: Unfortunately, we are not doing science any more, we are doing science business (like show business). It is about money, power, fame, and last of all science. I think the Internet will one day solve this basic problem in science. Where this manifests itself most is in the peer review process for publishing.

Anon.3: I would like to see less paranoia and more sharing of data and information, although I realize these problems arise as a consequence of competition and a struggle for limited resources.

JN: I would change the way funding is distributed. The fact that you need results to be given the money, which you need to get results, is incredibly frustrating. I wish there were more money available to researchers, or less expensive ways of doing science!

Martin Kampmann: Eliminate the politics, which seem to absorb so much valuable time and energy of postdocs and senior scientists. Unfortunately, too many of them seem to be into it.

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