Fascination of Science, page 10
Long-time President of the National Academy of Science
United States
Professor Alberts, why did you want to become a scientist?
My chemistry teacher at my Chicago high school was a wonderful man named Carl W. Clader, 35 years old at the time, and my homeroom each day for four years was his chemistry lab. There weren't safety rules in those days, and in the middle of one of the benches there was a well in which we'd put all sorts of dangerous chemicals, like concentrated sulfuric acid. We could mix concoctions that would explode, so I became really interested in chemistry.
I don't know if I would have chosen to be a scientist at that time, because I didn't even realize you could pursue a career as a scientist. I knew that medicine was a career that used chemistry. I had done well in high school, so I applied to the colleges my mother asked me to apply to and I got into Harvard as a premed student. Both of my parents were born in the United States to recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, and they always stressed the importance of education.
Beside causing explosions in the chemistry lab, what else did you do as a child?
I played a lot of softball, and I was a Boy Scout, which was a great experience because I had to overcome a lot of focused small challenges. Scouting has a system of merit badges, and you have to earn twenty-one of them to achieve the highest rank of Eagle Scout. You could choose from a variety of activities, such as learning to tie hundreds of different knots or building things. It was an active way of learning, and it had a big influence on how I think about education today.
Why is that?
I think children should be challenged to do things and not just to memorize facts. There are many things we could do better in education, but it's all about having active things to do and giving students some choice in what they do. In my first year as a premed at Harvard, I took many science courses, spending three or four afternoons in the lab every week. It was a huge amount of time, but extremely boring, because you had to follow instructions. It was like following a recipe.
Science is nothing like that. The independent projects we were assigned each year in middle school were a wonderful way to motivate kids because they really learned by doing. That's been a fundamental finding throughout my life. With those school projects I was testing myself and I learned a lot. These were teachers who had the vision to let us try to struggle on our own. If we needed help, they'd give it, but they didn't give us the answers and there was no one right product to produce.
Did you experience any failures in your career?
I've learned the most in life from my failures—and I've had many. The most important one for my scientific career was failing the PhD exam at Harvard in 1965, which was incredibly inconvenient. I had a 1-year-old child and my wife Betty, and I had already given up our apartment and bought plane tickets to Geneva for my postdoctoral work. Then, after a short discussion about my thesis, they said they weren't happy with it and that I'd have to stay another six months. From that experience I learned that in science, having a good strategy is everything.
Did that make you doubt yourself?
After failing the exam, I spent a month trying to figure out whether I had the abilities, talent, and motivation to be a scientist. I knew I enjoyed doing it. But everybody has this problem. It's the most important part of education. You need to figure out what you're good at, what you enjoy doing, and then aim for a career that enables you to make use of that. Graduate school is no different. Nobody can be a successful student just by memorizing things and learning what people have already done. Science is a creative endeavor, like painting. I tell every PhD student, “You are really testing yourself. You have to figure out what you're good at, what you'd like to do, and then give yourself the chance to succeed.”
Were you a creative person and a freethinker?
My talent is the ability to see the big picture. That's why I write textbooks. I'm creative in designing solutions to problems, and I do that in different ways. That's useful in life because we have all kinds of problems, not only scientific ones. But once you learn to do science, it's very useful for everyday life because everything presents alternatives, and you need a strategy. For me, the PhD experience was hugely transformative. It taught me that I wanted to do imaginative, important science. I decided to develop a unique method, and I chose an important problem that people weren't working on. It was an approach that worked out well.
The key is to identify a unique field in which to work?
It can't just be unique; it also has to be potentially important. Doing the same thing as everyone else has done is no fun, and it's not going to be a real contribution to humanity. You have one life to live—you might as well make a difference.
In a nutshell, what would you say was your contribution to society?
In 1953, Watson and Crick discovered the DNA double helix. It was an amazing intellectual breakthrough, solving a mystery that nobody knew anything about: Where does heredity come from? How is it possible? Physics, chemistry, and molecules could give you living cells and people, and heredity was one of the major puzzles. Watson and Crick solved this problem in theory, but not in practice. It was just the outline. If they were right, there had to be all this machinery to do this stuff.
I became fascinated with a particular central part of the molecular machinery: how to copy the DNA double helix using chemistry, as a chemist. My whole initial career, and where I first became successful, was working out the parts of the machine, putting them together and getting them to work and copy the chromosome in a test tube. It took me and my whole laboratory ten years. We discovered a protein machine composed of seven moving parts that copies the DNA double helix, making two DNA double helixes from one and making two chromosomes from one—and that's the essence of heredity.
Have you been obsessed with your work?
I lived close to the lab, so I'd go home for dinner for an hour or so and then return to the lab. In biochemistry, you have to keep track of the proteins you are purifying and make sure the equipment is working, so that often meant checking it in the middle of the night. Eventually, when you get older, it's the graduate students who do that, but in the beginning it was me. I was always late for dinner, and I worked at least eighty hours a week.
When you're really excited about science, it becomes incredibly enjoyable. I've been obsessed with many topics. That was the first one, and I've moved on to others.
When and why did you start trying to influence the way science is taught?
I saw what my children were doing in school and the textbooks they had in biology; they were full of words and concepts that covered a little bit of everything. Middle school biology textbooks were the hardest I'd ever seen, but it was completely by accident that I went on to co-author textbooks for universities. Jim Watson wrote the first really good textbook in our field, Molecular Biology of the Gene, in 1965. Then, around 1976, he had the idea to combine two scientific fields: molecular biology—which is what I had been working on—and a field called cell biology, which I had never heard of.
A lot of beautiful work had been done in the nineteenth century in studying cells, using only a microscope because they had no other tools, thereby creating a new research field called cell biology. Jim was a visionary and recognized that we could try to span the gap between molecules and just looking at cells by writing a textbook based on the same conceptual frameworks as he had developed for his 1965 textbook. He gathered a bunch of young authors and made an inspiring argument, saying “This will be the most important thing you'll ever do in your life; it will have more impact than anything else you do in your career.” And it turned out to be true. But he also told us it would take only two months dedicated time. In reality, it took us six authors more than 365 sixteen-hour days, writing at periodic meetings spread out over five years.
Have you been able to impact education in your role as president of the National Academy of Science?
Initially I didn't want to be president because it meant closing my lab and moving from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. The selection committee had made me feel guilty if I didn't take this unique chance to use the Academy's influence to improve science education. They knew this was a passion of mine. At that point, we were already in the middle of producing the first-ever National Science Education Standards for the United States. I was on the oversight committee, and it was going terribly, so part of the motivation was to get that project back on track.
At that time, there was a huge project to develop national standards in all the academic subjects, such as math, science, and history—and that led to the Academy being assigned and paid by the Department of Education to develop the first-ever national standards for science education. We had never done anything like it before.
How does current U.S. policy affect the nature of the international science community?
The United States has been a unique success in the world because it welcomes immigrants and is inherently open to anyone from anywhere. The new immigration policies are a big threat and are counterproductive. It's frustrating to me because the success of America—and American science—depends on this continuous pool of talented people.
We're starting to see the effects. In our department, for example, there are two assistant professors who were born in Iran. They're talented people, but they can't go home and their parents can't visit them here. So, who's going to come from Iran to the United States anymore? It's not welcoming, and it makes no sense. We're losing not only Iranians but also many other nationalities with great talent.
Is China gaining the upper hand by investing billions in scientific research?
We all benefit from China's investments in basic science because the knowledge is shared around the world. I wish that our leadership, instead of complaining about China's investment in science and new technologies, would realize it's a smart thing to do here, too. The whole success of the United States has been based on our leadership in science and technology, and that in turn has been based on the ability to take in the very best people and support them in fundamental research with government funds. My hope is that the next U.S. administration will energetically try to reverse the U.S. image and immigration policies taking root now. China and the United States should both be investing heavily in basic science, and they could easily cooperate. More support for basic science means that we could all move faster to increase our knowledge of the world, on which all future benefits to humanity depend.
As the former editor-in-chief of Science magazine, what are your thoughts on the criticism from many scientists of the review process for articles considered for publication?
A major part of the problem is that a lot of the people asked to review papers pass the task on to their students because they themselves are too busy. They look at the review only briefly before submitting it as their own. The motivation there is wrong. The postdoc and graduate students are trying to impress the professor; that's a big reason why we get these horrible reviews. We are killing each other. Scientists write critical reviews and then complain about the critical reviews they receive of their own papers.
I'm interested in the idea of open reviews. There are many experiments being carried out with that idea now; I also think we should explore the easy options, such as publishing the reviews anonymously. At any rate, I think we have to do better. Surely, we don't want to ruin science because of the review process. It's not a very complicated problem. We should be able to solve it.
“Scientists should pay attention to what happens to education at the lower school levels.”
What other changes would you like to see come to science education today?
I think that science education should be quite different from how it is now. Children need to learn how to solve problems. Science education should challenge them to work together to come up with solutions. For example, starting in kindergarten, the teacher could bring in a pair of white socks for every child and have them walk around the schoolyard where there are seeds on the ground. The children would then come in and pick off all the specks and dirt on their socks. Then it would be the job of the 5-year-olds to figure out which bits are seeds and which are soil. If done well, it's the children's ideas that they are all following, not the teacher's. We can do something like that for every year of school.
We don't train teachers to do that, and in some ways that's due to the educational standards movement I helped start in 1996, when we issued the standards from the National Academy of Sciences. To an extent, those standards inhibit good education. They weren't supposed to, but people take the standards so literally that it becomes impossible for teachers to be flexible. We have to do a smaller amount in more depth, and not push teachers to try to cover all the facts.
What solutions would you advise to bridge the gap between meeting the necessary standardization and encouraging closer coordination to fulfill the needs of the students?
It is critical that our school systems develop a much better way of incorporating the feedback from and advice of their best full-time teachers. We all need to deeply respect what our best teachers know. Ideally, a select, small rotating group of them could take on a formal advisory role in the governance of each school district. Their voices need to be heard, both by the public and by school leadership. We also need a similar professional teacher voice at the state and national levels. Creating such “teacher advisory councils” has long been one of my major goals.
How can scientists assist in that endeavor?
Scientists should pay attention to what happens to education at the lower school levels. In San Francisco, there is wonderful science education coordination among students, postdocs, and teachers. That kind of structure is needed all over the world if we're going to connect science with society. We also need to connect the schools to the real world around them. This involves using many more volunteers and opening up the educational process to the community as well.
We need to develop new kinds of systems, like when I was a Boy Scout leader in college. The Boy Scout system for earning badges includes volunteers who become experts in that endeavor. Today there is a great opportunity to create a series of challenges for kids in all areas and to have retired people and other folks work together to mentor the next generation.
What is your message to the world?
If everybody makes a small contribution toward improving things for the next generation, then—and only then—will humanity survive.
“I was repeatedly asked, ‘Why are you, as a woman, so passionate about science?’”
Viola Vogel | Biophysics
Professor of Applied Mechanobiology at ETH Zurich [Swiss Federal Institute of Technology]
Einstein Visiting Fellow since 2018
Switzerland
Dr. Vogel, you rose quickly in the scientific world and were even on Bill Clinton's team of advisors. How did you manage that in the male-dominated world of the natural sciences?
I was repeatedly asked, “Why are you, as a woman, so passionate about science?” I had to shrug this off so as not to lose my enthusiasm. I was always anxious to build consensus. As a result, my colleagues respected me from quite early on. But women, of course, are observed far more closely every step of the way. At the University of Washington in Seattle, I was the first female professor in bioengineering, and at ETH I was the first on the materials science faculty. Now, already one-third of the professors in the Institute's newly established Department of Health Sciences and Technology are women. So, things are really changing.
Do you think women have a harder time in science?
None of us wants to be viewed as a “quota woman” by the outside world. In this respect, the issue has been firmly dismissed by most women, including me. But I can see that in an entire generation, the number of women in many technical professions and in leadership positions has hardly changed at all. Although much has been done to support women, from offering childcare, to fostering a greater understanding that should men help out, too, and that parenting is a shared responsibility. For me, that's the biggest disappointment—that all this has only minimally helped motivate women to take this route in the sciences.
Did you ever doubt that you would make it?
Continually, already during my studies when it got really difficult. I think women question themselves more quickly. When I started out, it was taken for granted that women would either choose science or have a family. The two didn't seem compatible. For me, the first priority was to build my career as a scientist. It wasn't until I saw in the United States that it was much more acceptable for a woman to combine career and family that I began to change my attitude and start a family.
“When I started out, it was taken for granted that women would either choose science or have a family.”
How difficult was it for you to obtain a professorship?
The assistant professorship rank is the real bottleneck in an academic career. These positions are competitive, and at the time I applied, over 250 other people also applied at the University of Washington in Seattle. My decisive advantage was that I'd studied a rare combination of physics and biology. I had two children at that time and, as I look back, I am very happy about that decision. Before the children, I had tried to work through everything every day, until late in the evening. With my newborns, I quickly realized I had to reorganize my schedule to make time for my family. I made a list of priorities each day, and I worked through it as best I could, and then I went home with a clear conscience.
