Incredible Stories
(August 10th, 2009) Which experiences and qualities shape successful scientists? Our four biographies show that people are different and so are their experiences and struggles. By Bettina Dupont.
Exotic Genes
Scientists often feel poorly understood - especially by their blood relatives. Nobel laureate Paul Nurse always wondered what distinguished him from his siblings. Whilst he went on to become a famous cell cycle specialist, they left school at 15. At a joint event of the World Science Festival and the storytelling organisation “The Moth” he disclosed further details.
The truth started to unfold, when his daughter had to reconstruct the family tree for a school project. Pale-faced, Nurse’s mother confessed that she and her husband were illegitimate. Nurse imagined he might have inherited some exotic genes from his unknown ancestors. At this point, he didn't realise that his mother's confession was only a red herring.
He learnt more about his descent when the US Department of Homeland Security rejected his Green Card application in 2007. By this time, he was not only a Nobel laureate and had been knighted but was also President of the Rockefeller University. Homeland Security claimed that the details on his birth certificate were insufficient because the names of his parents had not been recorded. Therefore, he applied to the UK Registry Office for a longer, more detailed document. To his surprise the new birth certificate named his older sister as his mother. Nurse thought the UK Registry Office must have made a mistake but this was not the case. His family relationships were even more complicated than he had thought: he was the illegitimate child of his 18 years older “sister”. His father is unknown, which leaves even more room for speculation about how exotic genes could have influenced Nurse’s career. He was born at his great-aunt's house and his grandparents pretended to be his parents. His family managed to keep this secret from him for over half a century.
Uninhibited Curiosity and Supportive Role Models
Sylvester James Gates is a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland. His is a member of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the first African-American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university in the United States. How did he get there?
His attraction to mathematics, physics and space travel began in childhood. Since his father was a member of the armed forces, Gates first attended army schools. In the armed services racial segregation has been forbidden since 1948. When Gates was 11, at the beginning of the sixties, his mother died of breast cancer. His father remarried and the family moved to Orlando, Florida. There, Gates attended a segregated school for the first time in his life. Initially, this was a tremendously stressful experience. He had to learn to be black. However, this environment also fuelled his ambition and he found supportive role models.
Gates received bachelor's degrees in both mathematics and physics, and earned a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University, at the California Institute of Technology and was Assistant Professor at MIT. Gates says his father played a critical role in his achievements because he had always encouraged him to ask questions. “I got the idea that questions always had answers and that is certainly one of the things that propelled me towards becoming a scientist.” For students he has the following advice: they should not neglect their own well-being and a sense of self-worth and accomplishment. “The time as a student is also a time of maturation and an intellectual awakening under enormous academic pressure,” Gates told Labtimes.
Like many African-Americans, the scientist found his expertise occasionally unfairly questioned. In 1980, he made his first visit to Cambridge (UK) to attend a meeting sponsored by Stephen Hawking. During one of the evenings, he was with some colleagues and there was a technical discussion underway. He volunteered an answer to one of the questions raised. “I soon noted, however, that the discussion continued as though I had said nothing, with the people involved still asking the same questions”, he told Labtimes. Later, the group was joined by a French colleague who, when questioned, essentially repeated what Gates had said earlier. This was hailed as a great boon moving the discussion forward. This kind of discriminatory ignorance may sound familiar to many (female) scientists among our readers...
From Ballet to Neuroscience
Neurobiologist, Erich Jarvis, has also faced some challenges in his life. He investigates the neural mechanisms of vocal learning in songbirds at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His parents were divorced when he was six. When his father showed up, his mother called the police. Jarvis' father was not only an enthusiastic musician, hobby scientist and collector of fossils - he also suffered from drug-induced schizophrenia. For years he lived in caves.
Just when he started to regain his life and his mental health problems had been treated, Jarvis' father was murdered, aged 44. Erich Jarvis told Labtimes that his father buried himself into what he was doing until he became a part of it. He took a “big picture” approach to try to understand life and the universe. “I believe I have inherited some of that approach,” Jarvis said. He does not think that his father's illness influenced his vision of life.
Before going to college Jarvis trained to be a ballet dancer at the High School of Performing Arts in New York. This school became well known worldwide through the movie “Fame”. For Jarvis, being a scientist is similar to being an artist. “Both require discipline, hard work, perseverance, acceptance of lots of failure before success, and creativity.” Both scientists and artists made discoveries. If you overcame these hurdles in one field you could also do so in another. Jarvis changed his career path from ballet to science because he wanted to do something that would have a positive impact on society. “I felt I could do that better as a scientist,” he told Labtimes. In addition, he was already fascinated by the process of discovering new things and about how nature works. He mastered hardships in his life by not accepting the possibility of failure. Jarvis considers discipline, passion and an efficient process of learning and discovering to be prerequisites for a career in science. “There is always room for more scientific discoveries and thus for people to make them,” Jarvis said.
Early Bent for Conditioning
Onur Güntürkün, a professor at the Ruhr-University in Bochum (D), is studying the neurobiological basis of behaviour. In collaboration with 26 other scientists he and Jarvis developed a revised nomenclature for certain regions of the avian brain, taking into account recent functional and evolutionary insights. The group picture shows that Güntürkün is wheelchair-bound.
The scientist was born in Izmir, Turkey. At the age of 4, he contracted polio. During his childhood and youth, he lived for several years in Germany and in Turkey. In Germany, he attended primary school and grammar school. From time to time it was questioned as to whether a school for physically handicapped children would be a better option for him. However, his mother, a teacher, strongly rejected this notion. After all, Güntürkün does not think that the handicapped are particularly discriminated against by the German educational system.
Güntürkün was first undecided about whether to study psychology or medicine as his father, a physician. He finally decided to study psychology because he was unable to endure the aspect of bloody injuries. Thus, he was also able to follow his bent. As a child, he built tiny mazes in cassette covers and investigated how beetles found their way. “I conditioned fish in an aquarium to react to plastic panels of different colours and brightness, using food reward. I tried to find out whether fish can recognise colour or acts only on the basis of brightness,” the scientist told Labtimes.
Initially, he found the studies of psychology disappointing and boring, because they did not include much behavioural and neurobiological research. Then, this kind of research was labelled disrespectfully as “rat science”. At a scientific meeting a famous psychologist even told the PhD student, Güntürkün, to change his research interests because his field of research had no future in Germany. “I continued my scientific research, of course. My work was a part of me, not pure calculation,” he said. He worked as postdoc in Paris, San Diego and Konstanz. Today, the neurosciences are an important component of the curriculum in psychology and Güntürkün and his research are right in the middle.
