How Rob Became a Scientist: An Unconventional Path to Science

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00:00:11.24 Hi, my name is Rob Phillips and I'm from Caltech. And I'm
00:00:16.03 here at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. And
00:00:19.29 I was here to record another iBio event in a certain sense, and
00:00:25.26 we thought it would be a great opportunity to take advantage
00:00:28.13 of the fact that I'm here with my mom on her 80th birthday.
00:00:31.07 And so, what we're going to do is talk about our joint family
00:00:37.13 adventure as I worked my way through science and I think
00:00:41.03 it will probably be interesting to people, since as you're going to find out,
00:00:43.23 it was a bit of a wild adventure and it required a huge
00:00:47.10 amount of parental support. So I thought I would just start
00:00:52.00 out with an easy question that I think all the listeners
00:00:55.20 are really dying to know, which is what was your best
00:00:59.07 birthday present ever?
00:01:00.21 You! Of course.
00:01:03.12 How's that work?
00:01:04.14 That works just fine. Perfect.
00:01:07.00 So all kidding aside, so what we're going to do is maybe just take
00:01:11.13 a little bit of a travel through the years, say between 9th grade,
00:01:16.01 I guess, which is when I got a D in algebra, to maybe
00:01:20.16 when I got my job at Brown University, which was the
00:01:23.03 end of our financial dependence on you guys, which is when I
00:01:25.26 was 33 years old. So you know, that's hard.
00:01:28.22 We grew up in a house full of books and I've always been a
00:01:33.03 great reader. I'm kind of curious what you think the role of books was
00:01:36.20 in our upbringing and also in all 3 of us, there's 3 kids,
00:01:40.27 and all of us are big readers.
00:01:43.02 Well I think it started when you were all young, and I read you,
00:01:46.21 each of you, every single night. Even sometimes when we went out
00:01:51.07 before sitters. So I was always a reader, my parents
00:01:57.10 were always readers, and obviously books were hugely
00:02:01.01 important to me personally. And I could tell from reading to
00:02:05.01 you, that you really enjoyed it and you took up books in a
00:02:09.09 big way. And it was something we shared, and I wanted to
00:02:14.06 just inject something, what a thrill it was for me to see when you
00:02:18.01 had your two children, how you would read to them every
00:02:21.06 night. And sometimes when I would be visiting you, even when
00:02:24.02 Casey was old enough certainly to read, when he was probably
00:02:26.09 13 or something. You two were reading the trilogy..
00:02:31.19 Yeah, Tolkien.
00:02:32.24 Tolkien trilogy.
00:02:33.19 We also read Haroun and the Sea of Stories from uh..
00:02:36.17 Right, so I thought, this is something that just went on.
00:02:39.21 So obviously, we were big into books. I also remember going to
00:02:44.03 lots of used bookstores with you.
00:02:46.04 Right, I was going to come to that. So by April 30th, 1997,
00:02:50.09 that's a Saturday, which is the day that I discovered that I was
00:02:54.09 going to do science. When I was given a lecture about how
00:02:57.23 Eratosthenes figured out the radius of the Earth. And in a
00:03:01.01 nutshell, somebody could tell me the radius of the Earth
00:03:04.09 but in a nutshell, what I learned was this clever guy measured
00:03:08.06 the radius of the Earth by looking at the shadow of the
00:03:10.24 noon day sun in two different places on the Earth and
00:03:13.11 knowing the distance between the two places. And that
00:03:16.09 endows this question of realism, because it shows you how
00:03:19.08 trigonometry, geometry, clever thinking, optics, you know all these
00:03:23.16 things get merged. And above all, what it shows is that science
00:03:26.26 is a relationship between one person and nature.
00:03:29.19 There's no authorities. I don't like authorities. There's
00:03:32.19 no books. There's no rules. There's no regulations.
00:03:35.19 It's just you and your question. That's what Eratosthenes
00:03:38.06 was. That's what blew my mind. Before that, I thought
00:03:40.17 science as kind of stupid, because I thought it was a bunch of
00:03:42.21 memorization of facts, like French kings, you know. I thought
00:03:46.16 science was like that. The next morning, I told you and dad
00:03:49.18 that I was going to do science. And also told you I wasn't
00:03:52.17 gonna go to college, that I was going to leave high school
00:03:55.15 after 11th grade. On books, do you remember right after
00:03:59.17 that, you and I went up to LA and we went used book shopping?
00:04:03.00 Yes we did -- And we came back with like, 200 books. I
00:04:05.16 was just curious if you had anything to say, why did you do that?
00:04:08.18 And what was your take on that? -- Because it was fun!
00:04:11.01 Because we were together and we were doing our book thing.
00:04:13.01 And I was always amazed because you were after books
00:04:16.02 I knew nothing about, all these theoretical physics titles00:04:19.07]that were just totally out of my range. And I could go and look
00:04:24.01 at the things I liked, which was fiction, nonfiction, whatever.
00:04:27.04 But wander around with you, which is great fun
00:04:29.28 to do that. What a kick!
00:04:31.28 Yeah, so in that April I was 16 years old. And three months later
00:04:37.06 I basically left high school after 11th grade with my degree
00:04:41.24 and shortly thereafter, one of my good friends, which I'm sure you remember
00:04:45.24 very well, was killed in an accident. And that really established
00:04:50.21 that I was no -- no way that I was going to go to college.
00:04:52.19 How does that relate? I mean, why does the death
00:04:55.10 -- which I know is a horribly sorrowful time, but why that?
00:04:58.12 Why not go to college?
00:04:59.16 Yeah, I don't know if you remember. But I had a poster
00:05:02.03 in my room of Jack London, and it's a picture of him on
00:05:06.13 his boat, and it said "I would rather be ashes than dust." And
00:05:09.08 it talks about being a fiery meteor, rather than a sleepy
00:05:12.09 planet or something like that. And I just read Irving Stone's book,
00:05:18.16 Jack London: His Life, Sailor on Horseback. So it was the
00:05:21.12 juxtaposition of that book which showed me the life of Jack London,
00:05:24.24 which was really so amazing. And then seeing the death of Lance
00:05:29.13 at age 17, you know, he was snuffed out. And it made me realize,
00:05:35.20 you know, today's kind of a good day to think about it, it's
00:05:38.00 a birthday. At this point, I've reached an age where birthdays
00:05:40.09 I find kind of sad, rather than happy days. Just in a certain
00:05:42.27 sense. And it's because you realize that life is short.
00:05:45.22 And it just flies by. And then if you're unlucky, like Lance was,
00:05:50.26 you can just have your life snubbed out. And what I felt
00:05:54.24 is that, you know, is going to college was just what you were supposed
00:05:58.19 to do. And I guess I just felt that life is short, I better not do
00:06:02.27 what I'm supposed to do. And I should do what I should do.
00:06:06.09 I just felt that I did not want to cave and just go off to UCSB
00:06:10.20 for no reason. I would've just lived in Isla Vista
00:06:13.07 and just gone to some stupid classes.
00:06:15.08 Why did you even get to the point where you went up there,
00:06:18.05 where you decided to go, where you got an apartment..
00:06:20.05 Because you and dad insisted that you would let me do my deal
00:06:26.01 if I got into a UC school. So I got into a UC school.
00:06:31.07 Are you satisfied? So I got in and that was good enough.
00:06:35.06 Then I had satisfied the parental requirement, but I had no
00:06:39.12 interest in going to UCSB or anywhere else. So I didn't.
00:06:43.23 Well, I left home at 17. I moved up to LA shortly, but
00:06:47.08 the real thing that happened was I went off on a boat.
00:06:49.17 I sailed 3000 miles. And what I wanted to ask you about,
00:06:53.12 has in a certain sense to do with how I feel about my kids
00:06:56.10 and the adventures they have. I was 17 when I left the port
00:07:00.01 at Harbor Island on that boat. And I'm kind of curious, you know,
00:07:04.06 we set off. There was no cell phones, I didn't talk to you for three months.
00:07:07.20 I sent home stupid letters that came by snail mail. I'm curious about
00:07:12.05 parental fear in the face of adventure. Because there was lots of it
00:07:16.01 that we might touch on, but what did you and dad have to say
00:07:18.29 about, you know, these things that were ostensibly scary?
00:07:22.01 And I remember when you -- standing there watching you,
00:07:25.09 literally sail away. And of course, I was all teary and I thought
00:07:29.03 -- I think maybe I was just stupid and I didn't realize how
00:07:32.11 much could happen. I was also amazed at the letters that you
00:07:36.24 wrote home. Because you were reading all of Shakespeare,
00:07:40.20 as I recall. Trying to go through it one at a time. And commenting
00:07:44.21 on that. Commenting on what you were seeing and feeling.
00:07:47.08 Although, we have to be honest, they were incredibly
00:07:50.14 embarrassingly pretentious. I mean, I was trying out
00:07:53.07 my Shakespearean vocabulary and looked like a moron.
00:07:56.00 I know, but as a mom, it's okay.
00:07:59.16 Because I thought, here's a kid who's really going out there,
00:08:02.24 because once you told us, and you told us the day that you
00:08:06.10 were supposed to -- and we were going to get into the car and drive you
00:08:08.12 to Santa Barbara that you were not going to college,
00:08:10.04 right then is when you think, is this really going to work or not?
00:08:14.04 Are you really going to make a life for yourself? When did you
00:08:18.00 -- when you finally said, okay, I'm going to go. I'm going to take courses
00:08:21.00 now through the University of Minnesota. What brought that on you?
00:08:25.01 So now I'm going to go back, I'm going to have to go back
00:08:27.11 and do something rather more traditional, in order to do
00:08:29.23 what I think I want to do.
00:08:30.29 So first of all, let's remind you and me, that was 6 years
00:08:34.24 after high school. In that intervening 6 years, you know, I worked
00:08:39.04 at a computer store, I worked at Alpha Microsystems and repaired
00:08:42.29 hard disk drives, went on an 18,000 mile trip, I took 6 months,
00:08:46.26 I was an electrician for 4 years, I crawled around in attics
00:08:49.26 in Santa Barbara and La Jolla. And I was studying all
00:08:53.08 the time. And what happened was, I was on a 3 month trip to Europe,
00:08:56.04 and I was sitting on a train. And a guy from Westinghouse,
00:09:00.19 an executive was sitting next to me, his name was Donald
00:09:03.24 Trexler. I met him once in my life, and he told me I was an idiot.
00:09:07.02 I basically told him that I had a resume that said I had read
00:09:10.08 this and that book, and I had learned this and that physics,
00:09:12.22 and so on. And I said I sent it to Beckman Instruments and
00:09:15.16 all these places, and they basically didn't even answer me.
00:09:17.27 And he said, well, you're an idiot. Go get your union card.
00:09:20.28 So what happened was, I came back to San Diego and I
00:09:22.26 went to the UCSD library and I found this book called, How to
00:09:25.29 Get a College Degree Without Going to College.
00:09:27.13 And there were four universities I found that had these
00:09:30.14 sort of university without walls programs, where you could earn
00:09:33.25 a degree without going to college. Because I just think that
00:09:37.17 I'm not suited -- I mean, I'm a failure as a classroom student.
00:09:41.07 You know, I don't like tests, I don't like the notion of one person
00:09:45.23 telling other people what they're supposed to know.
00:09:48.23 That's interesting. I don't remember the gentleman's story
00:09:50.22 on the train. That's really interesting. So that's really what
00:09:53.01 -- That's really what happened. And then, the connection to
00:09:56.06 grad school is because Chuck Campbell, who was at
00:09:59.17 Minnesota. You know, everyone was kind of against him
00:10:02.24 admitting a physics student. But he said, let the guy fail.
00:10:05.02 And you know, to me, that's one of the main philosophies of life,
00:10:07.16 let people fail. Give them a chance to fail, because we're very
00:10:11.02 conservative. And I like to use sports analogies, you know all my
00:10:14.19 heroes in surfing and snowboarding, they pay. They pay with getting
00:10:18.14 hurt. And the reason is because they're right on the edge
00:10:21.10 And that's the kind of science that I like. So anyway, he said
00:10:23.19 let the guy fail. And after I talked to him, he said, you know
00:10:26.24 you should go to grad school. And I had no clue what grad school
00:10:30.15 was. None. And I said, okay, I'll try it out. And so I applied
00:10:35.13 and I got into some of the places, such as Wash U and UCSD. Yeah.
00:10:39.17 So you did.
00:10:40.13 Yeah. Plus, I mentioned at the beginning, until the age of 33,
00:10:43.16 we were still getting financial help from you and dad. So
00:10:46.09 I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the grad student
00:10:49.07 trajectory. You know, the hardship financially. And the
00:10:52.17 not knowing where you're going to get a job. You know,
00:10:55.27 lot of graduate students and postdocs, they go exactly through
00:10:58.27 what we went through. Where you wonder, am I going to get
00:11:01.01 a professorship? You remember, I interviewed on Wall Street.
00:11:04.01 So what are your thoughts about that?
00:11:05.17 Well, I think if you can manage it, obviously. You try to manage
00:11:09.24 it. It's your children, you want them to get the best you can
00:11:12.12 for them. So sure, it's not easy financially. I think even
00:11:16.13 more important is the wandering about in your case, where you
00:11:20.08 don't go in the traditional way. And I remember when you were trying
00:11:23.16 -- you were even getting your first postdoc, you saying something
00:11:27.04 like, oh they're going to want someone who went to Harvard,
00:11:29.05 who came up the traditional way. And I'd say, oh no, I'm sure things
00:11:33.13 will be alright. Not knowing, of course. But I had a great
00:11:36.13 -- I just thought you did a great job. I wasn't sure it was going to come, but
00:11:40.11 it's hard!
00:11:41.23 I would just say that there's a lot of emphasis on that.
00:11:45.01 The blue blood aspects, it does have a big effect on
00:11:48.26 things. What about parenting? I just like to a little bit come back to
00:11:54.05 these things of, you know, I'm thinking about the many
00:11:57.04 rough steps along the way. So you know, the -- I mentioned earlier
00:12:01.04 that Lance got killed, and you remember that his brother, Joe,
00:12:04.15 who was also my dear friend, drowned in the ocean
00:12:06.21 not too long after that. And again, some of these adventures,
00:12:12.28 the dangers, I guess I'm just -- I'm very curious to hear how
00:12:17.02 it played out. And I think you may remember a story from
00:12:19.18 Caltech. I'm not going to mention who the grad student was,
00:12:21.26 but you were visiting and one of my grad students made a remark
00:12:25.00 about how all this stuff that we're talking about now is actually me telling
00:12:27.19 stories about myself. And you bit his head off, because you
00:12:31.04 lived it. And again, this isn't about glorifying anything that happened,
00:12:35.01 it's actually quite the opposite. I'm still just very curious about
00:12:38.05 how I would've been quite fearful if I had been in your
00:12:41.25 boat. I'm not sure if I would've been able to handle it.
00:12:43.29 Having my kids do that.
00:12:46.14 I don't know how I handled it. I wasn't as fearful as I was
00:12:50.22 when I look back on it, I think, you know, I probably should've been
00:12:53.10 scared out of my mind. I think I took it rather well.
00:12:56.07 Yeah, there's no doubt about it.
00:12:58.09 About parenting, I think it's the one thing in life that nobody ever teaches
00:13:01.21 anyone. And it's something you -- it's just like trial and error.
00:13:06.15 You muddle through, you would know that, you muddle through.
00:13:09.13 But certainly, the way you went about living your life and starting
00:13:14.20 out on your trajectory was scary. And a lot of times I
00:13:18.08 was afraid and obviously when you were gone, I missed you
00:13:21.15 terribly. But as I say, I think you really showed rather quickly
00:13:25.24 that you were gonna make it.
00:13:27.17 The thing that's easy to take for granted and that's not obvious
00:13:31.15 I think to people is that there's a bit of nuance about how
00:13:35.18 these stories play out that have to do with the family
00:13:38.06 that surrounds you. And so, here at the MBL, I see people with
00:13:43.20 families and you can kind of get a sense that, okay, that's somebody
00:13:47.11 where there's some magic going on in that household. And
00:13:50.20 you know, I've said it before, but this is a pretty great day.
00:13:55.05 Because it's your 80th birthday and it's my 54th birthday.
00:13:59.13 And yesterday was my daughter and your granddaughter's
00:14:01.26 birthday. It's a time for reflection, since we're all together.
00:14:05.23 And also, you know, I'm here as the director of the Physiology
00:14:09.22 course, which is a dream come true and an impossibility
00:14:12.11 to even 10 years ago even imagine that I would have that
00:14:15.13 privilege. And so, I guess what I would say about it is
00:14:19.17 that, you know, I would like the viewers to be aware
00:14:23.10 of it is that it took a lot of support. Financial support,
00:14:28.00 of course, but I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about the
00:14:30.06 emotional, the psychological, the intellectual support
00:14:33.00 that you and dad gave all of us, but me especially
00:14:37.12 along this crazy adventure. And the adventure continues.
00:14:43.10 And our adventures continue together.
00:14:45.22 Let's hope.
00:14:46.12 Yeah, and I guess I'm looking forward having a nice rest of
00:14:51.00 today with you. And I love you very much.
00:14:53.21 I love you very much. I'm very proud of you. Very grateful.

This Talk

Speaker: Robert Phillips

Audience:

Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: November 2015

Talk Overview

Rob Phillips, in conversation with his mother (Lee Cudlip), talks about his unconventional path to science and how his parents encouraged and supported him, despite potential misgivings. After graduating from high school, Phillips spent six years traveling, working odd jobs, reading books, and teaching himself physics. He eventually received a bachelors degree from a “university without walls” program at the University of Minnesota. Phillips is now a professor of Biophysics and Biology at the California Institute of Technology and co-director of the Physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

Speaker Bio

Robert Phillips

Rob Phillips is the Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics and Biology at the California Institute of Technology and co-Director of the Physiology summer course at the Marine Biology Laboratory. His research focuses on elucidating the physical phenomena of a variety of biological processes/systems, such as mechanosensation and gene regulation. He combines physical modeling… Continue Reading