How I Became a Scientist: An Unlikely Journey to Science

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1:00:15.20 Hello! I am Mike Bishop from the University of California, San Francisco.
1:00:19.02 I am going to tell you the story of how I became a scientist and where that led me.
1:00:24.16 It's a rather improbable story, which has a few lessons in it about becoming a scientist and the process of science.
1:00:33.26 I grew up, I spent my childhood in a town of 400 in rural Pennsylvania.
1:00:41.01 My father was a Lutheran pastor with two very small parishes.
1:00:45.02 My family valued academic achievement, but science was not a presence.
1:00:49.28 I cannot remember even in the remotest of my extended family someone involved in science,
1:00:57.22 and it was never a topic of conversation in the household.
1:01:00.04 My first eight years of schooling were in a two room schoolhouse with one teacher
1:01:06.03 handling grades 1 through 4 and another teacher handling grades 5 through 8.
1:01:11.02 The second teacher was a remarkable individual who awakened my intellect,
1:01:15.17 but again, there was nothing said of science other than the collection of wildflowers.
1:01:20.17 My high school was also small, perhaps 80 in the class and maybe 5 of us went to college.
1:01:26.13 The culture was dominated by athletics, no surprise there, and pubertal hormones.
1:01:34.16 But still, the faculty again recognized my academic interests and encouraged me.
1:01:40.17 When I graduated I remember thanking my track coach for the varsity letter that I had finally earned in my senior year,
1:01:48.22 and which I actually still have at home.
1:01:51.09 And he responded by saying that he thought it was more important that I had been valedictorian of the class,
1:01:57.21 and he would rather be thanked for the physics course he had taught me,
1:02:02.05 which, come to think of it, was not that bad.
1:02:05.08 I went off to a small liberal arts college, Gettysburg College, on the famous Civil War battlefield.
1:02:13.15 And that was a glorious time for me.
1:02:19.02 The faculty were devoted and accessible. I dabbled widely in the liberal arts. I took enough science, but not a lot.
1:02:28.22 And I gave no thought to being a scientist.
1:02:33.11 While I was in high school a family physician took me under his wing
1:02:37.12 and began to encourage me towards a career in medicine.
1:02:41.12 So I took the requisite pre-medical courses but still was not certain about my vocation.
1:02:48.20 To dramatize how naive I was, during my junior year, one of my most favored professors
1:02:58.09 called me in and asked me what I wanted to do.
1:03:01.16 He wanted to counsel me about where to go next.
1:03:05.26 And I told him that I was going to go medical school, but that I was interested in an academic career.
1:03:13.09 And his response was well then you should consider going to Harvard.
1:03:18.13 And my response was, "where is that?"
1:03:20.26 I had literally never heard of the place.
1:03:23.23 In due course, I went off to Harvard, and Harvard was a revelation.
1:03:30.14 First of all, it was in Boston, where I could sate my burgeoning appetite for the fine arts.
1:03:37.26 And secondly, for the first time research permeated the education environment.
1:03:42.26 It was spoken of repeatedly by our faculty.
1:03:45.21 And more importantly, among my peers in my class were individuals
1:03:51.07 who had had sophisticated research experience as an undergraduate
1:03:54.12 and had a profound influence on my aspirations.
1:03:59.09 By the end of my second year of medical school, I was at a loss as to what I was going to do.
1:04:03.24 It was becoming clear to me that I did not want to practice medicine.
1:04:07.25 I had never experienced research. What to do?
1:04:11.22 My instructor in pathology rescued me by offering me a fellowship
1:04:16.18 in the pathology department at the Massachusetts General Hospital
1:04:20.01 where I would both study and do clinical pathology and tinker in his lab. I took it.
1:04:26.15 Who would decline a paid year off from medical school
1:04:32.22 free to do almost anything I wanted?
1:04:36.06 The autonomy of that year was extraordinary.
1:04:38.23 I worked hard, but I also had the opportunity to start teaching myself what I might have to know to become a scientist.
1:04:47.13 And from that reading, I became enamored of the newly emerging field known as molecular biology.
1:04:57.05 When I returned to medical school, I began to look for a way into that field.
1:05:02.15 I realized that I was not sophisticated enough to go to the heart of the matter.
1:05:06.14 I would have to find some outer niche of the field for beginner like myself,
1:05:12.23 and I was assisted in that by an elective course that I took.
1:05:16.19 The teacher in that course was a man named Elmer Pfefferkorn who had a tiny laboratory,
1:05:25.03 and he took me in to begin my first research experience during my free time as a third year medical student.
1:05:32.20 I had decided to work on animal viruses.
1:05:37.00 I had decided to work on animal viruses because they were simple.
1:05:40.29 They provided an accessible way to understand the cell, but they were still understudied.
1:05:47.00 In particular, they had not received much attention from molecular biologists.
1:05:51.11 I had a wonderful time during that third year, and decided I just wanted to do research in my fourth year.
1:05:57.10 So I went to the dean of... the associate dean of students,
1:06:04.09 and told him that I would like to substitute research in the laboratory for my fourth year curriculum.
1:06:09.23 He took a deep breath, told me that that might be professional suicide,
1:06:15.13 but then agreed as long as I would take a two month clerkship
1:06:19.10 in what I might want to do my internship and residency.
1:06:22.15 I did that. Two months at the Massachusetts General Hospital in internal medicine,
1:06:29.04 and I spent the other ten months doing research in a laboratory.
1:06:33.21 It wasn't professional suicide.
1:06:35.27 I got an internship and a residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital,
1:06:39.17 which was a magnificent experience.
1:06:41.22 And then I went off to the National Institutes of Health to finally get some serious research training.
1:06:47.20 There I began to work on poliovirus with the same rationale as before.
1:06:54.10 Here was a simple organism that utilized the mammalian cell for its replication
1:07:00.01 and by studying that replication we could learn things about the cell itself, as well as about the virus.
1:07:07.12 I published my first papers, and became friends with a scientist from Germany,
1:07:12.08 who invited me to come to Hamburg for a year.
1:07:15.14 My wife and I went off for our first experience living abroad, and nothing worked in the laboratory.
1:07:22.12 But while I was in Germany, I fell in love with Romanesque architecture, German expressionism,
1:07:28.09 and I would say in retrospect the year was an immense success.
1:07:32.21 While I was there I received some job offers.
1:07:36.24 I never did a job search. Those were different times.
1:07:41.07 I had two offers from prestigious institutions on the East Coast
1:07:45.27 and one from a place called the University of California, San Francisco in San Francisco.
1:07:51.16 I literally had never heard of that place, but my mentor at the National Institutes of Health
1:07:57.21 had moved there and was trying to recruit me there.
1:08:01.09 So I visited.
1:08:03.11 I immediately fell in love with the city,
1:08:06.03 and I saw a huge opportunity because at the time University of California, San Francisco,
1:08:11.05 widely known as UCSF, was not much more than a trade school,
1:08:18.14 but it was aspiring to become a first rate research institution.
1:08:21.26 So I was offered glorious laboratory space and the freedom to do as I wished.
1:08:29.21 When I arrived at UCSF, I met Warren Levinson,
1:08:33.27 who had set up a laboratory to study Rous Sarcoma Virus,
1:08:38.12 a tumor virus, a virus that caused sarcomas in chickens
1:08:42.07 and could be studied in cell culture in vitro as well.
1:08:46.17 At the time, the replication of this virus was a complete mystery.
1:08:54.23 The mystery was quickly solved by the discovery of reverse transcriptase.
1:08:58.22 Two years after I arrived in San Francisco,
1:09:03.07 I was joined by Harold Varmus who came as a postdoctoral fellow.
1:09:07.23 We formed a research alliance that lasted for 15 years and a friendship that endures to this day.
1:09:14.09 Within four years of forming our alliance,
1:09:16.26 we had found a way to pry open the black box of the cancer cell.
1:09:21.28 We had discovered that the tumor causing gene of Rous Sarcoma Virus was derived from the normal cell.
1:09:29.07 In due course it became apparent that there were many such genes in the normal cell
1:09:34.00 that could give rise to cancer genes if changed in some way.
1:09:41.13 This discovery launched Harold and me on richly rewarding research careers
1:09:46.17 that both of us have written about in books that you can find on Amazon.com.
1:09:52.25 When I reflect on my career, four things strike me.
1:09:54.28 First of all, it is important to chart your own course.
1:09:59.11 That will guarantee your passion for your avocation.
1:10:04.03 Second, choose to do something important.
1:10:08.16 The principal mark of a great scientist is the ability to recognize an important problem before others have seen it.
1:10:18.28 Third, try to do something new.
1:10:22.15 Try to help start a new line of research. It carries the highest risk, but also the highest reward.
1:10:30.07 And fourth, believe in your ideas.
1:10:34.00 Believe in your ideas and pursue them until they are either proven or discredited
1:10:40.24 because above all else, science is an adventure in ideas. Thank you very much for listening.
1:10:48.17

This Talk

Speaker: J. Michael Bishop

Audience:

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

Recorded: June 2011

Talk Overview

Bishop relates his unlikely journey to science from student in a rural two-room schoolhouse, to Harvard medical student, and ultimately to professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He also provides some advice from lessons learned along the way.

Speaker Bio

J. Michael Bishop

Dr. Bishop received his undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Harvard provided Bishop with his first research experience and introduced him to the study of animal viruses. Bishop completed his clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital and pursued a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. In 1968,… Continue Reading