How I Became a Scientist: From English Literature Major to Science

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00:00:29.25 I am Harold Varmus. I am a cancer biologist,
00:00:31.16 and I am the president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
00:00:35.08 I'd like to talk to you a little bit about how somebody becomes a scientist.
00:00:39.18 Many people think that scientists are born.
00:00:43.05 They are born with special properties.
00:00:45.15 They listen to Mozart in their crib. They excel at math even in grade school.
00:00:51.09 They join the chess club.
00:00:53.05 They don't do athletics.
00:00:54.21 They end up being victors in science fairs before they get to college,
00:01:00.24 and they enter a track that leads to advanced degrees in science and engineering.
00:01:07.13 Of course, this sometimes happens and reinforces the popular image,
00:01:12.06 but there are lots of ways to become a scientist.
00:01:14.27 And it is important at a time when the US is losing numbers
00:01:20.02 of scientists and not training enough to sustain our leadership in industry
00:01:26.05 and the sciences to think about other ways in which people do become scientists.
00:01:32.16 I had, myself, an unusual route to being a scientist,
00:01:37.27 and I'd like to spend a little bit of time telling you about what that route was like.
00:01:41.22 So I was a good, but not exceptional student,
00:01:45.13 in public high school in Freeport, NY on Long Island.
00:01:49.12 I didn't have strong science teachers.
00:01:52.06 I didn't show any particular interest in science.
00:01:54.16 I didn't spend my afternoons with a chemistry set.
00:01:57.11 I spent more of them playing tennis and going to the beach
00:02:00.09 or reading novels, than I did attempting to win science fairs.
00:02:06.14 My father was a doctor, and I expected to follow him into medicine.
00:02:10.17 And after high school, I went off to Amherst College as a pre-medical student.
00:02:15.09 And there, at Amherst, placed before me was a very rich table
00:02:20.06 of intellectual opportunities in physics,
00:02:23.19 and philosophy, literature and history,
00:02:26.16 and I found myself spending most of my time running the college newspaper
00:02:32.29 and doing a thesis on Charles Dickens and spending time with my literary friends.
00:02:39.16 I continued to think about medical school,
00:02:43.17 but didn't do particularly well in Chemistry and decided
00:02:46.01 to finally go off to graduate school in English literature,
00:02:49.18 where I spent a year before deciding again to think about medical school.
00:02:55.15 After being rejected by one, Harvard,
00:02:59.05 I chose to go to another, Columbia.
00:03:01.28 And I found myself engrossed in sequence in
00:03:07.23 psychiatry and then internal medicine...
00:03:11.09 never paying much attention to serious laboratory research,
00:03:16.12 but interested in other serious forms of research in the clinic.
00:03:19.28 But not really engaged in any of those forms.
00:03:23.12 I did house staff training, and then at the age of 28,
00:03:27.22 the Vietnam War required that I make a decision
00:03:31.24 about a way to serve my country without serving a war I didn't believe in.
00:03:38.04 I was able to do that thanks to a program that allowed
00:03:41.02 those of us who were dissenters from the war
00:03:43.26 to work at the National Institutes of Health.
00:03:46.15 And here, for reasons beyond this discussion,
00:03:51.07 I was plunged into work on the molecular biology of E. coli;
00:03:57.14 the way in which bacteria regulate the expression
00:04:00.26 of a set of genes called the lac operon.
00:04:03.11 This exposed me for the first time to the excitement of laboratory research.
00:04:08.01 I was a lot older than most students who write to me
00:04:11.15 today to work on an Intel project in my laboratory at Sloan Kettering,
00:04:17.04 but, nevertheless, I still had the same kind of enthusiasm
00:04:22.01 I see in those high school students for understanding
00:04:25.15 how a bacterial organism controls its genes.
00:04:30.08 Molecular biology was in its early phases
00:04:33.09 and the idea of using bacteria or other simple organisms
00:04:38.07 as model organisms for understanding
00:04:40.22 higher levels of regulation
00:04:42.27 in complex organisms was still, again, in its early stages.
00:04:47.10 And this was an exhilerating time, but it was not something
00:04:50.16 I had been trained for, and I wanted to get back
00:04:53.22 to something more medically related, which I did,
00:04:56.21 when I discovered through coursework at the NIH that the...
00:05:01.03 that there was new excitement about viruses:
00:05:04.14 very small packets of genes that were able
00:05:08.00 to turn a normal cell into a cancer cell.
00:05:10.23 Cancer was an important, and is an important,
00:05:13.05 human disease. I was interested in trying to understand
00:05:16.02 with the new tools of molecular biology.
00:05:18.05 At that point, at the age of 30, I came to the University of California,
00:05:22.04 San Francisco to begin what proved to be over 2 decades of work
00:05:26.24 on how cancer viruses grow, and how they turn a normal cell into a cancer cell.
00:05:32.13 The reason I tell this story
00:05:35.10 is to illustrate that there are lots of ways to become a scientist,
00:05:39.09 and that in the US one of the great advantages
00:05:42.20 we have is that we don't require that people make career decisions at an early age.
00:05:48.20 We allow, we even encourage what I would call
00:05:51.28 a prolonged adolescence. This is something to keep
00:05:54.25 in mind as you progress through high school and college.
00:05:58.26 There is still time to make decisions
00:06:01.04 about the way you are going to conduct your careers.
00:06:05.07 Moreover, it is important to remember
00:06:07.10 that not every scientist is a math whiz as a grade school student.
00:06:12.19 There are lots of ways to become a scientist,
00:06:15.13 and lots of ways to be a scientist.
00:06:17.25 In fact, I would argue that while science can involve
00:06:22.29 experimental procedures and analysis of classical experiments,
00:06:27.20 there are lots of other ways to think like a scientist.
00:06:30.19 Even in fields that are outside of what we call
00:06:33.29 the conventional natural sciences.
00:06:36.15 So thinking like a scientist means thinking about evidence,
00:06:40.23 gathering it, evaluating it, and interpreting it
00:06:44.15 in a way that helps to make sense of the world in which we live.
00:06:48.10 We need more of this in our world
00:06:51.12 and it is with an effort to understand
00:06:55.00 that there are lots of paths to developing a scientific outlook
00:06:59.16 that can influence your career and help strengthen our society
00:07:03.11 that I offer this brief story of an unconventional way
00:07:08.04 to become a scientist.

This Talk

Speaker: Harold Varmus

Audience:

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

Recorded: March 2011

Talk Overview

How does an English literature major ultimately end up as a cancer biologist? Varmus tells us of his circuitous path to becoming a scientist to illustrate the many routes that one can follow to a career in science.

Speaker Bio

Harold Varmus

Harold Varmus is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He previously was the Director of the National Institutes of Health (1993-1999), president and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York (2000 – 2010), and Director of the… Continue Reading