For biologists, we are surprisingly shy about the facts of life. After all, where do cell biologists come from? Storks or DNA are not adequate answers. So who are our scientific ancestors and who are our human ones? Who were the influencers, the supporters, and the guides? And from where inside came the endless questions and the itch to see how a thing works? What were the outside events that turned so many into explorers, plodders, geeks, glass washers, and the occasional genius? In the November 7 issue of Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC), Manuel Théry attempts to make such a picture of himself, albeit a simpler model rendered in a photo mosaic of faces, showing, “The enthusiastic teachers, fascinating mentors, inspiring colleagues, and inquisitive students of whom I am made,” as Théry describes it in the caption.
Théry, who is at the Université Grenobles-Alpes in France, is the winner of ASCB’s 2014 Early Career Scientist Award and one of 10 ASCB prize winners who contributed essays to MBoC’s special “Quantitative Biology” issue which also celebrates the awards made at the Annual Meeting. Contributors range from the E.B. Wilson Medal winners (William Brinkley, John Heuser, Peter Satir) to the Porter Lecture Award (Michael Sheetz) to the E.E. Just Awardee (August Avery) plus other career awardees. The winners were given no set topic yet the question of “How I became a cell biologist?” flows like a river through many of the essays. These lives took some surprising turns on the way to the scientific ocean.
In her account, Valerie Marie Weaver, the winner of the Women in Cell Biology (WICB) Sustained Excellence in Research Award, describes how she was born into a northern Ontario working-class family at a time when educational expectations for girls were minimal. But Weaver always had wider interests. “I was born with an insatiable curiosity and an inquiring nature that both shocked and perplexed my parents,” she writes. “In hindsight, the mad disassembly of dolls, melting of cosmetics, and dragging home of various skeletons and insects hinted at the beginnings of a scientist.”
A series of teachers nurtured her fierce curiosity, steering Weaver into science and eventually into a biochemistry doctoral program at the University of Ottawa. At a Canadian Federation of Cell Biology meeting, Weaver heard Mina Bissell describe her unconventional findings that the mechanical and physical constraints of the extracellular matrix were integral to the progression of mammary cancer. Weaver approached Bissell afterward and in the midst of a deep conversation blurted out that she wanted to join the Bissell lab. And Bissell took her on the spot.
Weaver’s life seems totally straightforward—the PhD from Ottawa, a life-changing postdoc with Bissell at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Berkeley, a faculty spot at the University of Pennsylvania, and finally her present post at the University of California, San Francisco. Except there is a missing interval in her life. Toward the end of graduate school, Weaver describes how she was in a “horrible” car accident on a Vermont skiing trip, breaking her back, both legs, hands, and many ribs. She struggled to finish her thesis but when the settlement money finally arrived, Weaver went against all prudent advice, postponing her Berkeley fellowship, and taking off on a six-month trek across Africa and Asia. No regrets, Weaver writes. “Not only was that traveling adventure enlightening and one I shall never forget, but the experience broadened my perspective and put my own life experiences into better perspective, and importantly, renewed my desire to pursue a research career.”
The story of August Avery’s path to science and his rank as Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine is even more startling. Avery was born in the Central American country of Belize to a teenage mother with immodest ambitions for her son. Initially, a Peace Corps teacher fanned his interest in biology yet, as Avery had no idea that you could make a living doing science, he announced at home that he would be a doctor. That seemed unlikely in Belize so his mother immigrated to the United States (“Initially illegally and then legally,” he explains) and brought him over to the land of opportunity. Unfortunately it was South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1980s when the crack epidemic and gang violence made daily life a war and a scientific career an unlikely outcome for Avery. He dropped out of Los Angeles High School in the 11th grade, taking his chances on getting his GED. He still has that diploma framed. “It was my ticket to being able to register at a community college,” Avery writes. “At the time, I knew no one who had gone to college in the United States and had no guidance on the process.”
Avery made it through two years of community college and then transferred to California State University, Los Angeles, to take a vocational degree in medical technology. There, his organic chemistry professor, Costello Brown, hauled him into the office. “He (Brown) then said: ‘Do you want to do urine analysis for the rest of your life?’ He suggested I try to get some research experience in a lab and go to graduate school. This was the first time I had ever heard of this option.”
To read Avery’s CV today, it would seem like the standard “up by the bootstraps” tale of American gumption. Except it wasn’t. Avery points out the key points along the way, a shortterm lack of money or longterm mentorship could easily have deflected him away from science. The difference came from scholarships and support programs such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Research Infrastructure for Minority Institutions that allowed Avery to cut his outside work hours and join the research lab of another Cal State professor, Phoebe Dea. Programs like these that support underrepresented minorities (URM) in science are critical for students like himself, says Avery. Even with Brown’s remark about “urine samples,” Avery says that after getting his bachelor’s, he would have cheerfully gone on to a predictable but relatively well-paid career as a medical technologist only he couldn’t afford to give up fulltime work in order to take on the year-long required internship to be certified in California. For Avery, Cornell’s Graduate School of Medical Science in New York City was an affordable alternative because it came with grants, scholarships, and a stipend.
His essay describes his subsequent success at Cornell, his postgraduate work at the Rockefeller University under Hidesaburo Hanafusa, and then his first job in industry with Johnson & Johnson. Avery liked working in pharma but he missed academia and especially missed working with students. So he went back, first to teach at Penn State where besides his teaching and lab, Avery used support from the Sloan Foundation and then from NIH to keep URM students at Penn State in the science stream. In 2008, Avery was recruited to Cornell in Ithaca.
“Those of us from underrepresented groups who have made it here have a duty to be part of this process,” Avery writes. “We also need to challenge our communities and schools to support bright, smart kids as much as they support talented athletes. We need to find out what worked for those successful minority scientists and replicate it.” That’s the beauty part for improving educational support for URM students, says Avery. “The good thing about any successful approach is that what works for our minority students can also work for our majority students.”
Some of these MBoC prize essays are more purely scientific autobiography. Douglas Weibel, who is now at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, won the 2013 Early Career Scientist Award. Weibel’s essay talks about his voyage from a conventional education in chemistry and engineering into the unknown waters of cell biology. The transformation for Weibel was the legendary Physiology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA. The MBL summer faculty was amazing, Weibel writes, but he learned most of the cell biology he needed that summer from his fellow students, both in and out of the lab. “The pace of the course was ferocious, and the intensity level was set high to accomplish meaningful science in a short time frame. We pulled sofas into the lab for recovery between 24-hour experiments; rediscovered that, when tired enough, napping on a cement floor is comfortable; and embraced a work-hard, play-hard attitude. It was common for students to dash outside for a swim or to go sailing between experiments, to play pranks on coworkers, or to spontaneously break out into a late-night dance party in the lab.”
In many ways, the most remarkable autobiography in the collection comes fromPeter Satir, one of the three winners of the 2014 E.B. Wilson Medal, the ASCB’s highest scientific honor which is named for America’s first cell biologist. Satir’s 48-year career (which is still going strong) is remarkable enough but it’s distinctive in another way. In the life of this one scientist, you can follow the “life” of modern cell biology from its invention in the mid-1950s by Daniel Mazia, Keith Porter, and George Palade to the present.
Satir has had a knack for being present at the creation. Porter and Palade opened their outlandishly named graduate program in “Cell Biology” at the Rockefeller Institute (as it was then known) in 1955. They accepted Satir into the program in 1956. Satir gave a talk at the first ASCB Annual Meeting in 1960. In 1961, Satir joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, arriving in time for biochemical analysis to reveal the microtubule and motor protein structure that makes up the cytoskeleton. In the late 1960s, Satir was at Berkeley to witness the explosion of biological technologies such as PCR and freeze fracture EM. (He also saw the campus explode in anti-war demonstrations and anti-student counter measures.) Freeze fracture EM allowed Satir to advance his sliding microtubule hypothesis. The noise set off by PCR is still ringing in our ears.
But there are smaller but significant markers in Satir’s essay. At Berkeley, he and his wife and co-investigator Birgit Hegner were the first couple hired in the same department, breaking the old “no nepotism” rule. It’s hard to imagine today’s “one couple, two careers” academic family without that breakthrough. In the previous scientific generation, the “no nepotism” ban on hiring had been a cruel trick played on women who had the effrontery to be both scientists and wives .
Satir likens the rise of cell biology to a human life. In his career, Satir saw the science of cell biology arise from the cradle, grow, survive adolescence, and mature in ways its scientifc antecedents never imagined. “When you have a good and stable childhood, you are buffered from the vicissitudes of later life,” Satir concludes. “So it has been in cell biology for me: The lessons from the cradle have not been lost. But Porter and Palade knew that cell biology had a longer history, in which one of the heroes was E.B. Wilson. Together with Dan Mazia, Porter and Palade were recipients of the first E.B. Wilson award of the ASCB. I am very proud to follow in their footsteps.”
About the Author:
John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.
