TRANSCRIPT
“I think what makes a good experimentalist is actually liking doing things with your hands, and being a bit obsessive about being able to repeat things the same way time and again so you can actually get reproducible results. But then when it comes to the analysis I think you need people who like moving from the big picture to the fine detail and backwards and forwards.
So if you get a result in an experiment that doesn't quite fit what you expected – you get a band on a gel which isn't quite where you thought it was – you want to be bothered about that. You actually want to care about why is it not doing what I thought it would; and, at the same time you have to understand why the band on that gel is actually interesting to the question of the evolution of animals or whatever the big question might be and move between the detail and the big picture.
And that suites me very well. I'm not someone who is very keen on theory for its own sake. I find sort of more philosophical – dare we call it Germanic approach say to evolutionary biology where you want to define everything very precisely – that has no appeal for me. But actually understanding what is going on in an experiment in front of you or in the natural world and testing that with the best experiment you can devise; for me that’s what’s satisfying.”
-Michael Acam, Ph.D.
Head of Department and Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“I think that what characterizes a good scientist is an unbounded and constant childish-like curiosity. The minute that you lose that childish-like curiosity you stop being a scientist. I think that that’s a pity. And I think today, I'm afraid, like children, there are also children that what they like is to excel and to show off and I think that’s not the same. I think today there are many scientists that are like the second kind of children and I think that the real ones are the first ones. There are not many but they are the most interesting ones.”
-Alfonso Martinez Arias, Ph.D.
Professor of Genetics, University of Cambridge
“When I think back to some of the first Gordon conferences I went to as a young post-doc... I used to look around and watch people. There were some top players in the cyclic AMP field at the time so I paid particular attention to them. One thing that really intrigued me by these guys (and two or three of them like Gilman, Greengard, Fred Murad all ended up with Nobel prizes) is that these guys were interested in everything. Now when I go to meetings and the program might be fairly varied, it’s really interesting how people only like going to their topics. If it’s not on their subject they're not interested. But these guys were interested in everything. In every talk, they concentrated, they took it in, and they asked questions – and that really impressed me.
I can see now that what they had was a characteristic of being interested in all aspects of biology, because you never know when that’s going to be important, you see. If you're locked into one tiny little part of the picture and you hardly ever move out of that, you don't read out of that, you don't know what's out there, what might influence your particular area, because everything is interrelated. So that's one thing that really struck me.
And I think the other one is this business of the working hypothesis. When you talk to these people you always find a great clarity, a vision, of what the problem is. So that always impresses me as well. And I think a certain degree of humility as well. There are a lot of brash scientists who go around putting out their work and trying to push it as hard as they can, but they never seem to really get anywhere. It's quite a more humble people who take it all in and so on. They are usually the ones that are quite successful.”
-Sir Michael Berridge, Ph.D.
Emeritus Fellow of Cell Signaling, Babraham Institute
“I've admired lots of people who've just been passionate naturalists and really taken the time to spend long hours in the field getting to know their animals, so they know exactly the right questions to ask. So those people who know lots of detail about the system. I've also admired people who are theoreticians who can stand back and think broadly about theoretical issues, and maybe not know so much natural history, but can think very clearly about how evolution might act on alternative decisions. John Maynard Smith was a great hero for me. He brought game theory to animal behavior. Bill Hamilton brought genetic theory to our understanding of social behavior. Those two are complete stars. Richard Dawkins of course brought the idea of selfish genes to animal behavior. And when I was a young graduate student sitting in seminars and listening to the way they phrased questions it would often light me up, and I would think oh my goodness how wonderful to think so clearly that you can ask a question that really nails something on the head. So I suppose those are the two things that have inspired me – people that are really wonderful natural historians and people who can think with tremendous clarity and ask penetrating questions.”
-Nick Davies, Ph.D.
Professor of Behavior Ecology, University of Cambridge
“Some of the scientists I've most admired I admire for entirely different reasons. Within my own field Mike Berridge is admirable for the shear breadth of visibility to cover a very wide range of signaling and not to worry too much about some of the finer details. If some things don't fit it's nice to pull out a big picture and put it up there for other people to demolish if it's wrong, but actually to write out some of the detail and see that you can't construct a big picture. Almost at the opposite extreme, another scientist that I admire hugely is Ian Parker, who just has a remarkable ability to interrogate data to the nth degree and extract from very detailed analyses relationships that other people wouldn't see. And that, as I said, is almost the opposite extreme, and yet just as much a scientist to admire and an enormous impact in the field as well. And I suppose the other immediate influence on me is Jim Putney, who is somewhere in the middle a little bit. Perfectly happy to engage with a bigger picture but equally happy to turn quantitative when that's what's needed which wouldn't probably me Mike's forte.
And then you go to somebody like Roger Chen who is a remarkable Nobel Prize winning scientist in the field, famous in the first instance for developing some of the indicators that everybody uses now – chemist turned to provide the tools for biology – and for fluorescent proteins; and, more recently developing really elegant translational tools to try and help in diagnostic and surgical treatments. And again, when you hear him speak they're simple ideas ultimately it just so happens that nobody else thought of them until he presents them to you. So it’s the beauty of a simple argument that no one else spotted.
So I don't really see a trait. I suppose if there is a common trait through any of them it's the ability effectively to communicate their ideas. All of those people are very effective communicators. And I suppose at the end of the day it doesn't matter how elegant or beautiful the science is, if it's wrapped in impenetrable presentation it's going to be difficult for the rest of the world to come to appreciate it.”
-Colin Taylor, Ph.D.
Professor of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge