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How did you get
in?
I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at Columbia
University. I followed that with a PhD at the University
of California at Berkeley in the Department of Physiology-Anatomy.
At the end of my doctorate, I wrote a first-author paper
on starfish oocytes for a journal called Developmental
Biology.
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This article had perfect control
experiments and synthesized all the extant and
mutually contradictory data in the scientific
literature on this topic, and it was a bit of
a hit among starfish people, if you like that
sort of thing. Because of that, I had a ticket
to go anywhere in the world to do marine biology.
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What's been the
highlight of your working career so far?
The results of a paper we have not even submitted for
publication yet. It elegantly puts to rest a controversy
in the literature. We disagreed with (and came to the
opposite conclusion of) another investigator from the
USA on the interpretation of nearly identical data simultaneously
emerging from our respective laboratories.
The strange thing was that on reflection,
I had to admit that either interpretation could fit
all the data. We then spent two months in our lab just
thinking about the problem before we designed the correct
experiments that could distinguish the two scientific
theories. We presented the data at the Biophysics Convention
in Baltimore in February (2004) and everybody was amazed
at how beautiful our data was.
What keeps you going through
the hard times?
The people I work with, particularly my long-time collaborator
and friend Jules Hancox.
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Why do you work in the
area that you do?
At an important juncture in my career, a supervisor
who believed in me as a scientist created a project
for me in a field that represented a cross-over
between his interests and mine. It turned out
to be a very important field, not only scientifically,
but in terms of drug discovery for the big pharmaceutical
companies and in terms of drug regulation at the
level of politics.
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Are you a scientist
24/7?
I can think of a variety of exciting circumstances in
which I am not concerned with science.
What's your favourite
trivial pursuit category?
Science and Nature. I am hopeless on the questions about
soap operas, or on who won the snooker championship
in 1973.
What was the title
of your last published paper?
The most recent one is "in press" at the journal,
Biological Psychiatry:
Tryptophan depletion reverses the therapeutic effect
of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in social
anxiety disorder
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What scientist
do you admire from the past?
Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer in the late
1500s who lost the bridge of his nose in a sword
fight and wore a silver nose as a prosthesis.
He is called the father of modern astronomy because
he spent his scientific life improving the grossly
inaccurate astronomical tables of his day by spending
20 years accumulating meticulous data on the movements
of the stars.
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This was all done from an observatory
he built on his own island, and all the data was gathered
by the naked eye, because he lived before the invention
of the telescope. Kepler was his assistant, and Tycho
Brahe's data formed the basis of Kepler's work proving
how the planets moved around the sun.
Brahe employed a dwarf as a jester, kept
a pet elk (which died after breaking a leg while going
downstairs drunk), and dabbled in alchemy. After his
royal patron died, Brahe's temper made him unpopular,
and he was forced to relocate to Prague where he died
after a heavy night of drinking.
What would you like to be remembered
for?
The friends I have made all over the world: Italy, the
south of France, the Ukraine, California. Science has
given me the chance to do what I love while meeting
and becoming friends with people in so many amazing
places, and we are all working together to make a difference
in our understanding of life.
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