Harold Varmus (NCI/NIH): How I Became a Scientist

I'm Harold Varmus. I'm a cancer biologist and I'm the president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about how somebody becomes a scientist. Many people think that scientists are born and they're born with with special properties. They listen to Mozart in the crib. They excel at math even in grade school. They join the chess club. They don't do athletics. They they end up being victors in science fairs before they get to college and they enter a track that leads to advanced degrees in science and engineering. Of course this sometimes happens and reinforces the popular image but there are lots of ways to become a scientist and it's important at a time when the U.S. is losing numbers of scientists and not training enough to sustain our leadership and industry and and and the sciences to think about other ways in which people do become scientists. I had myself an unusual route to being a scientist. I'd like to spend a little bit of time telling you about what that route was like. So I was a good but not exceptional student in public high schools in Freeport, New York on Long Island. I didn't have strong science teachers. I didn't show any particular interest in science. I didn't spend my afternoons with a chemistry set. I spent more of them playing tennis and going to the beach or reading novels than I did attempting to win science fairs. My father was a doctor and I expected to follow him into medicine and after high school went off to Amherst College as a pre-medical student and there at Amherst placed before me was a very rich table of intellectual opportunities in physics and philosophy and literature and history and I found myself spending most of my time running the college newspaper and doing a thesis on Charles Dickens and spending time with my literary friends. I continued to think about medical school but didn't do particularly well in chemistry and decided finally to go off to graduate school in English literature where I spent a year before deciding again to think about medical school and after being rejected by one, Harvard, I chose to go to another, Columbia, and found myself engrossed in sequence in psychiatry and then internal medicine. Never paying much attention to serious laboratory research but interested in other serious forms of research in the clinic but not really engaged in any of those forms. I did house staff training and then at the age of 28 the Vietnam War required that I make a decision about a way to serve my country without serving a war I didn't believe in. I was able to do that thanks to a program that allowed those of us who were dissenters from the war to work at the National Institutes of Health and here for reasons that beyond this discussion I was plunged into work on the molecular biology of E. coli, the way in which bacteria regulate expression of a set of genes called the lac operon. This exposed me for the first time to the excitement of laboratory research. I was a lot older than most students who write to me today to work on an Intel project in my laboratory at Sloan-Kettering but nevertheless I still had the same kind of enthusiasm I see in those high school students for understanding how a bacterial organism controls its genes. Molecular biology was in its early phases. The idea of using bacteria or other simple organisms as model organisms for understanding higher levels of regulation in complex organisms was still again in its early stages and this was an exhilarating time but it's not something I had been trained for and I wanted to get back to something that was more medically related which I did when I discovered through coursework at the NIH that there was a new excitement about viruses, very small packets of genes that were able to turn a normal cell into a cancer cell. Cancer was an important and is an important human disease. I was interested in trying to understand with the new tools of molecular biology. At that point, at the age of 30, I came to University of California San Francisco to begin what proved to be over two decades of work on how cancer viruses grow and how they turn a normal cell into a cancer cell. The reason I tell this story is to illustrate that there are lots of ways to become a scientist and that in the US one of the great advantages we have is that we don't require that people make career decisions at an early age. We allow, we even encourage what I would call a prolonged adolescence. This is something to keep in mind as you progress through high school and college. There is still time to make decisions about the way you're going to conduct your careers. Moreover, it's important to remember that not every scientist is a math whiz as a grade school student. That there are lots of ways to become a scientist and lots of ways to be a scientist. In fact, I would argue that while science can involve experimental procedures and analysis of classical experiments, there are lots of other ways to think like a scientist, even in fields that are outside of what we call the conventional natural sciences. So thinking like a scientist means thinking about evidence, gathering it, evaluating it, and interpreting it in a way that helps to make sense of the world in which we live. We need more of this in our world and it's with an effort to understand that there are lots of paths to developing a scientific outlook that can influence your career and help strengthen our society that I offer this brief story of an unconventional way to become a scientist.