Faculty Roundup

We asked faculty members to answer the same question and collected their responses below.

(View roundup continuation—Whitehead Fellows on grand challenges in biomedical research.)

Looking back at the last 25 years, what surprises you most about the direction your research has taken?

When I started, I was working in completely different areas. I could never have foretold where that research would take me. Our initial question was how does a cell control its shape? That launched us on an odyssey of trying to understand how cells organize their internal contents to generate movement, measure the forces involved and determine how groups of cells move in a coordinated way. We’re finally starting to come back to cell shape as it relates to cell movement, but the original question has morphed and the technical approaches we’re using now had not been developed 25 years ago.

I could never have predicted my professional path either. I now direct several MIT initiatives including one program with Singapore. I also direct a state-of-the-art bioimaging center. I never expected that.

—Whitehead Member Paul Matsudaira (from an interview)

The trajectory of my research has been totally unplanned and unpredictable, lurching from one topic to another on the basis of occasional accidents, unanticipated discoveries, and people's seemingly arbitrary tastes as to what topics they'd like to work on.

—Whitehead Member Robert Weinberg

Everything. There’s not a single thing that we are now doing that I would have guessed we’d be doing. Twenty-five years ago, I was doing very basic research, trying to find fundamental insights into basic biology by working on gene expression in fruit flies. My lab is still doing basic research, but now we’re more focused on protein folding as it relates to human diseases. I never thought I’d be probing cancer or neurogenerative diseases or that I’d be working with yeast, mice and arabidopsis.

—Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist (from an interview)

The hardest and most important part about science is figuring out what not to study. That surprised me a lot at the beginning because when you are training to be a scientist, you come to a place where you say, ‘how do those real scientists think of all those ideas?’ Eventually, you come to realize that you have many, many, many more ideas than you can possibly implement and that the hard thing is deciding what not to do.

A corollary of this is the importance of letting go. You have so many paths you can follow simultaneously, but you can’t follow them all. It’s actually better for me to let go of a bunch so that I can obsess on the few best ones.

Another thing that has surprised me is that some of the questions that we work on feel like they’re effectively infinite. In other words, the layers to be peeled off extend as far as I can see.

The understanding of the X and Y chromosomes that I learned in school was not only incomplete, it was almost entirely wrong. The real story of the sex chromosomes is infinitely more interesting and infinitely less predictable. It’s also extraordinarily coherent and sensible as it starts to take shape. But I know that there are many, many layers beyond that which we presently perceive. I feel like I’m running from room to room in this infinite house.

This is not like a surprising moment. It’s an unfolding surprise, which is much more delightful. It’s the sort of the surprise that doesn’t end.

—Whitehead Director David C. Page (from an interview)

I haven’t been doing science that long, certainly not as long as the senior people here, but it is fun to look back and say—when I started working on rapamycin, I never imagined I’d end up here. I find it ironic that you have to write grants, explaining what you want to do, predicting the outcome, and proposing next steps. Biology never works that way in practice. You always end up somewhere unexpected, which makes the journey more fun. You’d be foolish to follow your plan to a T and limit yourself to a specific sphere rather than pursuing the most interesting questions that arise from your results. Besides, you’d get bored if you always followed your original plan and predicted the outcome accurately.

I started working with rapamycin, very naively, because I was an MD/PhD student and I thought I should be doing something that had medical relevance. In the process of figuring out how the drug works, we discovered genes and a pathway with important roles in many different organisms. I don’t take credit for having any kind of deep insight initially. I just happened to pick a molecule that turned out to be interesting.

—Whitehead Member David Sabatini (from an interview)

I don’t like the word surprising because it means you didn’t expect it. In a way, nothing is completely unexpected because you make your own work go places. For me the better word is exciting, and it’s been thrilling to see how the fish has helped us answer really complex questions. I didn’t understand much about fish when I started working on them. I’d worked on frogs as a postdoc. Actually, I’d never seen a zebrafish when I came to the Whitehead and I hired postdocs who worked on fish before I had any in my lab. So it’s been exciting to watch the work on zebrafish unfold.

—Whitehead Member Hazel Sive (from an interview)