Buzz Baum: The art of cell shape

T he core genes that regulate cell shape are few in number but highly fl exible in application. This is dramatically illustrated in multicellular animals where, by repurposing these few tools, cells from different tissues assume startlingly distinct appearances. To do this, animal cells must have strong individual preferences for their own shape, says Buzz Baum from University College London. Individual cells battle to maintain their shape by pushing and pulling against their neighbors. In the process they create order as an emergent phenomenon, giving rise to the structure of complex tissues. Through his work, Baum has explored how cells arrive at their preferred shapes (1–4) and how this affects processes such as the development and homeostasis of epithelial sheets (5) and the division of cancer cells (4). We called him at his offi ce to learn more. What was your fi rst exposure to science? I learned basically everything at home by talking with my brothers and my parents over dinner. My father was a pediatrician and my mom is an artist, and they really taught us all to think by chatting with us at the dinner table. I'm the eldest of four boys. Jake and I went into science, and my other two brothers went into art, although my brother Josh does quite science-y art. My cousin David Baum was also a big influence on me. He's an evolutionary biologist and studied biology at Oxford, where we lived when I was growing up. He used to come around a lot, and he's one of the reasons I went into research. I'm actually collaborating with him now on a project about the evolutionary origin of eukaryotes. As a child I was obsessed with nature. I loved bird watching and observing nature, drawing what I saw. I always wanted to do either science or art. You obviously took the science path… I studied biochemistry at university, which was a terrible choice because we didn't do any evolution or biology. [Laughs] We did mostly organic physical chemistry and didn't get into much biology until the end. For me that was sad, because that was what I loved. On the other hand, at school I found biology very boring because it involved things like counting worms. It was very ecological and very soft. It wasn't until university, when I heard Paul Nurse speak in my third-year biochemistry course, that I realized, " …