Cyanobacteria

Any embarrassing moments? Yes. In my first year as an assistant professor I was asked to give a talk in a neighboring department. They had just moved to a new building and I was the first speaker in their new auditorium. As I started my talk, we discovered that the auditorium was so new there weren't any light switches. I couldn't turn off the lights, and my slides were invisible. All those hours spent preparing my talk were for naught, and instead I gave a chalk talk with a lot of fuzzy sketches! Any good advice you can pass on to young scientists? As a graduate student I met Ira Herskowitz, and he said this: " as you think about your data, keep your foot on the ground. But only one foot! " That saying reminds me of the movie Brazil and the idea of being grounded, but also letting your ideas take flight. I also remember what a lonely time it was when I started my own lab. The silver lining was that I had a lot of time to myself to think about my science and to do experiments. So my third piece of advice, especially to struggling junior faculty, is to focus on the biology. If you do good science, everything else will work itself out. What do you see as an issue for the sciences in future years? One area that I'm concerned about is the organization of our labs. The idea of a lab filled with graduate students and postdocs was born at a time when we wanted the sciences to expand rapidly. It was an effective way to train young scientists and to get work done at low cost. But today, we are at a steady state, and we don't need to generate hundreds of new labs. Instead we should consider how to balance the need for job opportunities and funding for students and postdocs with the need for a vibrant workforce in the lab. Some of those challenges we've met with better support for postdocs, different review processes for junior faculty at the NIH. Maybe we also need to train fewer students and postdocs and to increase the number of permanent positions in our labs. The problem is not solved yet and will probably require some creative thinking. because of their peptidoglycan cell walls; they have bacterial-sized ribosomes sensitive to the usual antibiotics; …