Richard Gardner: Nuclear garbologist

T he cell has a number of quality control mechanisms to ensure defective proteins get trashed. Most defects are detected and dealt with at the point of production to ensure that only quality proteins are released for use. But proteins can also become defective once they're at the job site. They can even be made to look bad by cowork-ers that want them destroyed, as Gard-ner discovered when studying sterol bio-synthesis during his Ph.D. (1–3). One of the most important job sites in the cell, where a pro-tein's performance must be tightly regulated, is the nucleus. Rather surprisingly, however, no one had thought to look there for protein disposal mechanisms. So while studying as a post-doc at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Gardner examined the fate of defective nuclear proteins (4). Gardner has now started his own laboratory at the University of Washington, where he continues to sift through nuclear protein trash, to fi nd out about disposal mechanisms and how these mechanisms might fail in some diseases. Was there a defi ning moment when you thought, I want to be a scientist? I don't know if there was one defi ning moment. As a kid growing up in rural Penn-sylvania, I was always outdoors, either going fi shing or capturing bugs and worms and butterfl ies. I think at that point I had decided I really loved ecology and was actually planning to pursue a career in ecology. What changed your mind? While I was studying biology at Cornell, I took a biochemistry class and became really fascinated by the idea of how molecules bring about all the important things that cells do. That really started to drive me toward wanting to understand the intricate internal mechanisms of life rather than the interactions of organisms in a larger environment. I had taken some ecology courses and certainly loved the fi eld trips! But I think I'm more of a gearhead in that I like to know how things work. What infl uenced your decision to do your Ph.D. in San Diego—was it the lab or the location? I picked the location fi rst because Cornell, at the time, was going through a very harsh winter. The pipes in my apartment actually froze. I remember I was also thinking of coming to the University of Washington. I had fl own in and interviewed with the biochemistry department …