I am Harold Varmus. I am a cancer biologist,
and I am 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.
They are born with special properties.
They listen to Mozart in their crib. They excel at math even in grade school.
They join the chess club.
They don't do athletics.
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 is important at a time when the US is losing numbers
of scientists and not training enough to sustain our leadership in industry
and the sciences to think about other ways in which people do become scientists.
I had, myself, an unusual route to being a scientist,
and 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 school in Freeport, NY 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, I 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, 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
to finally go off to graduate school in English literature,
where I spent a year before deciding again to think about medical school.
After being rejected by one, Harvard,
I chose to go to another, Columbia.
And I 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 beyond this discussion,
I was plunged into work on the molecular biology of E. coli;
the way in which bacteria regulate the 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
and 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 exhilerating time, but it was not something
I had been trained for, and I wanted to get back
to something more medically related, which I did,
when I discovered through coursework at the NIH that the...
that there was 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 the University of California,
San Francisco to begin what proved to be over 2 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 are going to conduct your careers.
Moreover, it is important to remember
that not every scientist is a math whiz as a grade school student.
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 is 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.