Brown: I think we should
tell the audience how
this collaboration
works. Basically,
we run a joint laboratory.
All the graduate students
and postdoctoral fellows
have two mentors.
They don't have one mentor.
So Joe and I co-mentor everyone.
And when we meet with our students
and fellows,
90 percent of
the time we are both
in the room together.
Very frequently
we give them
opposite suggestions.
Goldstein: Like whether phosphate buffer
or Tris buffer.
Brown: And the clever
ones will do both.
But the fact is that
we frequently argue
about the details
of an experiment, but never
about the general direction
of where we are going.
We obviously both share
a certain worldview of science
and how it should be done
and the rigor of science
and that is something
we absolutely share.
But we do argue
about the details
sometimes.
Goldstein: A lot of the
students and fellows,
they first come in,
they try to play
one of us off
of the other
when an experiment
doesn't work.
But they rapidly
learn they can't do that.
So that takes them
a little while to figure out.
But one thing I think
from some of our
early experiments
where we saw these
enormous changes
in comparing normal
and FH homozygote
mutant cells,
that sort of taught us a lesson
especially in the type of
work that we do
that we always
wanted to focus
on large changes.
A lot of our students
and fellows when they come in
wonder why
we don't pay attention
to certain results
where the changes are
less than two fold
in particular experiments
and so that is one thing
that we have learned
that both of us really
try to teach
all of our students
and postdocs about-
to focus on the large changes.
You'll never be able to work on
a mechanism of the small changes.
Brown: Well you know,
when we have our
research conferences
and the students
or postdocs present
to our research group,
Joe and I will
always sit in
the back of the room.
If we can't see the change
from the back of the room,
then we are not interested in it.
But the fact is,
I want to say something else
about collaborations.
When you do get an
exciting result
you know, in my opinion
what makes a result exciting
is that it opens up
a whole new area
of investigation.
The most exciting results
they may solve one problem,
but if they are really exciting,
they open up
a whole new line of inquiry.
That's what makes
a result exciting.
Like when we
found, did the experiment
with FH homozygotes and found
they couldn't bind LDL,
suddenly there were
a million more things
that we could do
to work that out.
Well, the excitement
when you have somebody
standing right there
with you
and you are looking
at the machine that is
reading out the results
and you see
these all-or-none changes
and immediately
this dialogue
of what are we going to do next
and you know,
it just makes
those moments, which
you know, maybe in the forty
years mabye we've had,
I don't know,
20 of those moments,
maybe.
Goldstein: So there are a lot of
interesting stories
that we don't have
time to tell.
But I would say
about half the time
that we've had
exciting results
one of us
has usually been
out of town.
We always,
for about the first ten years,
let me just say,
we would meet
every Saturday
and Sunday and plan
the week's experiments
for the next week.
The way we had
set up in our early days
working in cultured fibroblasts,
we would always get our assays
if we started in the morning,
we would always have the
results by four or five o'clock
each day.
But in order to really
move ahead we had to
plan experiments
ahead of time.
So we would sit down
on Saturday and Sunday
and plan every experiment.
And in those days,
we only had a
tissue culture technician
and one technician
who did a lot of the
biochemical assays.
And about half the time
when a result
would come out,
one of us
may not be there.
And if it was an exciting result,
we would always track
the other one down,
no matter where they were
in the world
to discuss the experiments
and go forth.
And so that was I think
a memorable thing
of our early days of
collaboration.
Brown: I could tell you what the
difference between
Joe and me is. Okay.
And it's very simple.
When we used to look
through a phase-contrast
microscope.
Look at cells
in a dish.
Goldstein: Like right there.
Brown: Right, there we are.
I would go to the microscope
and zoom in to the very
highest power
because I really wanted to see
the detail of what
a cell looked like.
And then Joe would
step up
and immediately zoom
to the lowest power
to see what the pattern of it all was.
And I think that that
in a way really
expresses that we do
have slightly different focus.
The partnership couldn't
survive if we were
both identical.
So obviously each
of us has some tendency
to think in some different
but highly complementary way.
And that works out very well.
We are very different
in terms of our
personal likes too.
Joe is a great
connoisseur of art
and has a wonderful
art collection,
and I collect grandchildren, so...