Abstract
My scientific career has taken me from chemistry, via theoretical physics and bioinformatics, to molecular biology and even structural biology. Along the way, serendipity led me to work on problems such as the identification of signal peptides that direct protein trafficking, membrane protein biogenesis, and cotranslational protein folding. I've had some great collaborations that came about because of a stray conversation or from following up on an interesting paper. And I've had the good fortune to be asked to sit on the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, where I am constantly reminded of the amazing pace and often intricate history of scientific discovery. Could I have planned this? No way! I just went with the flow ….
Highlights
What is life but a succession of chance events and poorly informed decisions? It is only in hindsight that we can dream up a life story with even a hint of logic planning and intelligent foresight
My one traumatic childhood memory is when in kindergarten I was forced to dress up in a Lucia costume—for some odd reason, every year on December 13, Swedes celebrate the butchering in A.D. 310 of the Sicilian Saint Lucia by putting white robes on the kids, with the girls having candles in their hair and the boys wearing white dunce caps with gilded paper stars on them
Karolinska Institutet, because when spending some time in Bill Wickner’s lab at UCLA, I happened to see an ad on a poster board announcing that Henrik Garoff—who had just joined the Karolinska as a professor of molecular biology— was looking for new staff
Summary
What is life but a succession of chance events and poorly informed decisions? It is only in hindsight that we can dream up a life story with even a hint of logic planning and intelligent foresight. We know that the polypeptide chain of a secretory protein is translocated across the ER membrane through a proteinaceous channel, the Sec61 translocon, rather than directly through the lipid bilayer, so, as it turned out, this analysis didn’t exactly address the question at hand.
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