Q & A

Abstract

Alexander Schier is at the Skirball Institute of the New York University School of Medicine. He obtained his PhD from the Biocenter in Basel, Switzerland, where he studied homeobox genes in Walter Gehring's lab. He spent his postdoc in Wolfgang Driever's lab in Boston, screening for and analyzing mutants that affect zebrafish embryogenesis. In 1996 he moved to New York. His main focus has been the dissection of the Nodal signaling pathway and its role in vertebrate embryogenesis. More recently, his lab has begun to also address questions in neural development and behavior. What turned you on to science in the first place? Sherlock Holmes. As a kid I liked to take things apart and solve puzzles, and Sherlock Holmes made me (naively) believe that puzzles can be solved by carefully collecting evidence and thinking very hard. Have any key events changed your scientific life? Several. I shall mention just three. First, listening to the Velvet Underground, Contortions and Talking Heads resulted in meeting Marek Mlodzik around 1981 – he had a similar taste in music and was the son of one of my dad's colleagues. Marek studied molecular biology when I was still in high school and persuaded me that studying biology is more fun than physics. He also convinced me that joining the Gehring lab was the best way to do exciting research. He was right. Second, visiting the Roche Institute in Nutley, New Jersey in 1995 resulted in meeting Tom Gridley. He told me about a new institute in New York called the Skirball which was looking for zebrafish people. Although I wasn't ready for a job yet, I always wanted to be in New York and faxed my application the same night. I joined the Skirball Institute a year later. Third, collaborating with Will Talbot since 1995 has been extremely productive and a lot of fun. What was the environment that influenced you most as a scientist? Walter Gehring's lab. It was an artist colony. He and the members of his group showed me that interesting biological problems can and should be addressed at every level, from imaginal disc transplantations to NMR studies, and going from mutations that lead to legs on the head of a fly to the precise amino acid–base pair interactions mediated by the affected protein. Is there a paper that influenced you most? Kimmel et al. (1989). A mutation that changes cell movement and cell fate in the zebrafish embryo. Nature 337, 358-362. This paper describes the discovery and analysis of the spadetail mutant. It beautifully combines genetics and embryology and set the standard for the following 10 years of zebrafish research. It made me realize the great potential of zebrafish as a system to study vertebrate development. What has been your best decision? And what has been your biggest mistake? Ironically, the answer to both questions might be: using zebrafish as a model system. It has been great to join the field when there were only a handful of zebrafish afficionados, and help develop the system and see it flourish. But I sometimes wonder if the grass isn't greener on the other side. Maybe I should have avoided three-months generation times and instead used simpler and faster genetic systems such as phage λ, Bacillus subtilis, Escherichia coli, yeast or Caenorhabditis elegans. What advice would you offer someone wondering whether to start a career in biology? Nothing is as exciting as a good experiment – the question, the thinking, the design, the execution, the results, the conclusions, the new questions. If you feel this excitement when you design or perform your first experiments, you will enjoy being a scientist. My other advice is to read Ramon y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator. There are some amusing but less enlightened parts in there (such as a chapter on how to select a mate), but much of what he says about science and scientists is amazingly accurate even 100 years after he wrote it. What do you think about scientific publishing? Non-scientist friends of mine are often surprised or dismayed when I tell them that their taxes pay for most research, but that the papers that describe the research are not accessible to them because of copyright issues. It also seems odd that some companies make huge profits by selling papers and journals to the very same scientists that do the research, write the papers, review the papers and often pay for the papers to be published. I therefore strongly support journals published by non-profit organizations run by scientists (the Company of Biologists, for example) and open access efforts by journals such as PLoS Biology or Development. What do you think are the big questions to be answered next in biology? We still don't know how organisms develop. We know superficially that there are signals, transcription factors, cytoskeletal rearrangements and so on, but it is not clear how or why all these components interact in a specific way to robustly and reproducibly generate such perfect, diverse and complex forms. Another obvious challenge is to understand how the nervous system processes information such as touch, heat or cold and generates complex behaviors such as sleep or consciousness. The study of development and behavior will keep us busy for a long time.