Sarah Hake

Abstract

Hake received her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1980. She carried out postdoctoral research with Michael Freeling at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981–1987. She was hired by the Department of Agriculture in 1987 to work at the Plant Gene Expression Center and has been there ever since, with an adjunct position in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley. Her eldest son, Kater Murch, is a physics professor at Washington University. Her second son, Mickey Murch, runs the family farm in Bolinas that her husband started. What turned you on to biology in the first place? While a student at Grinnell College, I took a plant taxonomy course with Vern Durkee. I loved the trips to the Bio Preserve that meant strolling in the woods, enjoying the tiny bit of Iowa that wasn’t plowed. Durkee took three students (including my future husband, Don Murch, and me) to visit the Botanical Garden in St. Louis. All of a sudden, I realized that a career could be made in plant biology and perhaps I could spend my life outdoors, hiking around. Going off to graduate school at Washington University (in St. Louis), I imagined myself studying wildflowers in the Sierras. As it ended up, genetics became my true passion, but the combination of maize and genetics has meant a career hiking around — though in a cornfield rather than the woods. And what drew you to your specific field of research? My PhD advisor Ginny Walbot guided me to maize, introducing me to tantalizing stories about maize genetics, such as those concerning B chromosomes, ring chromosomes, and paramutation. From St. Louis, we would visit Ed Coe and Gerry Neuffer in Columbia, Missouri, and watch how they used their cornfield as a lab bench. Ginny took me to my first maize meeting in Illinois. While at the meeting, I sent my parents a postcard telling them that “I have found my home in science”. As a postdoc in Mike Freeling’s lab, I was given the challenge to identify the gene for Knotted-1 (Kn1). Kn1 led me into plant morphology and back to my love of plant diversity. Do you have a scientific hero? Yes. I had the opportunity to meet with Barbara McClintock during a visit to Cold Spring Harbor. I was excited to show her photographs of my transposon-induced Kn1 alleles and how they changed the shape of the leaf — clearly her ‘controlling elements’ were regulating morphology. However, my notes were inadequate as she asked about each leaf on the plant. She then chided me with this advice, “only do what you can without error”, i.e., make no mistakes and keep scrupulous notes. When looking for rare events, it is critical to be able to discount error or contamination. What is the best advice you’ve been given? Don Kaplan was a professor of morphology at UC Berkeley. He told me that it is not what you accomplish in your career that matters but who you train. I think of all the great students and postdocs who have spent time in the Hake lab and am proud of their accomplishments and happy to think that I gave them an opportunity to become excited by research. What’s your favorite experiment? All maize geneticists love making crosses if they are not allergic to pollen. It is like being a fairy godmother, sprinkling pollen onto fresh silks with great hope for the next generation. The crosses that are informative — for example, complementation crosses or double-mutant analysis — are like Christmas presents, wrapped up with good statistics and figures, ready for publication. Any strong views on social media and science? As someone who doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter and who pulls out a cell phone only to receive a phone call, I enjoy the internet quiet. I don’t understand why students need their ears plugged with noise 24/7 and what they can possibly find interesting on their phones. I can’t imagine how people have time to ‘do science’ AND tweet about it or read tweets. Perhaps I am part of a dying ‘paper generation’. I enjoy the paper in the morning, carry a Science magazine in my backpack, and always have a pen and paper to jot down notes. I worry that a requirement to distill everything down to a few sound bites does not do service to any discipline.