Susan Hockfield Interview (page: 5 / 8) President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Print Interview

You have referred to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as "a wonderland for science." Why did you call it that?

Susan Hockfield: Cold Spring Harbor was an extraordinary place for a young scientist to be. There weren't teaching obligations, there weren't administrative obligations, you just did all science all the time. There is a year-round staff. It's a different place now from when I was there. It's much larger and there are many, many more programs. But when I was there, there was a very small staff. I think there were 45 -- maybe 50 at most -- staff scientists. People like me, who had their own labs. And then in the summer, Cold Spring Harbor hosts a group of courses and conferences. So people from all over the world would descend on Cold Spring Harbor and you'd have this incredibly active time of finding out the latest that was happening in your field and other fields. Hugely interactive, hugely social, and then the campus would go quiet, those summer visitors would leave, you would form the plan for the year, and then work very, very hard for the year. Then in the summer, you'd repeat the cycle. So it was a wonderful place for a young scientist. Sufficient support to get started, great focus, small and beautifully organized.

Research is often very secretive. People are competitive and want to keep information hidden until publishing. But you've emphasized the importance of collaboration in your work. Where did that attitude come from?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Susan Hockfield: My research beginnings at the National Institutes of Health really formed the way I think about doing research. Part of the limitation of the human mind is your own experience is all you know. That's why reading is so important, it's why conversations, it's why events like the Academy Summits are so important, because you can know more than your own personal experience. Now the lab that I worked -- I did my dissertation research at NIH -- was a multi-disciplinary laboratory. It was a lab that was very interested in pain research, understanding -- the kind of project that I was working on -- how the brain perceives pain, what are the neural circuits that mediate the sensations of pain, so that we could determine how to interfere with those circuits to provide pain alleviation. So the goal of this group was to understand pain so that pain could be controlled. Now chronic pain is a horribly debilitating condition. Now the group was -- my advisor was an anatomist, right next door there were physiologists, down the other arm of the building we were in were some pharmacologists, there were clinicians, there were psychologists, biochemists -- all working on this problem of understanding how the brain processed pain, and also looking at ways to alleviate it. And so this was my first big research experience and so I assumed research was always done this way. If you've got a problem you really want to address, you bring everyone in, every possible perspective, then you together try and solve it.

There's another thing. I was at an AAAS (American Association of Advanced Science) meeting in February of this year, and a student came up to me. These AAAS meetings are thousands of people -- and a student came up to me, very excited to meet me, an undergraduate. He introduced himself and I said, "What are you studying?" And he said, "I'm studying neurobiology." He said, "You studied neurobiology, didn't you?"

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I just laughed because as an undergraduate there wasn't any school that was teaching neurobiology. Neurobiology wasn't really a discipline when I was an undergraduate. Even at the time I was in graduate school I think there were probably only two neuroscience graduate programs in the country. So it wasn't a field yet. It was emerging out of the convergence of a lot of other disciplines. So neuroscience/neurobiology is a field that includes physiologists and pharmacologists and anatomists and clinicians. So I was kind of raised during my dissertation work in a multi-disciplinary environment. So when people describe something I'm saying as somehow vastly insightful or something, it's not vastly insightful, it's simply I'm telling you what my experience was and what I've always assumed would be others' experience. Now there are always new disciplines arising, or new work that's being done at the intersection of what previously might have been described as disciplinary boundaries, and I find some of the most exciting work occurs at those intersections. Certainly in my field that's been the case. We see this at MIT now in the realm of the great energy challenge. Even the cancer initiative that we've launched represents an intersection between disciplines. And perhaps I have a penchant for seeing things that don't respect standard organizations, but the fact is that there's a huge amount of exciting discovery that happens when you mash up people who bring different approaches to a given problem.

Do you ever encounter a conflict between collaboration and competition, when people want to keep their research secret?

Susan Hockfield: Yeah. You know, students often ask me that, when I talk about collaboration. "But my advisor tells me to be secret and don't tell anyone what I'm working on." You can't be idiotic about it. Although I have to say I probably was idiotic about it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There was a joke in my lab when I was a graduate student that one of the fastest forms of communication besides telephone and telegram was tele-Susan. Because I have a lot of enthusiasm for things, I would talk to people. And you can't be totally naïve about the importance of your work or your group's work, but on the other hand I see very little value to be gained by anyone by holding your ideas and your results too closely. We all learn a huge amount by telling other people about what's on our mind. Simply the discipline of putting it into words or putting it into writing allows us to understand what we're thinking far more sharply than we do when it's just an idea. And so I think simply the process of talking to people about what you're working on is very important -- helping your own thoughts evolve, and other people bring other insights to your work that are invaluable. So I think people tend to be overly cautious.

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