Bert Vogelstein Interview (page: 3 / 4) Cancer Researcher	Print Interview

In difficult times, what motivated you to continue with your research?

Bert Vogelstein: Until very recently, our laboratory was in an unusual and motivating geographical position within the medical school complex at Johns Hopkins.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Our laboratory was right above the radiation therapy unit. Radiation therapy, of course, is where cancer patients get x-rays treatments for their disease. And in order to get to our laboratory, I actually had to walk through the radiation treatment area. And, every day we'd come in and we'd see dozens of patients lined up waiting to get these treatments, and they were all very sick, many of them were in wheelchairs. You could see that they were just in terrible shape; most of them you knew were going to die relatively soon. And, you couldn't possibly walk through that room and not run up the stairs and start working. It just continually reinforced the idea that this is a disease, people are getting it, they shouldn't get it, we've got to do something about it.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

I saw that in my students. They'd go through there and literally run up the steps. It reinforced the importance of doing something for this terrible condition.

You spoke a moment ago about a gut feeling that you were right. How do you see the respective roles of intuition and analysis in making scientific discoveries? Is there a balance? A place for each?

Bert Vogelstein: That's been debated and written about for years. In my experience it's really pretty simple. It's not simple to do, but what makes a great discovery is simple. It's based on hunches. People have insights about processes that are sometimes unique.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I was in college one of the things that one of my professors said, which only later I understood -- he was a math professor, and he was telling me that he started out in physics and he switched, and I asked him, "Why did you switch from physics? because it's a lot of fun?" And he said, "My insights into math were better." And I didn't really know what he meant because at that point I'd never had an insight into anything. But, now I know exactly what he meant. You have hunches. There's some gut feeling you have that something is right, or can be done, or is ripe for investigation.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

That's not methodical at all, or analytical. It's just something that is a spark in a person. A person will be able to connect two things that haven't been connected before.

We talk about creativity, but humans are not creative. I mean we're not God; we can't create anything. What we label creativity is really something quite different. It means we can connect two things that were not connected before. We can't create either of those two things, it's just we recognize a connection.

With artists, it's that same sort of creativity. When they draw or sculpt something, they're connecting reality with something they see that has not been seen before. When a scientist discovers something, it's not a creation, in a sense. He or she is just able to connect two observations that were made by two groups of people and say, "I see a connection here that wasn't previously observed."

That has nothing to do with math, or anything you learn that's analytical. It's a power of reason. It's logical, at least in terms of science. And it's something that really can't be taught. You can be educated to recognize and have the knowledge. If you don't know about thing one, you'll never be able to connect it to thing two. That's why accumulating knowledge is so important in science, probably more important than in art, but the processes are very similar.

The analytical part only comes later. Once you make that connection, once you have that hunch, that insight, then you have to prove it, or try to prove it. That's when analytical skills come in, but that's quite a different process. That's an execution process, rather than a discovery process, per se.

Do you find one part of the process preferable to the other?

Bert Vogelstein: They're different.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The best thing, clearly, is that initial hunch, is that feeling you get often, at least for me, it's early in the morning. I'm lying in bed thinking and I think of something that to me at that time, seems really neat, some connection. And, nine times out of ten, after I get up and think about it and talk about it with my colleagues or my students, it turns out that it was the stupidest idea that anyone every had. But, that few minutes when you think of it, and you think that you really have come up with something that's important, that's a great feeling. And, the fact that they almost all turn out to be nothing, doesn't really matter. It was fun for the moment.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

That's part of the fun. The other part, the experimentation, which you do to try and prove that the idea you had is right, that connection that you thought of is right, that's much different. That's a lot like playing with toys.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. You have all these instruments in the lab, test tubes, and chemicals, and they're really just toys that scientists play with, that make it fun to do what we do. They're great toys. You have all these knobs, and it's just that we're all little kids who can fool around with these things and use them for interesting purposes. But anyone who likes to play with toys has got to like to do science because they are the world's best toys.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

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