Interview: Susan Hockfield
President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Which do you think was more significant about your selection as President of MIT, that you were the first biologist or the first woman?

Susan Hockfield: An interesting question. The first biologist or the first woman?

I can tell you two histories of MIT -- parallel histories -- and I can tell you the history of women at MIT, the history of the life sciences at MIT, taking place almost over the same period of time, both of which made it possible that the person who became president in December of 2004 could have been a woman, could have been a biologist. No one was anticipating that it would be either, or frankly, both. But my appointment represents where MIT is. I hope it also represents where MIT will be. But if it weren't the case that MIT undergraduate body is 45 percent women, it might've been... Let's say when I ask people, "Well, what do you guess the percentage of women at MIT is?" people go, "What is that, 15 percent?" It's not 15 percent, it's 45 percent; and it's been well over 40 percent for many years. You know, it makes it possible that a woman could be President of MIT. Similarly, while historically most of MIT's federal research support, if we just use this as a measure of the kind of research that's going on on campus, historically the major funders of research at MIT have been the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. Well, for the last many years NIH has been by far the larger supporter, the largest supporter of research at MIT. Now about 30 percent of our federal funds come from the NIH and those funds are more than our funding from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy combined.

It speaks to the federal investments in the life sciences through the NIH which have been magnificent. They're not magnificent now. I would say there's a crisis in underfunding of the physical sciences, so that the research budgets from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have not been sufficient to continue the rate of growth in research in the physical sciences. Nonetheless, MIT has a very robust research program in the life sciences and has had for decades. Actually, the Department of Biology has a long history. I don't know off the top of my head when it began, but certainly by the beginning of the 20th century.

Before you became involved in administration, you had a very distinguished career as a neuroscientist. We'd like to discuss your research on the brain. To start with, can you tell us about glioma cells and their properties?

Susan Hockfield: Glioma cells have an extraordinary ability. They are tumor cells that we believe arise from the glial cells in the brain.

There are two kinds of cells in the brain, two major classes of cells. There are the neurons or the nerve cells that we believe are largely responsible for conducting the messages. They are the circuit, if you will, the components of the circuits of the brain. The glial cells have the function that we don't yet clearly understand, but we consider them to be supporting cells. Neurons are terminally differentiated cells. That means once a nerve cell is born, it will not divide again, but will continue to develop into this incredibly beautiful structure that nerve cells have that allow them to communicate with other cells and send signals all over the body and through the brain. But they don't divide. Glial cells, on the other hand, are not terminally differentiated cells and can continue to divide. So it's no surprise that a primary brain tumor, meaning a tumor that arises in the brain, arises almost invariably from glial cells, and that's what glioma represents. When you get a brain metastasis of some other kind of tumor, breast cancer for example, those cells will lodge in the brain and multiply. That's what cancer cells do. But they multiply without being able to move outside where they're growing. So they grow as small balls of cells, I would say golf balls. Let's hope it's a pea, because if it's a pea size it's small, but a golf ball... But you know, as a single mass. Glioma is very different. Glioma has the uncanny ability to crawl through normal brain tissue. It makes them very difficult to treat.

If a surgeon removes what looks to be a glioma -- and there have been any number of observations and experiments going back to the early part of the 20th century and the late 19th century -- that the glioma cells will have spread beyond what looks to be the tumor, because they invade as single cells and can set up a new tumor locus somewhere else. It's one of the cancers for which we have very limited therapeutic approaches. We've made fantastic progress on a number of cancers, childhood leukemia for one. Look at the extraordinary advances with the new targeted cancer therapies, Gleevec and Herceptin. Gleevec against a kind of leukemia and Herceptin against a particular kind of breast cancer. We don't yet have tools like that for glioma, and it is a very difficult disease that so far has proved almost refractory to therapy. Now I got to glioma not because I was primarily interested in brain tumor.

I got to glioma by a bit of an experimental accident and by a certain amount of luck, fortuitousness. My husband's a neuro-oncologist, and I remember one Saturday afternoon we were sitting around around lunchtime and he had been reviewing, I think, the galleys of a review paper he was writing that included some fabulous images of real gliomas in real patients, and I in the meantime, was puzzling over some work that had just come out of my lab. We were trying to get our hands on the gene for a protein that I can describe in detail, but, in any case, we had found a gene. My post-doc, Diane Jaworski, had actually found a gene that we were pretty sure wasn't the gene we were looking for, but had some very interesting properties. And one of its interesting properties was that it was expressed when the glial cells in the brain were just beginning to develop. They were dividing and beginning to move to their adult positions. And my husband was working on his glioma review paper, and I was looking at this peculiar data, and we were talking to one another in the midst of this, and he looked at me and he said, "Well, you should look at that gene in glioma." Which we then did, and discovered that this gene is expressed by every glioma, virtually every glioma sample that we tested, and we went on to provide good evidence that this particular gene is part of the mechanism that allows glioma to do this terrible thing, which is invade normal tissue. The gene produces several different protein forms, one that's expressed on the glial cells as they're developing, but in a different form that is very selective for glioma. And so the last project in my lab, while I was in the lab, was exploring this particular gene and its protein products as a possible diagnostic and therapeutic target for glioma.

We'd like to hear about how you first became involved in neuroscience and brain research, but first, let's go back to the beginning: your childhood and where you were born.

Susan Hockfield: I was born in Chicago, Illinois. Both my parents were from Chicago, but we moved when I was three months old. I have three sisters -- I'm the second among four girls, all within six years.

How long did you stay in Chicago?

Susan Hockfield: My father was an electrical engineer before World War II -- the son of immigrants -- and when he returned from the war, he went to law school. We moved from Chicago when he became a patent attorney for General Electric. So we moved from Chicago to Schenectady, New York when I was about three months old. His career then took him into corporate law, so he was a patent attorney for a number of years and then moved up the ranks in the American corporation of the 1950s and '60s. At the time, corporations moved people around, so we moved about every three years -- two or three years -- until I was in junior high school. So we lived in Schenectady; and then Danbury, Connecticut; Houston, Texas and then back in Danbury. We moved to Chappaqua, New York when I was in fifth grade -- about a third of the way through fifth grade -- and I went to junior high school and high school in Chappaqua.

Was that challenging for you as a student?

Susan Hockfield: You know, it seemed to me that this was just the way life was.

I remember how startled I was when I met people who had lived in a single town all their lives. I thought everyone moved around. And I can't say it bothered me at all. I actually think it was very important to move to different places and develop new friends. I personally cannot imagine how my parents moved a family of six -- little kids -- from one town to another; so they seem like kind of superheroes to me. That they could do it without seeming at all flummoxed or bothered by it. We would just pick up and move to another town. And it was, I think, actually an important part of my having a fair amount of patience with people who are different from me -- a fair amount of appreciation, I would say, for things changing. Things change. Things in my life changed all the time, and I think that's important in leadership. I think it's important. The world is changing very fast. And from what I see the people who can adapt to change the fastest are among the most successful.

How did you do academically? It sounds like these moves didn't impact your life that much.

Susan Hockfield: Well, I can say I wasn't an astonishing student until I got to graduate school, and I should say, with as much modesty as I can muster, I was an astonishing student in graduate school, but I was loving it.

It wasn't until graduate school that I just fell in love with learning. Just fell in love with learning, and I could study for hours and days and it was a glorious feeling, and -- could've, would've, should've. You know, you think about what you could've done, what you might've done. I only wish I had discovered that kind of joy in learning earlier, because there are many things that I wish I knew now that I could've learned if I had been paying a little bit more attention to my studies. I have an older sister who was an astonishing student from the very beginning, and her interests and expertise lay more in the linguistic arts. She was a terrific language student, a very great reader. I mean, she was always reading. She liked history a lot. And in contrast, my intrinsic abilities took me more toward math and science, so it was a good contrast from having a sister who was about a year-and-a-half older than I was, going through school ahead of me doing astonishingly well. So you know, I got cut a little slack because my strengths were in math and science in contrast to hers. And because of that interest, it was imagined by my parents and myself that I would go to medical school -- kind of a standard thing. And while I had a deep interest, deep curiosity about how living things work -- or frankly, how all things work; I was forever taking things apart to figure out how they work -- medicine never felt exactly right to me. And it wasn't until I was in college that one of my professors suggested a different route which led me into research, and it was really the thing I had been looking for.

So you didn't take to reading as a child, because that was your sister's thing?

Susan Hockfield: Well, it's not that I didn't take to reading.

I struggled learning to read. When I was in first grade it did not come easily to me, and by second grade, I think, I was on the full reading wagon, but it wasn't something that I wanted to spend hours doing. I would love to spend hours taking things apart around the house, but I didn't really fall in love with books the way my older sister had. However, I remember my first big book experience was when I was in third and fourth grade -- we were in the Danbury Public Schools, Danbury, Connecticut -- and the school had a library, but it sure doesn't look like the libraries that schools have today. It was a room in the basement with no windows and a place where there were just a bunch of books on shelves. And I remember, as if it were yesterday, a shelf of books -- it was probably two or three books -- a set of books with orange covers that were biographies. They were illustrated with silhouettes. So rather than very detailed drawings, they were illustrated with silhouettes. But it was the first time I had run into biography, and I devoured that collection of biographies. You know how you have these profound memories. I still remember what the books felt like, I still remember what they smelled like, and I still remember these illustrations as silhouettes. And as I recall, I think most of the biographies I read were about Americans, but it was very powerful, very powerful. And I thought of it not as history, but really understanding people and how they came to do the things that they did. And I imagine, of course, they were written for children, so they probably talked about what these very famous people had done as children. However I haven't been able to find them again, but they were really... it was a wonderful book experience.

Was there anyone in your childhood or adolescence who particularly inspired you, or someone you wanted to emulate?

Susan Hockfield: I'm often asked whether there was some individual who lit the candle. There were many people who, I would say, fanned the flames. One of the wonderful things that my parents did -- again, four girls. I don't know whether they had been hoping for a boy. Who knows? But it was just assumed that all of us could do whatever we wanted to do. There wasn't any kind of suggestion, "Oh, you can't do that because you're a girl." Although when it came to choosing musical instruments, none of us picked up the trombone. We all started on piano, and two of my sisters stayed with piano. I moved to violin. One of my sisters actually became a very fine musician on the flute. When I think about what instruments we played, clearly all options may not have been opened, but it didn't feel that way. It felt like we could do anything we wanted to. And at the time, when you're three or four years old, you don't think, "Oh, I'd like to be a biologist," because that's not part of your world view.

When I think back to the things that intrigued me, when I was probably by four or five, it was biological things. And so I had this sense of enormous anticipation. My older sister, of course, got to freshman biology in high school before I did. I was so envious. Oh, I was so envious! And when I finally got to that course it was just heaven. And then I took a marvelous course my senior year. There was an advanced biology class for a small set of students who had been through the whole science sequence, and it was a wonderful, wonderful class. We worked with real animals, we did experiments with rats. It was really about mammalian physiology, and that was a terrific class. And I arranged -- I don't know where I got this idea -- but I arranged to take the AP exam in biology. The school didn't give an AP course in biology. There was AP English and AP math -- probably AP history, I don't think I took that -- but somehow I got the idea in my head that I would like to take AP biology. So I was excused from class to spend -- I don't remember how many weeks -- sitting in the library reading a college biology textbook, which was interesting but I don't describe it as a lot of fun.

You say you turned a corner in your love of learning when you reached the graduate level. Was there a connection to your discovery of neuroscience as a field of study?

Susan Hockfield: I think so. When I was in college I was majoring in biology. I actually wondered over a couple of years whether to major in biology or English. Having confessed I wasn't a great reader, but literature has an extraordinary appeal. I studied a lot of literature and poetry when I was in college and I think at that stage of late adolescence, the lessons in life, the lessons in expression that you get from literature were quite appealing to me. In any case, I decided to major in biology, but there was still this sense of pressure and determination that I would go to medical school and I was feeling quite increasingly uncomfortable with it. I was studying biology, but most of the students in my classes were pre-med, and they were approaching the classes and the class material in a very different way from how I wanted to approach it. Then finally, in my junior year I took a course in cell biology taught by a professor named Jerome Kaye, and it was the course I had been looking for. It was wonderfully exciting. The structure of the cell and the function of the cell had just begun to be dissected at very high resolution because of new technology that had come on board within the last several years.

In class one day, Professor Kaye described a puzzle. So this is my first sense of science that was actually being made as we were learning about it. So he described this problem and it seemed to me the direction to answer that problem was very obvious. And I went to see him in office hours and I said, "Why is this a problem? Why is this a puzzle? Because you could just take this particular route." And he looked at me and he said, "Well, why don't you do that?" And it was at that moment that I first began to understand that this marvelous science -- a set of discoveries I had been reading about and enjoying -- was done by people. You know, people like me. Not some other class of people that was separate from who I might be. And so I asked him how I would do that, and he said, "Well you know, there's a medical school across the way. Just go over there, walk around and ask someone to give you a job." So being a very trusting person I walked over to the medical school and I walked around and asked if people would give me a job. Why they would hire me I cannot imagine, but I actually did find someone who hired me for a part-time job. I graduated a semester early and went to work in the lab and it was, as I described a minute ago, the thing I had been looking for. Absolutely intoxicating. It was a neurobiology lab. I did not go looking for a neurobiology lab, but stumbled into a neurobiology lab, and everything about it I just loved. I loved the science, I loved reading the journal articles, I loved the discussions in the lab and at lab meetings. I loved just using my hands, I loved the physical challenge of doing things that are very small. Anyway, that was all quite wonderful. And so I worked for two years in the lab and then went to graduate school.

Now I don't think when I graduated from high school I would've had any idea (a) that I was going to go to graduate school, or (b) if I were, what field of study. But coming out of my lab experience, I entered an anatomy program. And I would say not intending to do neurobiology or neuro-anatomy, I thought I would do cell biology. And I would say that while my pursuit has been neurobiology, it really is biology that intrigued me.

When I got to graduate school, and you got to spend all of your time reading about this thing for which you had an infinite curiosity and infinite enthusiasm, and you could talk to people who were studying and interested in the same things, that was just glorious. And so I think it really was that I had discovered this real-life manifestation of the thing I had been curious about since I was four or five years old -- you know, that it really finally came together. And as an educator, what you want for your students -- as a mother, what you want for your child -- is to find that thing, that pursuit that is intoxicating. Because when you fall in love with something, you can bring to it a level of commitment, a level of energy, level of curiosity, a level of persistence that is absolutely required for success. You just can't have success without that.

When you started graduate school, had you already dropped your plan to get an M.D.?

Susan Hockfield: When I got to graduate school, it was suggested many times that I should perhaps not just get a Ph.D. but get a Ph.D. and an M.D. And it was funny, I started graduate school in January. I have done more things than probably would be good for me counter-cyclically. So rather than starting in September with everyone else, I started with January, just because that's the way it worked out. Actually, because I was anxious to start now. Once I've decided what I want to do, I want to do it now. I'm not a particularly patient person. And I had the remarkable good fortune to get a summer internship in a lab at the National Institutes of Health, a neurobiology lab. And so during the academic year from September through June I would take classes, and then from June through September I would be in the lab full-time, and I would try to get to the lab as much as I could during the course period of the year. And every time I thought about doing the M.D., all I could think about was that there would be long stretches of time when I couldn't be in the lab, and I just couldn't do it. I just could not imagine not being in the lab.

In retrospect -- could've, would've, should've -- yes, it would have been good for me. Actually, I think it would have been very good to have done the double degree, because over the period from 1980, when I started my lab, 'til say 1998 when I became dean of the graduate school at Yale, the world of the life sciences changed so dramatically. When I began my lab in 1980, the idea that the things I would be doing would have a clinical significance in my lifetime was really pretty remote. But over the next even ten years, it became clear that there was hardly anything you could do in a biologically oriented lab that didn't spin off something that would have a clinical application. And for that, I think having had an M.D. training would have been very useful. But it worked out.

Your graduate school was Georgetown, which is just up the road from NIH. Was that a coincidence? Serendipity? Luck?

Susan Hockfield: Yeah, huge serendipity or luck. My first job was in Rochester at the medical school at the University of Rochester. I then moved to Washington and had a job at George Washington University as a lab technician. Actually as an electron microscopy technician. I have a great affinity for how structure allows you to understand function. So I was working at a lab at GW, and only applied to graduate schools in Washington. I wanted to stay in Washington, and Georgetown made a more attractive offer than GW, so I started graduate school at Georgetown. A fair amount of serendipity is the way to put it. The man who became my dissertation advisor had an opportunity to bring a graduate student as an intern into his lab at NIH, and let the chairman of the Department of Anatomy know, and he sought me out and said, "Perhaps you'd like to pursue this opportunity for the summer." And I did, assuming I was going to do something else for my dissertation, but my experience in that lab led me to my dissertation work.

What was his name?

Susan Hockfield: Steven Gobel. That was funny. Again, serendipity, unusual. I was the only graduate student he ever had. At NIH there aren't graduate students. Generally, you have post-docs -- you don't have graduate students -- and so I was his only graduate student, and what a wonderful experience for me. I had worked in a lab already for two years, so if you enter graduate school without any previous lab experience, there's a huge amount you need to learn just in terms of how you work in a lab. There are thousands of things about how you work in a lab that you just need to learn, and it takes some time. But I had already learned much of that as a lab technician, and if I had gone to work with a scientist who is used to having graduate students, I would've done the things that graduate students do. But instead I went to work with someone who was used to having post-docs, so he didn't think there was anything unusual about my fast-forwarding through that graduate student stuff and just jumping in essentially at a post-doc level. So my graduate research was done with the kind of independence normally accorded only to a post-doc, and I was in an environment where everyone was considered to be a mature scientist, and it was just wonderful. Wonderful. There were very few graduate students around, so I had access to spectacular scientists, one on one, in the midst of this very large group in which I was working. A hugely fortunate, deep, intense educational experience.

Were you still pursuing cell biology generally at this point, or had you already decided to focus on the brain specifically?

Susan Hockfield: Oh, I was all brain all the time! By the time I finished graduate school I was all brain all the time. But an interesting thing happened. I got my Ph.D. in 1979 and spent a year doing a post-doc at University of California, San Francisco and then moved to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Just to give you a sense, in 1980, the first brain gene was cloned. It was the sub-units of the acetylcholine receptor. Molecular biology has provided a powerful source of fundamental information about biological systems. Neuroanatomy took off from some general concepts of biology and anatomy, but not very much -- not as far as tools; but molecular biology could provide that. Now before 1980 molecular biology was in its infancy. This grew out of the elucidation of the structure of DNA in the early '50s and then the understanding that RNA comes from DNA and the RNA coats for protein -- a phenomenal set of discoveries. But the techniques had very low resolution.

Technology determines in a very important way what you can see, what you can do. You can't do experiments beyond what your technology allows, and often the breakthroughs come because you or someone else has figured out how to make that technology go a little deeper, go a little further, provide a little higher resolution. But early molecular biology required a huge vat of one kind of cells, multiplied over a zillion times, in order to find a single gene. So just the requirements of doing molecular biology experiments basically require that you had a single cell, and a hundred thousand copies of that single cell, in order to get your hands on a gene that was important in that cell. But by the late '70s, the techniques had gotten better, so that you could study a gene that was not expressed in a hundred thousand of the exact same cells, but you could actually find it in a complicated tissue like the brain. The brain has thousands and thousands of different kinds of cells. Some cells express these acetylcholine receptors, some don't. And the resolution of the molecular biology techniques finally began to allow you to look at a complicated tissue. And so I, as I started my own lab at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, had access to technologies that we really never had before, and that allowed us to look at what was happening at the level of individual cells in the brain. So I did all brain all the time, but I would no longer be characterized as a neuro-anatomist. I became a molecular neurobiologist and devoted the rest of my research real exclusively to questions of brain development mostly.

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?

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?"

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.

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.

Why would you abandon your research, the ability to spend as much time in the lab as you wanted, to become so involved in university administration?

Susan Hockfield: This is a very common question. "How can you leave the lab for administration?" And people usually have very long faces when they say "administration." I loved working in the lab, and had the same amount of skepticism, disdain, whatever the right word is to describe how many faculty, particularly young faculty, feel about administration. You know, "Why are they there?" One of the joys of working in a well-run university is you don't have to pay any attention to how the place is run, you just do your work. It's a huge, huge privilege that we accord our scientists, engineers or scholars in the American research universities. When I got to Yale, I had already started doing various administrative leadership tasks earlier when I was at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, actually at my first very serious assignment, administering science rather than doing science myself. My graduate experience for me was absolutely transformational. People talk about peoples' most profound allegiance or affinity being to their undergraduate institution or their undergraduate experience. I don't feel that way. I feel that for most of us who have done graduate education, that is the identity -- for me -- part of my life.

College was fine, but it was really in graduate school that I found my life's work. And I found my life's work -- I discovered how to push myself beyond the limits that I thought I had, I learned new ways of relating to people, I learned new ways of learning. It really was probably the most formative period of my life, very important, and I value it highly. When I was at Yale University as a professor, another extraordinary privilege, the graduate students --many graduate students -- weren't having that kind of sense of this being the most important part of their education. And I worried, because golly, I didn't enjoy the privilege of going to a graduate school like Yale! It's a spectacular educational environment. And it made me very sad that we weren't utilizing the potential of the Yale graduate experience, and the students weren't feeling the kind of acceleration and exhilaration that I had. And when the president of Yale, Rick Levin, invited me to be Dean of the graduate school, there were some things that I thought I might be able to help. And it was really a sense of service, a sense of giving back. My graduate experience had been so important to me. It was my responsibility now to help make the graduate experience for the Yale graduate students as rich and fulfilling as I had experienced. So I agreed to do it, but I had assumed it would be a very short service -- three years, perhaps four years. But what I discovered, once I was actually Dean of the graduate school, was just how interesting, important, exhilarating this other kind of service to the world can be.

Did you continue teaching while you were Dean?

Susan Hockfield: I didn't teach formally, but my faculty appointment at Yale was in the medical school, and my primary responsibility was actually teaching in the context of my laboratory. So I kept my research lab. I had graduate students and post-docs in the lab, I continued that. I think I gave a lecture or two, but I found it very difficult to take on the kind of commitment that's involved in teaching while having this enormous set of commitments and obligations as Dean of the graduate school.

You talked about taking on the position of Dean because you thought there were things you could bring to the position. Can you talk about those for a little bit? The "Take the Faculty to Lunch" initiative, for instance.

Susan Hockfield: I actually embarked on my service as Dean of the graduate school more intuitively than rationally, but things that I learned then I've used again and again. One of the things that's very powerful is listening to what people say and then telling them what they've said. I might listen to you, I might've listened to ten other people over the course of the previous several months, and may have heard the same thing expressed in different ways. So the exercise, if you will, of my telling you what I've heard is telling you what I've heard from you, integrated over what I've heard from who knows how many people. It's a powerful way of moving an organization, and what I heard at Yale was a sense of being lost about the purpose of graduate education. And again, my own background had produced an experience, if not an articulation of the experience, of the importance of graduate education, and it's a fascinating paradox. The importance is very personal. I've described my graduate experience as something that was personally fulfilling, that it's intoxicating, exhilarating. That's a very selfish kind of view of things. But the wonderful paradox is that when you're doing advanced research, when you're doing advanced scholarship, you're not only doing something which is personally enormously satisfying, it also does good for the many. And that's the magic, is figuring out what you can do that you really love, but that also is service to the many.

What I did at the graduate school was to take every opportunity to articulate back to the community why graduate education is so important for the individual, for the institution, but also for the larger world. That's kind of at a high philosophical level. There's some very practical things that I sorted out, and they seem almost obvious to me. I once said, the way I do these things is when I walk down the hall and I see some garbage on the floor, I pick it up and I put it in the trashcan. It's not so hard. It's not brain science, we like to say. So there were some just operational things that I sorted out, but I think probably what I view as my most important contribution was offering inspiration around the power and importance of graduate education. There were days that I felt that I was an incredibly corny person, just saying stuff that everyone knew. But invariably, someone would report back that the way I had captured their thoughts had helped them understand what it was they were doing at Yale. Very powerful. You mentioned "Take a Faculty Member to Lunch. "

There were many more opportunities at Yale for undergraduates to engage with faculty than for graduate students. When you're a graduate student it's important that you go very narrow, very deep. You don't want it to last, you know, for too many years. And so to accomplish what you really need to accomplish in a doctoral program you need to focus and be very direct. And that means for most students they're interacting with only one faculty member, but usually in the context of the lab or the library or the work. So there weren't very many social opportunities to just seek mentorship, to build a community. And so Take a Faculty Member to Lunch was not my idea. This was, as most of my ideas people think are my ideas, an idea that came out of just talking to lots of people. And someone at some point said, "Well, hey, we could do that by encouraging the students and the faculty to have lunch together." We had a little competition for the name of the program -- it became known as "FEAST" -- Free Eating Attracts Students and Teachers -- and the prize for the student who named that, a student of psychology, was lunch with the Dean in the graduate school dining hall, of course.

For so many of these things, if you just provide the opportunities that people are asking for, it can be very effective. So it became a way of bringing people together. We had Bring People to the Graduate School. There were departments that started using this FEAST program as a place to have departmental meetings or group meetings between graduate students and faculty. It was very effective in building community.

While you were Dean of Graduate Studies at Yale, you also tried to foster more communication between disciplines. Could you tell us about that?

The other program we started when I was Dean was a lecture series called "In the Company of Scholars." Jonathan Spence gave a lecture yesterday morning -- he's a historian of China. Arguably, certainly, the nation's best Chinese historian. So I had a thought. I was walking down the street one day. Remember, I was in the Neurobiology Department in the Medical School -- I knew the name Jonathan Spence -- and I walked by the Yale bookstore and there was a display of his most recent book. And I looked at the book and I thought, "You know, if Jonathan Spence passed me on the street, I wouldn't recognize him, because as a neurobiologist I know many of the neurobiologists. I don't know any of these historians." And it struck me that this is another necessary consequence of graduate education being narrow and deep. Necessary, but not exclusionary. And so I started -- I and my colleague started -- this program "In the Company of Scholars," where three times a semester I would invite a faculty member from science, the humanities or the social sciences to give a lecture to the graduate school community. The graduate school at Yale had 2,200 students and roughly 600, 700 faculty were affiliated with the graduate school. So these lectures were expressly for the graduate community: graduate students, faculty in the graduate school. And the charge I gave to each of the faculty speakers was, "Tell us about your topic, but in a way that an intelligent person from another discipline can understand it." Well, this became a wonderfully exciting series of lectures. Of course, the first person I invited to give the lecture "In the Company of Scholars" was Jonathan Spence, and he gave a magnificent lecture. And I don't know, there were over 100 people in the audience, and then we had a reception afterward. And as I went from group to group around the reception, they were talking about the lecture, and that continued, as I said, three times a semester. It was a wonderful way of bringing the graduate community together, and giving students and faculty an opportunity to hear from the masters outside of their own disciplines.

What does it take to make a university competitive?

Susan Hockfield: That's a great question. What does it take for a university to be competitive? Probably every university president would give you the same answers. I've been trying to articulate why MIT is different from some of the other great universities, but we have to begin by understanding what an extraordinary benefit it is to this country to have a set of the best research universities of all time, and a large set, here in this country. These universities sprang from the bottom up. They weren't determined by the government. They were not put in place by a single source. So each of these universities is very different from the other, and yet we compete fiercely with one another, and I think that's a source of much of our strength. So to be competitive, a great research university obviously has to have very high standards, and those standards really have to reside in the faculty. So the faculty at any great university or college really do come first. They're the source of our inspiration and direction around education and also around research. In a very important way, they don't just set the standards, they also determine the culture. So the faculty are key. When you've got great faculty, you can attract great students. When you've got great students you can attract great faculty. So it's a self-perpetuating equation. You have to have high ambition. I believe you have to have a high purpose.

MIT was founded in 1861 to serve the industrializing nation. It was founded with a very practical ambition, which was to prepare engineers and scientists to provide the kind of understanding and technology that the nation needed. By the middle of the 19th century we had colleges that were in place from early in the 18th century and before that. But by the middle of the 19th century, graduate education was not available in the United States. It was only available in Europe, and frankly, technical education was not really available in the United States. There was a brain drain of U.S. intelligence -- intellect -- to Europe. What's happening then was actually what we see in the United States today -- they would go and stay. Now people come to the United States and they stay, and I wish we had made it easier for them to stay from all over the world -- brilliant people around the world who want to come and study and work in the United States at our research universities. In any case, around the middle of the 19th century the first graduate schools were started in the United States, and MIT and a number of technical universities were also established to begin to serve this industrializing nation's needs.

You've maintained some programs at MIT to extend science education beyond the university itself. Would you like to talk about that?

One of the things we do at MIT, as you may know, is we put all of our courses online, a program called Open Courseware. We don't give any credit for it, but the materials for all of our courses are online. Some of the courses are present in full video. Most of them not, but you could take a course just using those materials rather than going to a textbook. In the fall, we launched a new portal for Open Courseware called Highlights for High School, because we learned that many high school students and teachers are accessing the Open Courseware site. So high school students and teachers around the world, where the high school curriculum has been exhausted and they want to go a little further, were turning to MIT's materials. The Open Courseware site is not so easy to navigate. It's targeted, at the lowest, for a freshman at MIT, and the freshmen at MIT, let's just say, are pretty advanced. So we opened a portal to make it easier for high school students and teachers to navigate the site. As I said, it's called Highlights for High Schools. But one of the things on the site that I particularly love is that we've taken three of the AP courses -- biology, I think it's chemistry and calculus, I think those were the three -- and mapped the curriculum for those courses to Open Courseware material. And again, I just feel enormously envious of the students who were like me in high school, who want to take AP biology but their school doesn't have an AP biology course, and so instead of trying to figure it out on their own, they can actually go to MIT and access all the marvelous materials that we have so that they can study what's equivalent to AP biology with our stuff.

Was that your idea, because it's something you had to do without?

Susan Hockfield: Open Courseware was an idea that came about long before I was at MIT. It's really brilliant. It came from a brilliant insight. What years must it have been? Probably the late '90s. A lot of schools were concerned about the impact of distance education on residential education, and a lot of schools embarked on various experiments in distance education. People were concerned about what it would cost, or interested in whether these could be revenue-producing enterprises.

My predecessor, Chuck Vest, convened a group of faculty to think about how MIT should approach distance education. So this very extraordinary group of faculty went off and thought about it and came back and the report was "Oh, we've looked at it every possible way and we've concluded that you can't make money at it, so we should give it all away for free." And so MIT embarked on what has become Open Courseware, and it is a really quite remarkable force for the democratization of education. We get emails from people all over the world who have used it and describing how it's changed their lives. Then, when I arrived, there was information coming from people who had used the site, and we discovered that there were a lot of high school students and teachers using it. And there were faculty and staff at MIT who were anxious to provide an Open Courseware opportunity that would be actually targeted to high school students and teachers, and I encouraged that development, because I think it's so important. I think that there are a lot of students who have interests in the kinds of things MIT does -- science and engineering -- and yet because of a paucity of educational materials or educational insight, while they're in high school, lose that passion. And it's very important for our nation that we help those young people understand just how wonderfully exciting and rewarding advanced science and engineering are, and how important it is for them to keep their interests focused, and graduate from high school, and then aspire to study science and engineering at the college level.

Should a student try to get into the best college to get the best educational experience?

Susan Hockfield: Education is so much about an individual, and how an individual's mind can be expanded and how a student can reach to deeper understandings and new understandings. What's most important, I think, is getting the match right, and that means finding a place where a young person can allow him or herself to be challenged. And that's different, the recipe's different for different people. About MIT, I often say it's not right for everyone, but when the match is right it's magical. I mean, I see these MIT students coming in. These are students who, you know, the brightest kid in their high school and the brightest kid in the town, the brightest kid in the state, and they get to MIT and they've never been challenged in a way that MIT challenges them. We have a commonplace we use all the time about raising the bar. It's a place that raises the bar for everyone. We raise it for one another, we raise it for ourselves. So it's a place that really stretches people. That's what a great education should do. So it's up to a student to figure out what's the right place.

Since your time as an undergraduate in the 1970s, have you noticed changes with each graduating class? Any trends or cycles?

Susan Hockfield: I don't know whether it's cyclical or not, but I have enormous admiration for the students I see at MIT today. It's a very different group.

My generation saw that there were problems in the world. Every generation sees that there are problems in the world. But the response by my generation, and I say this with some embarrassment, was to march around and scream and shout about it and carry posters. This generation doesn't do a huge amount of hand-wringing about it. They roll up their sleeves and they get to work. So I am enormously impressed by this generation's optimism. Certainly at MIT I see a huge amount of practicality. They want to solve the problems, and they're very practical. They're very directed, they're very energetic about how they do it. So I think we are looking at a different generation. This generation is more collaborative, I believe. At least that's what I see at MIT. They're more collaborative, they're more ambitious, they are interconnected. There was a conversation at breakfast yesterday talking about the difference between this generation and my generation, and wondering how much of that is a product of the technology. You know, I see my daughter and students working from these network sites -- Facebook -- and they are connected to so many more people than we could've been connected to when we were young.

Looking towards the future, do you see a change in the role of women in the sciences?

Susan Hockfield: I hope so.

The nation needs all of the scientists and engineers we can produce. So it's a huge mistake to somehow sideline half of the people who might go into it because they're not men. And we have growing populations of new Americans, growing populations of minorities, and I hope that many of those young people find their passion in science and engineering. We need everyone who wants to be part of this fabulous enterprise, for no reasons, just partly because of the numbers, but also all of the very interesting problems where I've seen advances made are made because people bring different perspectives to the solution. So people talk about diversity in a kind of reflexive way. Diversity is critically important, because you have to get people who think about problems in somewhat different ways. Not that they're going to have a different solution on their own, but they certainly bring a different perspective to every kind of conversation. And I think we need to continually bring in new insights, new kinds of perspectives into these solutions. Or if we bring in the standard people, we'll get the standard answers. And those answers have been pretty good, but I actually believe that the reasons that some of the answers that we've gotten have been great is because there's been different perspectives brought to the table.

As part of our mission at the Academy of Achievement, we often ask people if they have a personal definition of the American Dream. How do you define the American Dream?

Susan Hockfield: I am enormously inspired by the American Dream. The American Dream is the environment I've described, growing up in my family, that you can do what you want to do, that you can be who you want to be. And I see it at MIT. There was a marvelous demonstration of what the American Dream means.

A faculty member who gave the first lecture for our freshmen this past fall was talking about the incredible power of the American melting pot. That brilliant, ambitious people from all over the world have come to America because of the freedom, because of the ability to rely on yourself. Right? Because at the heart, it's a meritocracy. If you work hard, you'll be rewarded for your hard work. Dick Samuels, who is a professor of political science, was giving a lecture to our students, and talking about the power of the American melting pot and he said, "We'll do an experiment. Raise your hand if you weren't born in the United States." Now only eight percent -- eight to ten percent of our freshmen -- are international students, but about 20 percent of the students raised their hands, roughly. So these are the children of immigrants. And he said, "Keep your hand in the air. Raise your hand if one of your parents wasn't born in the United States." And another huge number of hands went up. And he said, "Keep your hands in the air. Now raise your hand if one of your grandparents wasn't born in the United States." I didn't actually... I couldn't count, but it looked to me as though 85 or 90 percent of the students had their hands in the air. This is what America's about, is bringing people from all over the world to these shores, giving them productive work, giving them opportunities. And what I think is incredibly important -- not just for the nation but also for the world, as an example of what people can do together from different backgrounds -- that we continue to be a nation that welcomes immigrants, that we continue to be a nation that offers everyone opportunities, and that we continue to be a nation also that rewards success. I think these are all important elements. And individual achievement, individual effort, I think, is an important part of it. So it's balancing opportunity for all, but also appropriate rewards for work that's been well done.

Thank you, Dr. Hockfield, for taking the time to talk with us today.