A Last­ing Mem­ory

by Roberto

Al­most forty years ago, I ar­rived in Boston to be­gin my job as an as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor in the mi­cro de­part­ment at Har­vard Med­ical School. Dur­ing my post-doc at Stan­ford, I had very much hoped to get a call from bac­te­ri­ol­ogy at UC Davis. In­stead, I got the call from the East Coast school. Not com­pletely cer­tain that I wanted to head in that di­rec­tion, I was swayed by the of­fer of a lab space across the hall from Jon Beck­with. It was dif­fi­cult to re­sist set­ting up shop next door to one of my sci­en­tific he­roes, whose el­e­gant ap­proaches us­ing bac­te­r­ial ge­net­ics had un­cov­ered so many won­der­ful de­tails of tran­scrip­tion reg­u­la­tion and pro­tein se­cre­tion. Plus, the en­tire de­part­ment was such a re­mark­ably friendly and wel­com­ing group.

Senes­cent leaf. ©Roberto Kolter

I was very ex­cited. But I was also ex­tremely ner­vous and com­pletely un­sure of my­self in my brand-new lab. There was this mo­ment, I re­mem­ber it so vividly. Early one morn­ing I headed down to the de­part­men­tal stock­room to pick up some of­fice sup­plies. All alone among the poorly lit and nar­row spaces be­tween the shelves, I nearly passed out. I had to hold on to the near­est shelf to keep from falling, over­whelmed by the feel­ing that some­one had made a ter­ri­ble mis­take. The ques­tion arose:

"What am I do­ing here?"

The panic sub­sided, fol­lowed by a few min­utes of quiet in­tro­spec­tion. Those mo­ments of calm af­ter the storm, still in­flu­enced by some mea­sure of self-doubt and in­se­cu­rity, gave me the chance to stop, con­sider, and de­cide. Over the years the same ques­tion arose in mind many times again. Thank­fully, it sel­dom took on the force of that mo­ment in the stock­room, but it al­ways pro­vided the op­por­tu­nity to ques­tion what I was do­ing. In rais­ing the ques­tion, an­swers about what to do seemed to arise ef­fort­lessly. Some­times I stayed the course, some­times I made dras­tic changes. Dur­ing the en­su­ing four decades, the call from Davis never came and I grew to love Boston dearly. For me, af­ter all the ups and downs, the ex­pe­ri­ence of hav­ing a lab proved re­mark­ably sat­is­fy­ing. Al­ways guided by the ques­tion­ing.

I learned this les­son early on in my ca­reer. When on oc­ca­sion we are shaken by self-doubt and in­se­cu­rity (and who isn't?), it is an op­por­tu­nity to stop and think. It can serve us well to ques­tion what we're do­ing and why. And then, af­ter the ques­tion­ing, see what an­swers arise in mind. They can sur­prise and help de­ci­sion mak­ing.