Composing a Further Life

employed. If he wants to go to graduate school, I would be willing to help with that as well, and I would be willing for him to know that, but I want him to feel that at some point he’s got to support himself and the money is not unending. I think he knows that. But then once he is established, we could give him enough to let him buy his first house, whatever it takes to ease his progress.”
    Since the selling of the company, Barbara had started research on a protein called “notch” (because mutations affecting it cause notches in the wings of fruit flies), which is essential to embryonic development but also promised interesting connections to her earlier work on cell death and to the development of tumors and the amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s. I’ve been interested for some time in career patterns that move in zigzags rather than straight lines, so when Barbara described her shift of interest, I asked her about this. “You pick up a clue, something connects with it, and off you go in that direction,” she said. “It partly has to do with what different students are interested in. You let them into your lab because it seems to connect, and it turns out to be really productive in its connections.”
    “If I asked you,” I wondered, “leaving financing aside as an issue, what questions you think you might want to work on, looking ahead as long as you can, how would you frame those questions?”
    “I think it would be very hard for me to frame the questions, because what I’ve learned about the way I do science is that I cannot predict what I’m going to be doing five years from now. If I find something interesting on the way that takes me off on another path, I’ll go there. It’s partially because I like following where the clues lead me and partially because in that way I am forced to learn a new field every three or four years.” For a scientist, there is always something new to be learned. “I didn’t know anything about this notch protein. I’d heard of it, but barely. And it’s become fascinating. I suspect that five years from now I probably will still be working on it, but I will have another thing that’s interesting to me as well and I will probably be veering in another direction. I won’t have solved any big question that way, but I will solve a lot of little questions. I’m a meanderer.”
    “Barbara is a scientist,” Dick said. “She is interested in the questions that really don’t have answers yet. What I enjoy more than anything else is taking something and making a tool. I like the craftsmanliness of it. It’s very different, more engineering than science.
    “The styles are so different in science. Look at somebody like Melvin Calvin and look at Linus Pauling. Calvin wanted to figure out how photosynthesis works, and he essentially worked on that for most of his career. If you look at Linus Pauling, for one or two years it was this, for another five-year period it was that. He was really all over the scientific map.”
    “Yeah, I am more the Linus Pauling type than the Calvin type,” Barbara agreed.
    “Much more. But very significant things come out of going places where people haven’t been before.”
    “I guess there are two things I would say about five years from now,” Barbara went on. “I will be working somewhere in the immune system, almost certainly, because it’s a place I feel comfortable; it’s home and I know the players, so it’s a comfortable place to be, just from a collegial point of view, and I know the experimental system. But I wouldn’t necessarily say I’ll be doing
x
in the immune system. I will be following where my nose takes me. I tend to like, and I get turned on by, going to areas where people haven’t been before. When I found this interaction between our cell death protein and notch, nobody had even thought about notch in the immune system. I really like that, because I think that gives me a little edge when I’m not competing with a million top guns in the field.”
    “Well, but just until they notice you’re onto something interesting,” I said with a laugh. “Then they all swarm in, right?” This is where the nature of legacy in scientific work is so different from what it is in the humanities. The names of those who make major scientific discoveries may get remembered, but the original papers reporting on research go quickly out of date as work gets replicated and elaborated, is integrated into broader