Nobel mentor
Q&A with Martin Chalfie, Amgen Scholar faculty mentor

Last fall, Martin Chalfie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work showing that the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene can be used as a biological identifier when inserted into the DNA of an organism. He has published more than 85 papers which have been cited nearly 9,000 times.

Though wildly successful, Chalfie, also a faculty mentor in the Amgen Scholars Program at Columbia University in New York, wasn't always confident in the lab. As an undergraduate, he worked for a whole summer without getting a single experiment to work. “So I simply dropped out of science. It took several years before I got back in," he recalls. Those experiences led him, as a mentor, to develop projects that would be feasible for students to complete during their summers with the Amgen Scholars Program. "We make sure students learn how to move around in the lab, how to think about their projects and get something done," he says.

We asked him more about his experiences as a young scientist, and what his life is like now. The following is an edited transcript:

What was your experience like as an undergraduate in science?

I had two lab experiences. The first was in the summer of my sophomore year, and there wasn't much to it. The second one was after my junior year, and I was trying to do research that would lead to a senior thesis. I think I put a lot of pressure on myself. I thought that if anything went wrong, I had been a failure at the experiment. I also thought I really couldn't ask for help.

That’s clearly wrong. Everything is quite collaborative in research. It's through interactions that we get a whole lot done. But I had somehow gotten into my mind that a true scientist just knew how to do experiments. I think I was overwhelmed by the fact the experiments didn't work. But that's normal -- you have to go back and think about why they don’t work.

What is the best advice you can give to scientists whose experiments are not going as planned?

I would say to seek out help. Try to troubleshoot and think about it first, and then get other points of view from colleagues and faculty mentors. Ultimately, remember that grappling with an unusual result or negative result is part of what we all do. It could be that experimental assumptions need to be changed. I might view it as an opportunity: Sometimes having something not work the way you thought it would, might actually give you a hint as to something completely new.

What do you do in a typical day?

It's too hard to say what a typical day is. For the last several weeks, the department has been submitting grant proposals. As chair of the department, I ensure that all the parts of the application were put together. I do a fair amount of writing. I've been doing quite a lot of work in the last month or two trying to finish up manuscripts. Those projects always seem to be more time consuming than you expect. We rework and rework manuscripts that lead us to more questions and sometimes more experiments. We get those done and revise the manuscript again. Much of my time has been spent writing grants to help the department and its infrastructure or fund new faculty members. I also spend time talking over experiments with people in the lab. For example, before going to big meetings, we’ll go over all the work that the lab will be presenting.  

After you published your landmark Science paper on GFP, you had a flood of requests for the vector. Most of the inquiries, you said in your Nobel acceptance speech, came from graduate students and postdocs. What does that tell you about the role of young people in science?

Students and postdocs often drive research in the lab. The best graduate students and undergraduates are the ones who think about their experiments a lot. And when they hear about a new tool or technique, there’s a lot of networking. If one person hears about it, they go and tell their friends. If you view science as a 9 to 5 job, it’s just not going to work.

What happens after you win the Nobel Prize?

Really wonderful things and strange things happen. I had one situation where someone wanted to arrange a speaking tour for me. Suddenly you’re in demand in a way that’s unexpected. Now that this designation has been given to me, suddenly I'm asked to go to meetings that I've never been asked to go to. Like the opening of a university in Saudi Arabia, or economic meetings in which they want to talk about the impact of the economy on science. It’s a little strange to get used to. People write requests for autographs. One of the good parts is you get in touch with friends who you’ve not heard from in years. There’s also more of an opportunity to try to connect with students and encourage people to think about science.