An Interview with Salk President ElizabethBlackburn

Did you ever consider a career outside of science?

When I was a teenager, I had classic music lessons all through school. I really loved music and I played competently. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it really be great to be someone whose life is really all about music?’ But another part of me was very realistic. Being competent at piano playing is a far cry from being a real performer and to love music isn’t to mean you can make a career out of it.

So I had the wistful dream of being a musician. But I also knew I loved science, even as a teenager. For over 50 years—most of my life!—I have been front and center a laboratory scientist. Science, to me, was the best thing that I could do. I do still noodle on the piano, mostly just for my own relaxation. We have a piano in our house in San Francisco, and my husband and son would make themselves scarce when I’d play. The only one who would put up with it was our parakeet, that had no means of escape and would chirp away merrily along with various sonatas and other piano pieces I play.

What made you decide to accept the position as president of Salk?

Because it’s Salk! It’s such a special place. Your heart does a little leap every time you first step into the courtyard. The architecture is so extraordinary; it makes you wonder what it does for creativity. There has to be some amazing synergism that neuroscientists will have to figure out. There’s always been that special feeling about the place, and the science is really something special as well. So, when the possibility of becoming president came along, I got really excited. But then I told myself it would pass—but of course it didn’t. [Laughs] I really kept thinking about it, the next day and the next day, and I began to think, this could be real. A big part of my excitement was knowing the Institute as a non-resident fellow and having such an admiration for the scientists and their science that happens here and the ways it happens.

Do people have misconceptions about science?

There is a visual stereotype of the lone scientist wearing a white coat—and the coat hangs very straight indeed. It somehow suggests that the work is rigid, boring and solitary. In fact, science is probably one of the most social things on the planet. It’s all about ideas going viral among science communities. Scientists think deeply much of the time but if they don’t communicate what they did, in one sense it didn’t happen. If you’re doing a biological experiment and you don’t write down what you did in a notebook or publish it in a paper, that experiment never existed, right? If it never makes it out of your mind, it doesn’t advance science. So it’s an incredibly social and communal kind of enterprise. Science also has this interesting dynamic of balancing rigor with creativity. It’s a lot like art. You look at Picasso, and you think he’s creating very free-form simple-seeming works. But Picasso was taught early on how to draw in the most classic styles and he mastered those completely. His more creative work could launch from this rigorous training. The scientist’s lab coat is an emblem of the rigorous platform that launches the real creativity in science.

The biological sciences have moved so rapidly in the past 60 years. What’s left to learn?

I wonder in biology if we aren’t where physics was in the 19th century. We know so much about the molecules, cells and cellular signaling and other fundamentals about how things work at one level, and yet, at another level we don’t know a lot. We’re very mystified by the complexity of the whole organism. We look at all of the elements and say, ‘Gosh, how did this actually turn into a human who is functional for 70, 80, 90 or even 100 years?’ There was great confidence in 19th century physics, and a feeling that they had a handle on how things worked, but there were universes they hadn’t even dreamed of. We’re at this stage of justifiable pride in all we know about biology, and yet, we know it’s still very tough. In a hundred years, scientists may look back and say ‘They knew a lot of great rigorous biology, but boy, they were so naïve.’ We’ve already had a few surprises. For instance, how important RNA molecules are in many of the functions we thought proteins dominated. There are probably other worlds in biological systems that we’ve never imagined.

As president of Salk, what are your aspirations for your time at the Institute?

We can start with one very clear mission: to have great science thrive at Salk. So what does that mean? We’ll need funding, of course, that’s always critical, but money isn’t enough. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don’t have the right kind of environment that inspires people to do great science there’s no point. You have to always be asking what makes a scientific community greater than the sum of its parts. At Salk, everybody is committed to this idea that doing science—great science—is not only the most exciting thing they do but also that this is what will make a lasting impact on human wellbeing. The important thing is making sure that we have a community of people devoted and enabled to do that. It’s also important that people who train at Salk leave the Institute with not only the skill set to do rigorous, creative science, but with a passion to do really great science.