Expecting the Unexpected
If you do not expect it, you will not find the unexpected, for it is hard to find and difficult. -Heraclitus (quoted within Loren Eiseley’s “The Unexpected Universe”)
I have a confession. I often get bored or zone out during academic seminars. Sometimes the topic is outside my field and presented at a technical level that I can’t follow. Sometimes I’m too anxious about other tasks to really pay attention. Sometimes I’m just tired. I love working in my lab and spending time reading, writing and analyzing data. So sometimes, it’s hard to tear myself away to attend yet another seminar. I attend as often as possible to learn a bit about what my WHOI colleagues are doing and to help create a good impression for visitors. I inevitably learn bits and pieces that are interesting or useful, but does that average seminar have a measurable impact on my scientific productivity? I doubt it.
But, and this is an important “but”, there are some extreme outliers. I can think of two seminars that have had dramatic and direct impacts on my scientific career.
The first was given at the University of Hawaii while I was a resident graduate student. I was studying the effects of estrogenic steroids on reef-building corals, and frankly I was struggling a bit with how to move forward with my research. By chance, I was reading my school newspaper and saw an advertisement for an upcoming seminar about environment endocrine disruption. I had never before been to a seminar within that particular department and probably never attended a seminar based on a newspaper ad, but I decided to go and convinced one of my committee members to join me. The speaker was Dr. John McLachlan, a leading voice in characterization of endocrine disrupting chemicals. During his seminar, Dr. McLachlan primarily spoke about effects of environmental contaminants on humans and other mammals (e.g., “lab rats”), but in passing, he speculated as to how environmental chemicals might affect hormonal signaling in a “coral reef animal.” My professor and I both jerked upright in our chairs and asked ourselves “what does he know??” Immediately after the seminar we ran down the aisle and peppered him with a barrage of questions. This interaction eventually led to John inviting me to his lab at Tulane University where we collaborated in searching for steroid receptors in corals*. The experience was transformative for me. This was my first foray into molecular biology. For the first time I learned practical skills in PCR, degenerate primer design and in situ hybridization, and for the first time I was immersed in discussions of molecular evolution and transcription factor action. This experience gave me the background to come to WHOI as a postdoctoral scholar working in the Hahn and Stegeman labs. I remain indebted to my UH mentors and to Dr. McLachlan for taking me under his wing. And I marvel at the whims of fate that drew me to that seminar.
The second was in my home department here at WHOI. A fellow postdoc, Mark Baumgartner was speaking about his graduate research on foraging ecology of right whales. During his presentation, Mark explained that during parts of the year, the whale would spend large portions of their dive time swimming along at a constant depth, deep in the water column. The whales were feeding on dormant copepods that formed dense assemblages and provided a very nutritious food source. With my background in endocrinology, my brain jumped ahead thinking of the likely hormonal signals that could regulate the copepod dormancy. I thought that if such an important biological cycle was hormonally controlled, that disruption of the signals by environmental contaminants could have disastrous consequences. I thought it would be interesting and straightforward to study endocrine disruption in copepods. The next chance I got, I asked Mark how dormancy was regulated in copepods, and I was shocked to hear him answer “no one knows**.” At the core, this was a start of a collaboration between Mark and me that led to our first joint publication in 2008 (10 years ago already??!). It led to a major new research direction for me, and I think this broadening of my research focus was instrumental in my appointment to the permanent Scientific Staff at WHOI.
Did I know that either of these seminars would have such a big impact? Absolutely not. Will the next one I attend have a similar impact? Maybe not, but I’ll do my best to go into it with an open mind and to expect the unexpected.
* We never found any (!), but we learned a lot of interesting things, including identifying the first nuclear receptor from a coral.
** We still don’t know (!!), but we’ve learned a lot about physiological and molecular changes associated with dormancy and development in copepods.