When Dr. Tom Roberts ’70 received an honorary degree at Wabash in 2003, President Andy Ford said, “Your revealing work with kinases and signal transduction may very well be an answer to prayers of people the world over. Cancer, you have predicted, will be reduced to the status of an annoying illness, easily controlled with medicine.”
Ten years later, the drug Gleevec—a product of research done in Roberts’ laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute—has made chronic myeloid leukemia manageable with a pill per day. But other cancers
have proven a more complex and tenacious target.
Roberts returned to campus last spring to explain the scientific and financial challenges facing researchers who design the “smart drugs” that target cancers on a molecular level. Later he met with biology and chemistry majors to explain in detail how the drugs work.
Between those talks and on the day his first grandson was born in Boston, Roberts sat down with WM
in the Haenisch Reading Room to discuss his calling, the funding obstacles facing cancer research, and what he considers one of the most important gifts a teacher can give a young scientist.
An excerpt from that interview:
WM: In your talk today, you called yourself a “lab rat.”
Roberts: I still go into the lab seven days a week. And I actually spent a lot of time in labs here. I think students at Wabash now do much more independent research here as undergrads.
Yes—both with faculty on campus and through
off-campus internships.
It’s pretty important for students to do a number of experiments that fail before they go to graduate school, and you get that in independent research.
The problem with the experiments associated with a lab course is that they tend to work. At least, if you don’t screw up, they work. That’s not the case in real science.
Having grown up on a farm, I tell people that science is like farming. Any time you’re trying to get your living from nature, you have to put up with the fact that nature doesn’t always want you to win. Both scientists and farmers know this: You don’t control nature; you just work with it.
We get kids who come to graduate school who have never had anything fail. They’re extraordinarily smart, and they think everything is within their power. It’s very frustrating to have the experiment fail for the tenth time and have to say, “Maybe we need to move on.” That’s one of the most important things people learn in graduate school: when to give up on an experiment.
I used to give talks to the parents of PhD students when they would come to graduation. I’d say, “Your kids have been doing something where the failure rate is probably 90 percent in terms of the number of experiments that actually work.” Think about that. Scientists fail 9 times out of 10. It’s psychologically challenging.
So what do you consider your vocation? Lab rat? Scientist? Is it a career or a calling?
I wanted to be a scientist before I knew what science was. That’s peculiar, but I think it’s actually true. That’s the reason people used to get into science. It was more of a calling than a career.
Starting in about 1975, recombinant DNA came along and that actually created not only an incredible new way to do life sciences, but a whole new industry, and a career. You had smart people showing up in the lab saying, “I could have been a lawyer or a doctor, but I like the dress code here better. I like to wear jeans.”
During the expansion phase, which lasted decades, it’s been a career. Right now, job prospects for budding young scientists aren’t as good as they once were; it’s beginning to look more like a calling again. Certainly being an academic scientist is, at the moment, a calling.
During the time I’ve been in science, getting money from the government to take up this challenge has been difficult, but not impossible. But only about seven percent of grants are paid in cancer research right now. So 93 percent of the grants fail.
So somebody who’s been to college and graduate school, they’ve done four or five years as a post?doc, they now have a lab—they really know what they’re doing—yet 93 times out of 100 they fail to get money to do what was going to be hard to do anyway.
This becomes, at best, a calling. At worst, it’s an IQ test where the smart answer is to quit. This would be terrible for this country, but in my opinion, that’s where we’re heading. The smartest people won’t want to be scientists.
They’ll go to Wall Street?
That’s already happening. Certainly at Harvard, everybody wants to be an investment banker. Though 2007 and 2008 slowed things down a little bit.
So, your calling: lab rat or scientist?
When I came to Wabash, I wanted to be a scientist; I wanted to find out new things. Working at a cancer institute and seeing all the kiddies with no hair, adults, too, at this point my emphasis is more practical. I really would like to help cure cancer.
More toward healing?
This tends to happen to scientists. They start out just wanting to find out stuff. Then, as you get older, you think, “Gee, I’d like to be relevant.” Certainly, hanging out in a cancer institute, you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t respond to the problems of the patients.
You’re a father…
And a grandfather. My daughter-in-law went to the hospital at 2 a.m. this morning.
So, does this change the way you see life at all?
That’s a very good question. Probably not.
We threw a big party for my mother when she turned 90, and she came up to me and said, “Really nice party, son, but I don’t really feel like I’m 90. I don’t feel old.”
That’s the funny thing about coming back to Wabash. Hell, I’m 65, but I don’t actually feel old. I don’t feel that far separated from the college in time, although I clearly am.
Should I be growing up? Yeah, probably. But maybe people in general—and maybe scientists a little bit in particular—are just overgrown kids.