MagazineR50

Q & A

Andrew MurrayAndrew Murray is Professor ofMolecular and Cellular Biologyand Director of the Bauer Centrefor Genomics Research at HarvardUniversity. He grew up in Britainas an expatriate American,received his BA from CambridgeUniversity and then moved to theUS to do a PhD at Harvard beforespending 13 years at theUniversity of California, SanFrancisco. He has worked on thecell division cycle, with aparticular emphasis onchromosome segregation inmitosis and meiosis, and hasrecently begun experimentalstudies on evolution.

What turned you on to biologyin the first place?Embarrassingly, I don’t know. Asa child, I was a reader andtinkerer rather than a bugcollector. Because I grew up inEngland, I had to choose betweenthe sciences and the arts at 16,and did so with some difficulty. Ithen encountered anextraordinary chemistry teacher,David Powell, who quotedShakespeare while he explainedthe Schrodinger equation. Hisinfluence and some intrinsicattraction to the mysteries ofbiology convinced me that Iwanted to become a biochemist.

Do you have a favourite paper?Yes, Bruce Nicklas’ 1969 paper (J.Cell Biol. 43, 40-50) showing thatchromosomes could only bestably attached to the meioticspindle if they were undertension. It’s an example offraming a question clearly,collecting data, using them tomake the simplest possiblehypothesis, and then doing anelegant experiment to ‘prove’(apologies to Karl Popper) it. Tome, this paper is as beautiful as agreat painting.

What is the best advice you’vebeen given? As a brand newgraduate student, I was sent toask Arg Efstradiadis advice about

a lunatic scheme I had cooked upto clone genes. He said “This is avery clever idea, but it will never,ever work”. I ignored him andplunged into 6 months ofunrelentingly failed experiments.Now, with a better sense aboutwhat makes experiments feasible,I know he was absolutely right. Myadvice is: think independently,challenge dogma, but get, listento, and consider advice. Feel freeto ignore it, but be able to defendwhy you’re doing so.

If you knew what you know nowearlier on, would you stillpursue the same researchpath? My big mouth, magpie mindand unrelenting optimism wouldalways lead me to be involved intoo many things, run a lab that’stoo big, and work in too manyareas. I would like to be able tocompare this style with that of adifferent me, who would havebeen a lone scientist who did theirown experiments on a single topicwhose grasp I couldn’t escape. Ithink it sad that it’s much harderto pursue the monastic optionthan it used to be.

What has been your biggestmistake? Adhering too strictly tothe NIH’s holy grail of ‘hypothesisdriven research’. I’ve sentstudents off on some terriblepursuits of hypotheses thatseemed so cute they had to beright, whereas the most interestingthings I’ve found have been theresult of surprises or “I wonderif…” experiments.

What is your favouriteconference? A small one dealingwith a wide range of topics. I'mdisappointed that as the barriersbetween different biological fieldserode, these meetings areparadoxically dying and beingreplaced by more and morespecialized conferences.

Do you have a scientific hero?I wrote a piece for CurrentBiology on the subject a fewyears ago, and named three: LeeHartwell, Tim Hunt and BruceNicklas; Lee for the majesty of hismind, Tim for his generosity, andBruce for the elegance of hiswork.

Any views on the state ofscience publishing? I’m veryunhappy that papers are less andless accessible to people outsidea very narrow audience. The worstthing is the undefinedabbreviations which now litterpapers. For example, how manypeople understand this title,“Cooperation of GGAs and AP-1 inpackaging MPRs at the trans-Golgi network” (Science 297,1700-1703). This journal has gonefurther, by axing the Materials andMethods from their papers,meaning that only the tiny fractionof readers who download theSupplemental Materials can reallyjudge the paper.

What is your greatest ambition?To learn about evolution. In thelast four years, we’ve begun to doexperiments on evolution, both tosee how specific interesting traitssuch as sex, cross-talk andmulticellularity evolve, and also toask more general questions abouthow the different factors — sex,mutation rate, interactionsamongst mutations — control therate and trajectory of evolutionaryadaptation.

What do you think are the bigquestions to be answered nextin your field? Understanding howcells work. I find microbesespecially impressive, becausethey’re tiny, metabolically complexand they face wildly variableenvironments. How do theycoordinate all the different, andoften mutually incompatiblereactions they perform? How dothey manage to make the rightresponse to what are likely to bethousands of differentcombinations of stimuli thatpopulations encounter on timescales that are short enough thatadaptation must be physiologicalrather than evolutionary? I thinkprogress here will depend on twothings: picking a small number ofproblems to use as examples andinteractions between biologistsand others (I’m partial tophysicists).

Department of Molecular and CellularBiology, Harvard University, 16 DivinityAvenue , Cambridge, Massachusetts02138. USA. E-mail:amurray@mcb.harvard.edu