LAUSR

I often tell people that if I didn’t have to work for a living, I would still be doing what I’m doing. It is an unbelievable privilege to be an academic scientist, paid to work on your passion, to follow up on your curiosity, to inspire and be inspired by generations of graduate students and post-docs that pass through your lab. So how did I end up being a scientist, doing what I love for a living? I grew up in Singapore in the 1970s and early 1980s. I was educated in a school system that encouraged the rote memorization of facts. Science, as it was taught in my high school, didn’t allow room for questions that might lead to independent thinking. Facts had to be learned only well enough to pass examinations. If one did well in science, one went to medical school. One only saw scientists in movies, never in real life. When I was 17, I went off to college in America, and my eyes were opened. I remember writing in wonder to my friends back home to tell them about a time in freshman chemistry class when one student asked a question to which the professor replied, “I’m still working on that”. This is what I wanted to do! I want to be part of a profession that generated knowledge with which to explain things better. But my path to becoming a professional scientist and a virologist is best described as circuitous. During college, I worked in an exobiology lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center studying lipid biosynthesis in certain cyanobacteria species. I was fascinated that we could gain insights into Earth’s ancient atmosphere by studying “fossilized” metabolic pathways that could be reactivated only in the absence of oxygen. I was amazed we could tease out secrets that had been hidden for more than a billion years. I wanted to be a member of a profession capable of such elegant detective work. I thought being a physician scientist offered me a way to satisfy my love for science and medicine. Unfortunately, federally funded MD/PhD programs were not open to foreign students, so I went to the only medical school (Yale) that required an original thesis for graduation. I ended up taking an extra year off to do research, working on the molecular cell biology of small nucleolar ribonucleoproteins, which only fortified my desire to become a scientist. After medical school, I headed off for a research residency at the University of Pennsylvania, where I did my postdoctoral research with Bob Doms. The coreceptors for HIV entry had just been discovered when I joined Bob’s lab. For a while, it seemed like coreceptor-mediated entry had an explanatory role in almost every aspect of HIV pathogenesis. Doing science became addictive. Figuring out how the virus evolved to use different coreceptors was endlessly fascinating.