An Interview with Winslow Briggs

Transcription

1 Annual Reviews Conversations Presents An Interview with Winslow Briggs Annual Reviews Conversations Annual Reviews Audio interviews are online at Copyright 2010 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved Sabeeha Merchant: Good afternoon, Winslow. Elaine and I are just delighted to be here in Palo Alto to talk to you and get some input from you about your scientific past and a little bit about your career. Winslow Briggs: Well, it s a pleasure to see a former colleague from Annual Reviews, and a present colleague from Annual Reviews and a former graduate student. I m afraid the former graduate student knows a little bit more about me than never mind. Elaine Tobin: I know what questions not to ask. Winslow Briggs: But it s a pleasure to be here. Sabeeha Merchant: I wanted to start by asking you whether when you started your research career, I guess maybe 50 or 60 years ago Winslow Briggs: I beg your pardon. Sabeeha Merchant: had you imagined that there might be so 1

2 many photoreceptors? Winslow Briggs: When I started my career, I had absolutely no interest in photoreceptors and didn t know anything about them. I knew that light caused auxin to move around, or it was supposed to according to one investigator, but no interest in that. Auxin, yeah, that was great. I wanted to learn about plant growth hormones, but light didn t come in until a little later on. Sabeeha Merchant: But at that point, when light did come in and you started to think about photoreceptors, were you thinking about one receptor or multiple receptors? How did it evolve? Winslow Briggs: This was actually in 1957 when a student in a class I was giving put his hand up in the back of the room and said, Why hasn t somebody done this experiment? And he described the experiment. He said, It seems to me that would resolve the controversy about what the growth hormone is doing. And I said, Gee, nobody has done that? We can do that. And I had a senior who wanted a project, so I gave it to him and good heavens, it worked. And we solved the problem, and that was the start because at that point, I thought I ve got to know what molecule it is that s picking up that light signal. And then, of course, it was just the blue-light receptor. It wasn t that there were, as we now know there are lots of them, but at that point everybody assumed that there was one. Sabeeha Merchant: But that wasn t the first receptor. The blue-light receptor wasn t the first one that was identified? Winslow Briggs: No, no. It was a red-light receptor that was identified in 1959, Warren Butler and Bill Siegelman and some very brilliant people, Sterling Hendricks, at Beltsville. Probably one of the greatest achievements by the U.S. Department of Agriculture s research labs there, and it actually kept you busy for a while. Elaine Tobin: Yes. And you did a sabbatical with them, didn t you? Winslow Briggs: I did a sabbatical with them, that s right. And I wrote a review on the growth response to blue light coming in from one side. And I hadn t finished it, and eventually, I did finish it during the first month on that sabbatical. And Sterling Hendricks kept complaining that I wasn t in the lab when I was supposed to be in the lab. And so I finally finished it, and I thought I better give it to this intellectual giant to read. And he took it, and I didn t see him for about a week. And then he came back and said, My, you re wordy. But then the next day, he apologized. He said, I suppose people are going to work their way through all these intricate little details and try to figure it all out. So anyhow, so that was my first experience with those guys, and they had just isolated the farred reversible pigment that they eventually named phytochrome. So I was able to get right in on some of the early attempts to purify it, so that got me interested in another photoreceptor, so that worked out very well. Sabeeha Merchant: So then you spent some time working on phytochrome and phytochrome signaling and, eventually, got into the molecular biology. Winslow Briggs: Well, because of people like Elaine, yes. She came with the chemistry major 2 Briggs

3 from Overland as I recall and didn t plan to be a plant biologist. Elaine Tobin: Well, I wasn t. Winslow Briggs: But you ve done pretty well. Sabeeha Merchant: So you learned all your plant biology from Winslow? Elaine Tobin: Yes, that s right. Winslow Briggs: None from anybody else. Elaine Tobin: Well, which brings me to the embarrassing remembrance of my oral exam when you asked me to name three plant families and describe them. Winslow Briggs: I did what? Elaine Tobin: That s exactly what I said. I said Winslow Briggs: Oh well. Elaine Tobin: Yes, we ll forget about that. Nonetheless Sabeeha Merchant: Can you do it now? Elaine Tobin: No. Winslow Briggs: You can t? Elaine Tobin: Anyway, nonetheless, I passed. Winslow Briggs: Yes, you did. Rather well as I recall. Sabeeha Merchant: Well, we all have things that we re not good at. Elaine Tobin: Ignorant, that s all. Sabeeha Merchant: Ignorant. Right, right. So then you moved back, I should say, to the bluelight receptor. Winslow Briggs: I moved back to the blue-light receptor when I first came out here to Carnegie and Stanford. Sabeeha Merchant: Came back to Carnegie, um-hum. Winslow Briggs: And went totally off the track. We looked at something we were sure was the blue-light receptor, and we studied it and looked at its biochemistry and so forth and so on. An Interview with Winslow Briggs 3

4 And after six or seven papers on it, which were very well received, we decided that it was a very interesting artifact. And that was that. And went back to other things until, well, one postdoc in another lab at Stanford, a man by the name of Peter Ray, had been doing some experiments with auxin. And the experiments were of the sort where you dump auxin on tissue samples and then you make membrane preparations, and then you test to see what proteins can get phosphorylated. And his hope was that he would solve the problem of how auxin worked because he would find new proteins that became phosphorylated and absolutely none of them did. There was no change that was induced by auxin. But he took one batch of his seedlings that he d grown in the dark, and he took them out into the light and let them sit there for a couple of hours. And then he made his stem sections and membrane preparations. And the sample from the dark had one protein that was really heavily, heavily phosphorylated. It must have had phosphates sticking out every 10 amino acids it was so black in the film. In the light, it was gone. Well, it turned out that Peter Ray was interested in the auxin side of things but didn t want to get involved with photoreceptor problems. So he sent this postdoc, Sean Gallagher, over to my lab to see whether I might be interested. And at that time, one graduate student had just come, was in Peter s lab on a rotation, and came over to do a rotation with me. So I asked Peter whether it would be okay if I let Tim Short, the graduate student, work on that project. And we rapidly found out that it was blue light. And then we did tons and tons of biochemistry on it without ever being able to isolate it and purify it. And that continued from 1988 all the way to 1996 or Sabeeha Merchant: I think I remember you showing me that autorad when I visited the Carnegie Winslow Briggs: That could be. You could see it from the end of the hall. You d hold up this thing, and there was a black line on one of them, and it was missing on the other. And the explanation was very simple, and that is when you turn the light on the plant, all the phosphates occupied their little serines, and then when you tried to put more on afterwards, they were already all occupied. So that was the clue just finding and then well then Sabeeha Merchant: And then ultimately the genetics. Winslow Briggs: Ultimately, molecular biology, obviously. In fact, we didn t succeed in purifying using conventional biochemistry. It just didn t work. And then a postdoc came, Mannie Liscum, came to the lab, and insisted that the thing to do was to hunt for mutants, and so, over my dead body, he brought an Arabidopsis into the lab, this plant lab rat, and we got our first mutants. And once we had the mutants, then it was only a matter of time before we ran down what the protein was. But it was long in coming. Sabeeha Merchant: During the past few decades, I m sure you ve noticed a change in the way science has been done. Today, we re asked to justify all of our work in terms of being useful to society or having practical applications. Whereas, at least my guess is, that when you started your career, you were able to pursue your science and your research out of curiosity. Yet, when you think about your most recent work on phototropins, one would not have, at that time, anticipated that some of your discoveries would have implications with respect to the function of pathogenic bacteria, for example. So do you want to comment on the value of basic research in plant biology? Winslow Briggs: I m a very strong supporter of basic research because I think it will take you on avenues that you just wouldn t get to if you were told to go after something or other. I know 4 Briggs

5 that we discovered this molecule and discovered that it had this one little domain that made a little cage that contained the flavin molecule, and that was what picked up the blue light and made some wonderful conformational changes. But then, these days, every couple of weeks, eight more bacterial genomes come out. People started looking and they found, by gosh, here is that same 100 amino acids. Sometimes as much as 50 percent identical in these bacterial proteins. And from then on, it was fortuitous that we had connections with people who worked on a nasty, pathogenic bacterium and that they were willing to do the experiment, which was to test for bacterial virulence in the absence of that protein, in the presence, in its presence but in the dark, and show that A it was necessary for the bacteria to be virulent, and B that if you put it in the light, virulence went up 10 fold. So the National Science Foundation was delighted because it s just this sort of thing they would like to argue justifies supporting basic research. Sabeeha Merchant: Absolutely, yes. Winslow Briggs: And I don t know that one would have gotten there well, I guess one would have eventually. Somebody would have picked this up, but it was a weird twist for things to move in. Sabeeha Merchant: That s sort of the definition of discovery. You can t discover something that you already know, so you can t target your discoveries by saying well, we should study X so we can discover Y because then it s not a discovery anymore. So this is, yeah. Winslow Briggs: But now having picked that one up, we know, for example, that that same protein is found in other animal pathogenic bacteria. We know that it s found in plant pathogens. We know that it s found in the most primitive bacteria in the Dead Sea, for example. And what this opens up is a whole field of molecular photobiology. Why do these bugs need a photoreceptor? With Listeria, is it the same story as it is with Brucella, which makes this nasty brucellosis in cows and ungulate fever in man? What about Listeria? That s a very, very poisonous, nasty bacteria. It s got a photosensor in it. Does that photosensor kick up its virulent just the way it does in Brucella? People ought to be doing these experiments. And yet nobody seems to pay much attention yet. I can t handle pathogens because I m not allowed to, but my goodness, somebody ought to be following up on some of the other ones. Another experiment, for example, with the brucellosis. There s an assay for Brucella virulence that involves not just a cell culture but involves live mice. And I m dying to have that assay done with the mice kept in the dark or kept in the light to see whether, in fact, that helps them fight it off. And my hunch is that it will. And I m having a very hard time getting they keep saying well, they re going to do the experiment, yeah, we ll do it. But now a year has gone by, and it still hasn t been done. So if you know anybody Sabeeha Merchant: It sounds like something we should try. Elaine Tobin: I don t know how to handle mice. Sabeeha Merchant: Well, we are in the medical school. Winslow Briggs: Yeah. But you can handle Listeria. An Interview with Winslow Briggs 5

6 Sabeeha Merchant: Yeah we can. Winslow Briggs: No, it will get done. Sabeeha Merchant: It ll get done. Winslow Briggs: But I mean, that is a good example of the way in which absolutely basic research can suddenly take a weird turn that turns out to be quite valuable. Something else that the National Science Foundation likes a lot, and that s what they call outreach. And outreach, I always thought that meant that you were communicating your science to the public and telling them what neat stuff you were doing and so forth. And it turns out that just the very fact that I occasionally give a public lecture about the after effects of a fire to the members of the public is the kind of thing they have in mind. So any kind of scientific communication to the public, that is clear and if you can make it exciting, so much the better, apparently they regard very highly. Sabeeha Merchant: So when I think about the photoreceptors and these pathogenic bacteria where maybe our a priori, one might not have expected them to have photoreceptors or for the photoreceptors to be important in their biology. Well, now in retrospect, one thinks that well, after all, all the organisms on this planet do depend on the sun. I mean, that is the one sort of constant with respect to life on earth. So in retrospect, one might imagine that photoreceptors are probably important to all forms of life, even though we may not have discovered some of them yet. Winslow Briggs: I m sure that there are over 100 bacterial species that we know have a protein that has that domain. In the six that have been tested, they ve all been shown to do the photochemistry. And in three cases, they ve been shown to have a physiological role. But that s all out of something like 13 or 14 percent of all bacteria that have been sequenced have turned up with that domain in one or another of their proteins. Sabeeha Merchant: So that might almost suggest that there are still photoreceptors that are yet to be discovered Winslow Briggs: Oh I think so Sabeeha Merchant: in the bacteria that don t have this particular kind, for example. Maybe they have something else. Winslow Briggs: Well, another one in the last five or six years, another one, which has a different kind of a domain, has shown up to be very common. So there s still a lot to do. Elaine Tobin: You ve mentioned briefly your work at the state park. And I d like to hear more about that. How you managed to fit in, which seems to me to be kind of a major project, in with all the other research that you re doing in the lab. Winslow Briggs: Well, that s because I m an idiot. 6 Briggs

7 Elaine Tobin: Simple answer. Winslow Briggs: Very simple. No, we had this park where we ve been volunteering for so many years, it s 87,000 acres. And some careless neighbor back in September of 2007, on a nice hot September day, started burning paper plates in an outdoor 50-gallon drum, and it was rusted out at the bottom. And the next thing she knew, the entire backside of one of the ridges was on fire, and it wound up burning 46,000 acres. Sabeeha Merchant: That s half the park. Winslow Briggs: Really, it was half the park. And the fire was almost all in the park. And so I thought gee, that would be a wonderful opportunity to look at recovery, vegetation recovery, in all of the different ecosystems. You know, the chaparral, there s grassland, there are hardwood forests, there are pine forests, riparian areas along the streams. So I wrote a proposal to the park superintendent and said I wanted to train some volunteers, and this is what we wanted to do. And he said, Go to it. So I managed to collect about 20 volunteers, all of whom had to go through radio training, all of whom had to get training in back country driving in 4 wheel drive. And obviously get training from me. And then we had an anonymous donation of $22,000.00, and that was to be used to make sure that everybody had a proper camera, they had a GPS instrument. So that s what started it. What that means is that we can tend to disappear because it takes a while to go out and check all those plots, photograph them, identify the stuff that s coming in, and generally record. Sabeeha Merchant: So you have two research labs, one at the Carnegie, and then the other one at the state park. Winslow Briggs: One of them is about 40,000 acres in the state park, but it s been fascinating. For example, I learned that there are some species where the seeds won t germinate at all unless there s been a fire. And they respond to something in smoke, and that compound now has been isolated. We know what it is. In fact, it s one of a family. You just burn any kind of wood. You can burn filter paper because it s a product of heating cellulose, pyrolysis is a product of cellulose. And it s a butanolide. You re the chemist, you d know that. And in any case, it s effective in inducing seed germination in parts per trillion. It doesn t take much, and it must be very stable because the fires in September, then the rains come, and in the spring, the seeds germinate. So it must still be around. And there are plants that aren t simply seen except right after a fire. You know that they re there because they show up after a fire. In this case, the last fire that went through there was in So that s what, how many years, 56 years that they just sat there waiting for some idiot to light a fire. Sabeeha Merchant: But it makes sense because they have less competition, so that s the reason they Winslow Briggs: That s right. And they showed up one species showed up in the hundreds of thousands and, of course, they re gone now. There were hundreds of thousands the first year, hundreds the second year, and essentially zero the third year. Sabeeha Merchant: But their seeds are there waiting for the next fire. An Interview with Winslow Briggs 7

8 Winslow Briggs: Seeds are there waiting. Well, in the meantime, we harvested a whole bunch. Well, it s worked out in a rather surprising way. One of the guys that s done some of the nicest work on the butanolide, he s in Australia. He s been in the lab where they did all this chemistry, and he s been doing very nice studies on plants. And he wants to come back to the States. He s an American citizen, and he wants to come back to the States so that he can apply for jobs. He s in a postdoc now, and job candidates in Australia don t get offers from people in the States. They know they can t afford to fly them back. So he wrote and said I had talked with him, and he said, Gee, would you have a space in your lab for me for a year? So I said, Sure! So now that fire project is going to move into the lab. He s got some very nice molecular biology, and he s really he s a super able guy. Sabeeha Merchant: So you can burn the filter paper in the lab and get these seeds to germinate in the lab? Winslow Briggs: Oh, yeah. What you can do is you can build yourself a little fire in the lab, take a dry filter paper and waft it back and forth in the smoke, stick it down once, and then put the seeds out. Bingo, they germinate. Take another piece of filter paper, keep it away from the smoke, zero. So yeah, it s very easy to do. And I have a colleague down at San Jose State in the chemistry department, and doggone it if he hasn t synthesized some. He s in on this project. So we have a good supply on hand. Sabeeha Merchant: Well, that will be nicer than lighting a fire in your lab. Winslow Briggs: Much nicer. Although you know Elaine Tobin: Oh, that s right. You survived a fire in that lab. Winslow Briggs: You know, there s a very well known chemical ecologist by the name of Ian Baldwin at Max Planck [in Jena], and he s done a lot of experiments in the high desert in Nevada. There s a species of tobacco, Nicotiana that apparently is a fire follower. Its seeds germinate only after a fire. And he discovered that you could go to your friendly corner barbeque store and buy a little bottle of something called liquid smoke and, of course, that is smoke that s been bubbled through water. And dilute it 1 to 300, and it works perfectly. So you don t have to worry about having either burning down the lab or else getting some karrikin from some source. You can do quite a lot with smoke, liquid smoke. Sabeeha Merchant: I m sure the safety inspector probably appreciates that. Winslow Briggs: That s right. When we first published a paper about the virulence in Brucella, it came out, and it got quite a bit of publicity because it was interesting that light would turn on virulence. So there were a whole bunch of news reports, including some that got to the Stanford Safety Office, and I got a frantic from the Stanford Safety Office saying, What are you doing with Brucella?!? Sabeeha Merchant: Do you have a license to work with this, right. 8 Briggs

9 Winslow Briggs: So I ed back and said, There, there. All we have is a little piece of DNA, and these bacteria are all safely done in Argentina, which is where they were. So that s been an interesting project to develop out of just being in the park. Sabeeha Merchant: I have a little bit of a digression here, but in reading your article, I noticed that I guess out of modesty, you didn t mention any of the awards that you ve won in your career. And I just wanted to ask you which of them has been sort of the most important to you or maybe you can tell us about the last one where you had an exciting trip to collect the award. Winslow Briggs: That s a little bit hard to say. Probably the election to the National Academy earlier on was the exciting one. That was just wonderful and totally unexpected. And I had been exchanging practical jokes with a guy by the name of Hans Kende, and I had actually pulled a fast one on him. He went to a postdoc in, or a sabbatical in Switzerland, and I was in Freiburg, Germany at the time. So one of my colleagues called him up, Rainer Hertel, and just handed me the phone. So I said, Hello, Professor Kende? And he said, Yes. This is Mr. So and So from the Guggenheim Foundation, and why don t we have your report? Well, there were great sputters at the other end. Sabeeha Merchant: So you both had Guggenheim fellowships for your sabbaticals? Winslow Briggs: Well, I d have to remember whether it was Guggenheim or something else that he had. But anyhow, about three months later, I got a call from the Frankfurt airport by somebody who wanted to know whether I had any knowledge of a person who was bringing me anything. Well, this went on for a bit, and ultimately, he said Well, we have in our custody a man named Cornelius Reid, which actually had done his degree with me, and he has three pounds of hashish that he says he s bringing to you. I said, What?! And there was this long silence, and they said, Win, this is Hans. Sabeeha Merchant: Gotcha. Winslow Briggs: Gotcha. And about a month later after that silly telephone call, the phone rang, and I wasn t home. But one of our daughters answered the phone, and it was Stacy French who had called up to tell me that I had been elected to the National Academy. So I got home from the lab in Freiburg, and she came out and said, What s the National Academy?, and I said, Well, it s the National Academy of Sciences. She said, Well, somebody that says he was Stacy French called up and said that you ve been elected to the National Academy, and I thought, Ah ha! Hans Kende strikes again! I remember that very vividly, and I had to wait for a couple of weeks before I got some kind of an official notice to realize that, in fact, it wasn t Hans Kende. No, the only one that was exciting was this last one, the Japan International Prize in biology, and that came as a complete surprise, too. And that was quite an event. We were flown over, Ann and I were flown over to Tokyo, and put up in a wonderful hotel. And then the ceremony was presided over by the Empreror and the Empress, and we before the ceremony, we had a private audience with the Prime Minister, the recently deposed Prime Minister, I might add. And we also had a private audience with the Emperor and the Empress. And that was you know, talk about being terrified. An Interview with Winslow Briggs 9

10 Elaine Tobin: What does one say? Winslow Briggs: Well, I had learned ahead of time that he was a biologist and interested in fish, and I had also learned that she was very musical, apparently a very good pianist and that he played the cello. So we had a little bit of conversation about that, and they both speak very good English. And so instead of the bowing, it was he put his hand out immediately for us to hold, making the goof that President Obama did. Then he bowed to the Empress, and the Empress s hand was out like this. Sabeeha Merchant: Right. Winslow Briggs: So that was fascinating. And then the ceremony, of course, there had to be a lot of very formal bowing. But then afterwards, they had a reception, and the most exciting part of it for me was that all three of our daughters and their husbands were there. We managed to find funds to bring them over. So we were all lined up in a row for a reception line, and the Emperor and the Empress went right down the line. They talked with us for a while, and then they went down, and they talked with each of the couples for five or ten minutes, and it was really quite touching. Sabeeha Merchant: How lovely. It is. Winslow Briggs: And so that was a pretty exciting occasion. Of course, it came with a big check, too. Sabeeha Merchant: Which doesn t hurt. Winslow Briggs: Which doesn t hurt. Sabeeha Merchant: It helps to pay for the family to go over probably. Winslow Briggs: That was definitely a real high point, on the shoulders of many over the years. Sabeeha Merchant: Of course, you ve probably been to Japan many times before. Winslow Briggs: Oh yeah, a lot of times, a lot of times. Well, yeah, in the plant photoreceptor field, Japan is very strong. They have a number of excellent labs. And even though a couple of the senior people had to retire, think Masaki Furuya, there are still some absolutely terrific people. So it was nice to be able to address that. I had to give an acceptance speech, and I was told that it could be no more than exactly five minutes. Things were programmed to the nearest 30 seconds, it was really quite amazing. So it was nice to be able to point out that it was a real thrill for me to have this field represented because Japan had such great strength in this field and that many of these colleagues were actually in the audience. So one could Sabeeha Merchant: Well, maybe they played a role in your selection in the sense my understanding is that the Japan prize is given in different subjects every so often. Winslow Briggs: That s right. The subjects change. I had gotten a nomination form ages before, 10 Briggs

11 and it was to be in sensory biology. So I thought, Yeah well, neurophysiology vision, smell, whatever, touch and tossed it away. It was the last thing I expected that plant-photoreceptors would be considered as sensory biology, but apparently somebody did. So that was exciting. Elaine Tobin: Maybe plants are respected more in Japan than they are in American science. Winslow Briggs: Well, I don t know, but the Japanese certainly retire their professors early, at least the plant biology ones that I know. Sixty-two out. Sabeeha Merchant: Well, that is one of the wonderful things here in the U.S. I mean, you still have an active lab, and you told me just a little while ago that you still work at the bench. Winslow Briggs: Yeah. A little bit, yeah. Even sometimes with karrikins, with these wonderful smoke compounds. Sabeeha Merchant: So obviously, you enjoy that. So do you think that this is something that s important for a career as a research scientist that one should enjoy working with one s hands or enjoy the bench? Winslow Briggs: If you have a small lab group, yes. But if you have a large lab group, you won t have time. You re going to spend your entire time getting funding for all those guys in the lab. But, no, I ve been very lucky because after I retired, we had light activated phosphorylation to this protein, but we didn t have the protein, and we didn t have the photoreceptor. And then I had some surgery, and I thought well this is the time to shut things down. But one more try, and then things broke. So we didn t actually get the photoreceptor until four years after I had retired as director. So that worked out, but not a lot of people can do that. Sabeeha Merchant: That s right. It was quite a privilege to be able to stay on and Winslow Briggs: A real privilege to be able to stay on and Sabeeha Merchant: As you mentioned grant funding, it reminds me of what I read in the prefatory chapter. You wrote that there were no advertisements for your first position, there were no advertisements in science, and it was a casual phone call from one professor to another that got you your first job at Stanford. And then you wrote about getting your first NSF grant. But the way it was written, it was sort of almost as well, it s automatic. You get a job, and then you get your grant funded. Well, whereas you well know, today, it s quite different. The typical Winslow Briggs: It s dramatically different. Sabeeha Merchant: The typical PhD student has to do one relatively long postdoc, perhaps sometimes even two, maybe apply for dozens of jobs, and then go through several interviews, perhaps submit half a dozen grant proposals before funding. So it s really dramatically different. On the other hand, young people today start with a million dollars in set up funds, whereas you probably had nothing or maybe one freezer or one incubator or something. Winslow Briggs: Oh, let me tell you about my lab at Stanford. In 1955, there was no hot water An Interview with Winslow Briggs 11

12 in the lab. There was no piped in distilled water or deionized water. And we had to walk miles down a hallway this way and then down another hallway this way in the basement. Sabeeha Merchant: To get the water. Winslow Briggs: To get the water. And then lug these carboys back. You saw some of that for at least one year. Now, it was a very primitive lab, and they just had big tables, and they weren t even reasonable lab benches. Sabeeha Merchant: So if you had to do it again, would you rather be doing it in today s climate with the stress of having to find a job, but on the other hand the million dollars of start-up, or were you happy doing it the way you did it? Winslow Briggs: Well, it was much easier then. I don t want to go through that again. No, the way I got that job was just outrageous. Really, as you say, no advertisement, no equal opportunity, none of that stuff. It was just professor at Stanford calling his old buddy at Harvard saying, Do you have anybody who is finishing up? It was as egregious as that. And then I went out, and they had a faculty meeting that rotated behind me. So when I went for my exit interview with the chairman, he offered me the job. Elaine Tobin: So amazing. Sabeeha Merchant: That is amazing. Winslow Briggs: Well, it isn t the only time that happened because another very well known Stanford professor is Paul Ehrlich, and Paul was flown out. He was at Kansas at the time, I think. He was flown out. He gave a seminar, and his usually brash seminar was Paul being Paul. And then he also spent the next day going around and talking to different faculty members. And apparently, also, he described this recently. There was a rotating faculty meeting, and he got to the chairman s office, and the chairman said, Well, Paul, we d like to have you join us. Just like that, so at least two that were done that way. Sabeeha Merchant: Well, it s certainly nicer for us that it s done differently today because perhaps we wouldn t have jobs today if it was still done that way. I mean, opportunities for people like us to have faculty positions. Winslow Briggs: That could well be the case. I remember we were considering graduate applications one year. It would have been in the 60s, in the, yeah would have been sometime around 1968 or We had 16 candidates, and we had 8 fellowships that we could award, so we had to decide which of the 16 to take. And one faculty member got up and said I move that we accept the eight men. It was eight men and eight women. Sabeeha Merchant: Had applied? Winslow Briggs: Had applied. Because the women will just get their degrees, and then they ll go off and get married and never be seen again. And they ll be lost to science, and we will have wasted our 12 Briggs

13 Sabeeha Merchant: There you are, Elaine. You were lost to science. Winslow Briggs: Fortunately, he didn t prevail, but it was appalling that that mentality still existed. Elaine Tobin: When I came, that was true in the biochemistry department. Winslow Briggs: It s still true in the biochemistry department, I m sure. Sabeeha Merchant: You think even today? Winslow Briggs: Oh, no, no. Elaine Tobin: This was in Winslow Briggs: I don t know about the present biochemistry department. Sabeeha Merchant: I would guess it wouldn t be that way today. Winslow Briggs: Well, no. And if you look at the composition of the biology department at Stanford, it s pretty evenly balanced, 50/50. I don t think they have a count, but Elaine Tobin: The world has definitely changed. Sabeeha Merchant: The world has changed. Winslow Briggs: The world has definitely changed, and it s long overdue. Sabeeha Merchant: Well, Elaine mentioned to me that despite at the time the policy of restricting female students in the program, Elaine said she never once felt different in your group, and she attributes that to you. Winslow Briggs: Well, it was a pretty sassy bunch. She just was joining it. Sabeeha Merchant: Do you want to comment on how it was being a student in Winslow s lab. Winslow Briggs: Be careful. Elaine Tobin: Well, he s sitting right here. No, I think the wonderful thing about being a student in your lab was that you were really interested in the science. You weren t a politician, a science politician, as far as I could tell. Winslow Briggs: God forbid. Elaine Tobin: Well, thank goodness, which made it a pleasure to work with you. And the fact that whatever I did, some of it was my own ideas that weren t so clever, but you took it seriously and An Interview with Winslow Briggs 13

14 gave me the chance to figure out that it wasn t so clever without saying, You stupid but I think the other thing was that you valued what I did in a way I could still remember. I guess I was TAing in your course, in plant physiology or whatever you were teaching to the Harvard undergraduates, and as part of the course, you talked about my experiments. And I still remember that. It was like a validation that oh yes, I was really a scientist. Sabeeha Merchant: That your experiments were important enough for Winslow to tell his students about it. Elaine Tobin: Yes. And that was something important to me that you never, because I was just a woman, let me feel like I was something less than your male students, and I always appreciated that. Winslow Briggs: Well, I m glad to hear that. Sabeeha Merchant: Well, I think that s also reflected in Winslow telling us earlier about the student in his class who made the suggestion about an experiment. And Winslow didn t sort of poo poo it or think, well, it s an undergraduate suggesting it. He gave it consideration and actually then acted on it. And I think that s certainly an important role of a mentor to encourage ideas in the students. Winslow Briggs: Well, that was a real piece of luck. Have the smart guy sitting in the back row. It s one of those experiments you think, Why didn t I think of that? It s so simple. You simply take a little piece of glass and put it between two pieces of tissue and see whether they still communicate or not. And if they don t, then one answer, if they do, there s another answer. Elaine Tobin: But it shows also your fascination with the science itself. Sabeeha Merchant: The curiosity and the design of the experiment. Winslow Briggs: Yeah, but I mean, I think anybody who is a successful scientist has to have a pretty strong element of that. Elaine Tobin: Yes. But you have it more than many people I ve known. Winslow Briggs: Well, I m lucky. I m lucky. Sabeeha Merchant: What advice would you give to a young person today who I guess is interested in research with respect to say what course work preparation one should have or what type of project to choose, or any other type of career advice? What can you think of? Winslow Briggs: Well, certainly, if you re going to go into biology, which I assume is what you re talking about, you need to take all of the basic chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, and a suitable number of specialty courses if you happen to be interested in animals or plants. I think more important, however, is what you do later. You ll do a thesis project, and lets say that s very successful, and you get three papers out of it. Then, the next thing to do is to go on a postdoc as you do these days, but go and do something entirely different. You can always come back, but 14 Briggs

15 do something entirely different. And then, as you re doing your research, if you see something off over here that really seems to be something we ought to look at, even if your grant doesn t say that you can work on it, do just a little bit of probing over there and find a way to That, that was one of the wonderful things about Carnegie. Once one got there, there were built in funds that you could use for things like that. And we took advantage of them. But be prepared to turn a corner that you don t expect to turn. And you did that? Elaine Tobin: Yes. Winslow Briggs: Rather spectacularly. Elaine Tobin: Yes. Well, but I think it was my ability to do that came from you really. Winslow Briggs: Thanks. That s not entirely true. Elaine Tobin: All right. Sabeeha Merchant: Well, so you mentioned something that s special about the Carnegie that is that you had resources available to indulge your curiosity, and that s because in a sense, the Carnegie invested in the people rather than in a project. So it s not sort of a contract job where you have to study ABC. Rather, we re going to let you indulge your curiosity and maybe something will come out of it. Winslow Briggs: Or you have to chase funds where the funding is in the area where the funding is. Sabeeha Merchant: That s right. Which is how it is today. Winslow Briggs: Unlike any university position that I know at a research university, Carnegie has enough of a budget so that each person gets a position. In other words, I have money of my own for a postdoc. That s what s going to support this guy that works on the smoke studies. I couldn t possibly put him on my NSF grant. The NSF wouldn t be very happy. But I can do that, and then I have an additional pot of money for supplies. The department is well well set up with equipment of the neatest kind. New confocal microscope with incredible resolution, all these things. And that makes a difference. That really means that you can turn these corners. It would be more difficult for you than it was for me. I mean, I could turn the corner from phytochrome to blue light just like that and spend two years with a graduate student working on the project and supporting it before we actually had a paper that would give us sufficient impact in the field that we might possibly get grant funds for it. And one sees that happening. One of our other colleagues who you know very well wanted to begin looking at sciana bacterial pigments two and a half years before he could get a grant because he wasn t in that field. And he would write wonderful proposals, and the reviewers would say he has had no experience in this field. Well, after two and a half years he did, and he s made a huge name for himself. Elaine Tobin: The Carnegie is a wonderful situation. An Interview with Winslow Briggs 15

16 Winslow Briggs: Carnegie can do that. Most universities can t. But even so, you ought to be able to bootleg. No, I had a grant from the National Science Foundation in 1957 to study auxin in ferns, and that s when this guy got up and raised his hand in the back. So I just wrote a letter to the National Science Foundation saying that this is a really interesting lead. It has nothing to do with my original proposal, but would it be all right to work on this. And the National Science Foundation wrote back immediately and said go for it. And I believe that s still true. If you stumble on something exciting, you can ask your program director, and they ll let you do it. I think young investigators ought to know that. And they thrive on it, and the NSF really likes that. Sabeeha Merchant: In 1957, it was before I was born. So you ve had funding for more years than I ve been alive. That seems amazing. Winslow Briggs: Early place to see. So you did some homework? Sabeeha Merchant: Well, I did read the chapter again. I had read it last year when you remember, you had sent it to me before you submitted it. Winslow Briggs: Yeah. I was afraid it might be too flip. Sabeeha Merchant: No, no, it wasn t. I really enjoyed it. I liked the first sentence, the man with the shotgun. It sort of sounds like a novel. It pulls you right in. Well, I do want to read about the man with the shotgun in your annual review about biology. So I thought that was a lovely opening sentence. Elaine Tobin: As much as I know about you, I didn t really know about your Minnesota background. Winslow Briggs: It was important. Sabeeha Merchant: The pictures, they re taken by a Briggs, who is Winslow Briggs: My father. Sabeeha Merchant: That was your father. Winslow Briggs: Yeah. He was a schoolmaster, and he got interested in well, he always had some interest in identifying plants and wildflowers and things like that. So after he retired, he had a Leica camera, and he decided that he would get a huge collection of slides of Minnesota wildflowers. So I used to go out with him, and that was one of those occasions. Sabeeha Merchant: So these were directly from one of those trips you took with your father? What about Briggs Hall at Talbert. Is that related to you? Winslow Briggs: Yeah. That s named after my grandfather. He was the Dean of the Faculty at Harvard and the first president at Radcliffe at the same time. So Briggs Hall is named after him. 16 Briggs

17 Sabeeha Merchant: Is that why you got all three degrees at Harvard because there was a family connection? Winslow Briggs: Well, when I was thinking about where I would go to college, we had visited Princeton for some reason, and I raised the issue with my father who was a Harvard graduate as to whether I might be interested in taking a look at Princeton. He said, Well, you can go anywhere you want for college, but I ll pay for it if you go to Harvard. Sabeeha Merchant: That would do it. Winslow Briggs: So that sort of did it. And then it seemed, well, as I had mentioned in that article, I was a music major until just the end. And then it was possible to continue in biology. Elaine Tobin: Do you ever regret giving up the piano professionally? Winslow Briggs: Well, I regret that I didn t have more talent. Elaine Tobin: I ve heard you play beautifully. Winslow Briggs: Yeah. But not at a professional level. Very few people make it in that business. Sabeeha Merchant: So there s more opportunities in science? Winslow Briggs: Yeah. More opportunities in science. Well, my sister has made it very well. She s a very fine pianist. Sabeeha Merchant: And she teaches? Winslow Briggs: Yeah. She teaches, teaches and performs. She s performed all over, pretty much all over New England with chamber groups and recitals and things like that. Elaine Tobin: How is it that you ended up or your father ended up in Minnesota? Winslow Briggs: Well, he was offered a head mastership at a school in Minnesota. So he took it. Sabeeha Merchant: So one follows the job, just like Winslow Briggs: He took it in 1918, and he retired in That s how long he was the head master. And the school had six or eight students when he went there, and by the time he left, it had I think 300. It was a private school. Sabeeha Merchant: Let me ask you about one other thing with your name attached to it. The Briggs Rule. Winslow Briggs: The what? An Interview with Winslow Briggs 17

18 Sabeeha Merchant: Briggs Rule. Winslow Briggs: Oh, the Briggs Rule. Sabeeha Merchant: Yes. Can you tell us about Briggs Rule? Winslow Briggs: The Briggs Rule is very important for anybody who is on a faculty that has committee meetings. Well, while I was at Harvard, I kept getting asked to be on this committee or that committee. So I finally decided the way to handle this is yes, I ll serve on the committee, but I won t stay at any one meeting longer than 50 minutes because that s the academic hour. So that at the end of 50 minutes, I m going to say, Briggs Rule and get up and leave. And I stuck to it, and by gosh, the meetings got more and more compact and more and more productive. And it really worked. Sabeeha Merchant: Maybe that s one of the secrets to your success is being able to not waste time, right? And that s why you can run two labs, one in the state park and one at the Carnegie. Winslow Briggs: Both of you know about how much time faculty meetings waste. In fact, there was a long argument at Stanford one time about whether one of the curators should, in fact, attend a faculty meeting. And this went on and on, and I hadn t established the Briggs Rule yet. But finally, Charlie Yanofsky, who is one of the most distinguished members of that faculty got up and said, I always thought it was a penalty to have to come to faculty meetings. Sabeeha Merchant: Rather than a privilege, right. Winslow Briggs: Needless to say, that ended the discussion. Sabeeha Merchant: This might be a good place to break and thank Winslow for his time. Winslow Briggs: Well, thank you both very much for putting up with this. Sabeeha Merchant: We look forward to the next one. Winslow Briggs: I m not going to write another prefatory. I m not going to write any more reviews ever. 18 Briggs

19 An Interview with Winslow Briggs 19