When we advocate open science, do we think about what scientists do? Alongside the theorising, we could all benefit from listening to scientists, to find out how they started in research, and their actual practice.
I recently interviewed Richard Jefferson (the full interview is available on YouTube), who created the world’s first transgenic crop, a version of the humble potato, no less. But Jefferson insisted that more significant than that innovation was his development of a technique, rather than a crop: the GUS reporter system for plants, a technique used in the development of the potato.
So fascinating was this interview, which I recommend to anyone, that I’ve listed some of the insights he mentioned from his research career.
How to get involved with research
Few science undergraduates get a chance to experience a working research environment. Jefferson, by contrast, was in a research lab within two weeks of starting his degree:
Talk about good luck. I started my undergraduate at University of California at Santa Barbara in the year that recombinant DNA was invented. And my first exposure was within a couple of weeks of starting as an undergraduate. There was the lab of a man named John Carbon, who just two weeks earlier had returned from his sabbatical with Paul Berg, a Nobel laureate shortly thereafter, for inventing recombinant DNA with colleagues at San Francisco and Stanford. And so there was I, a wet behind the ears undergraduate, entranced with biology and hearing about this harbinger of a revolution based on DNA and molecular biology. I was so excited about this that I engaged with John Carbon, and he did something he’d never done: he brought an 18-year-old undergrad into his laboratory to learn the craft … It was an incredibly exciting time. And that pretty much, well, cast the die for me. I was in the lab, washing dishes, cleaning up, pouring petri dishes, and also getting to do some of my own research as an 18-year-old. It was incredible.
The methodology of study
Jefferson recalls while studying for his PhD:
I learned how to think about what the problem space is, not in terms of what can I ask, but rather the opposite: What can’t we ask? In other words, what is hard? And it’s usually not hard because it’s intellectually hard. It’s hard because we don’t have the tools.
Why develop processes and tools for researchers?
It’s incredibly easy to ask and answer questions if the tool lets you do so. But if you lack that tool, you’re constrained in the sorts of things you can ask, the sorts of problems you can solve. The idea of figuring things out didn’t excite me in science. Almost all scientists love to figure things out. I like to figure out how to figure them out. So from that point of view, developing a methodology is extraordinarily exciting.
Communicating a new idea
it’s one thing to create a methodology; you still have to get people using it. At this time, there was no internet, so Jefferson had to use his own resources:
With a tool, if you don’t share it, nobody knows you’ve done it. So I used my NIH funding to buy about thousand bubble wrap mailing bags and I wrote a 40 or 50 page user’s manual in great detail, the DNA sequences, everything else, and put about 10 or 20 tubes of DNA of different samples of the new compounds I made to measure this stuff and the techniques. I made, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds, maybe even a thousand of these things. It wasn’t expensive. I sent it out to everybody … and this is before I published it for sure. And certainly before I’d even patented it: I wanted to see small local businesses built using science and biotechnology to improve the lot of local communities, farmers and business people.
Open Science in the 1970s?
This might have been the birth of open science in its modern form, sending everything out long before it was published with full disclosure of all the DNA sequences. Back then, contrary perhaps to the thoughts of some of the open science advocates, science wasn’t broken. It was incredibly communicative. We would be on the phone all the time with the other competing labs who were our colleagues … It’s an great feeling to see as a new technology, a new technique develops within days, weeks, months through the telephone. From my perspective, it isn’t open if it isn’t open for others, if it isn’t open for outcomes.
Subsequently, the use of this new GUS technique to create transgenic crops led inevitably to commercial development. Later, Jefferson would found
The Lens (1999), with the goal of making patent literature more accessible; an new career, outside the lab. But that is another story.
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