Welcome
by Neil Caudle
Left: On the cover of our print issue, Oliver Smithies, in his early twenties on a motorcycle that he continually tinkered with. At the time of this photo, he was a university student at Oxford. Photo courtesy of Oliver Smithies.
One evening last year, Oliver Smithies stood in front of a crowd of retirees, students, and various other admirers who had gathered to hear him speak. He did not boot up a PowerPoint presentation. He did not lecture. He did not attempt to wow us with his wizardry. Instead he told us a story. Occasionally, to illustrate a point, he stepped to the whiteboard and scratched out a diagram with colored markers, but he is so color-blind that the colors were meaningless to him.
He had brought along a stack of his laboratory notebooks — worn, rumpled journals packed full of his script. Modestly, he led us back in time, confessed his wrong turns and misguided assumptions, and then he read aloud the record of each moment when a mountain of hard work cracked open and revealed to him the jewel of an idea. These were the ideas that would eventually earn him a Nobel Prize. But on that evening last year, they were nuggets of spine-tingling drama in a rich and fascinating tale. And even though he was speaking about some of the most sophisticated problems in genetics, his audience understood every word. He charmed us, he enlightened us, and no one who heard him that evening will ever forget his story or the joy he had found in his work.
When Mark Derewicz was writing the cover story for this issue, he contacted some of the former students and postdoctoral fellows who had worked in Smithies’ lab and asked them what they’d learned there. Josh Knowles, now a fellow at Stanford, sent Mark a list of lessons from his mentor. They included:
- Find something you love to do enough that you are willing to sacrifice perfectly good Saturdays for it once in a while.
- When giving a talk or writing a paper, tell a story.
- When telling a story, work as hard as possible to explain complicated things in a simple way.
Noted, Dr. Smithies.
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