I learned early - in primary school in Adelaide - that it was good strategy to substitute "architect" for "air hostess" or "nurse" (the top choices for girls) for every request for information on my future career. Once I learned to spell "architect" correctly, this impressed teachers no end, and I kept it up for several years, until I felt I should change it to "meteorologist" in deference to topping the state in geography. Actually I think I would have been a very happy meteorologist or architect (in fact, thirty years later I got a huge buzz out of designing our house in Eltham). I never did particularly well in science - the only other prizes I ever got were in art and creative writing - and what made me eventually substitute "geneticist" for "meteorologist" was a class in my final year biology in which the marvels of budgerigar breeding were presented. This totally changed my view of biology, which I had hated because there was so much stuff to learn and no grand rules to hang it together. I loved the order Mendel's rules imposed. If only I'd known about evolution - the grand rule that makes sense of all life's variety!
In any case, I had no serious designs on a career of any sort, being far more interested in teenage stuff - balls and tennis parties in those days. I went to Uni because I assumed everyone did. Motivated by sheer terror next year at Adelaide Uni, I worked like a demon and managed straight distinctions. Way overkill, I decided - I wouldn't make that mistake again (indeed, I never managed another clean sweep). Deans and advisers began to interest themselves in my career.
At that point, and very grudgingly, I spent a semester at the University of California at Berkeley where my parents were on sabbatical, and discovered many sorts of genetics besides budgies, as well as something called physicochemical biology (now cell biology), taught by the fabulous Daniel Mazia. So when deans and advisers quizzed me next, I nominated this mouthful of a subject and was justly sentenced for my presumption by a two-years of hard labour at chemistry. I solved the problems of inevitable culture clashes between chemistry and genetics by spending most of my time doing neither. Motivated mostly by boredom and the wish to meet interesting men, I was elected to the SRC, so spent a great deal of debating the heady issues of the day with would-be lawyers and politicians over cappuccino
What motivated me to do honours (in Genetics and Physical Chemistry) was largely the terrifying prospect of teaching high school. The roll of the academic dice pointed me to a project based on chromosomes. My supervisor-to-be suggested looking at a newly discovered phenomenon called "puffing" in the giant chromosomes of the larvae of some insects (gall midges were best). I might have spent my entire life working on RNA transcription and gene regulation if it had not been for my visit to the gall midge expert Melbourne Uni. Dressed in a chic little suit with matching accessories, I made my way to Melbourne and timidly approached the midge expert. He said brightly that I was in luck - he was going on a field trip that very day - to the Werribee Sewerage Farm, which is where Chironomus bred. I bravely donned thigh waders to help net the wrigglers from the ponds. Back in the lab, we sorted the wrigglers out from disgusting little floaty bits and pieces in large white trays. The end of my interest in gall midges in general and puffing in articular came when I managed to up-end one of the trays over my slimline skirt.
Back to Adelaide and an
alternative project looking at the X chromosome in kangaroos to see
whether, like the human X, one partner became inactivated in females. (I
still work on X inactivation in marsupials, amongst other things). My
career as a cytogeneticist began disastrously. On day one, I played
theatre nurse to my two supervisors as they chased kangaroos around the
yard, finally catching one who would do anything for liquorice allsorts.
Back in the lab, I took copious notes as a technician showed me how to
process the precious blood - settle out the red cells, take off the clear
layer and spin. She carefully poured off the supernatant into another
tube, and left the empty centrifuge tube lying on the sink. While she
slipped out for a few minutes, I helpfully washed the discarded tube. On
her return she noted it gleaming in the draining rack and nearly fainted.
It was some minutes before I realised I had disposed of the precious
lymphocytes, and many years before I lived it down.
Nevertheless, I took to culturing cells, making chromosome preparations and performing the exotic new autoradiography. I particularly loved gathering data - even counting silver grains was fun when you were watching patterns forming. I emerged at the end of the year with a First and a CSIRO scholarship. This was a bit embarrassing, since I had never even contemplated doing a higher degree, though I had agreed to stay on and finish my experiments, which were quite exciting (yes, kangaroos also inactivate on X in females). Not that I had any better idea, having not found a male who would look after me for the rest of my life, and having no idea about what jobs I could do. The die was cast at a department Christmas party, when my supervisor propositioned me about staying in Adelaide to do a PhD. In panic, I said the first thing that came into my head, which was "I thought I'd go to Berkeley and work with Dan Mazia". Having blurted this out, I had to follow through or dodge weekly enquiries from my boss. It was a little like writing to God. I wrote something like "Dear Dr Mazia, I am Jenny Nobody from Australia. I loved your course and I'd like to come and do a PhD with you …" To my infinite surprise, I received the warmest letter from him, explaining how to apply and advising me to enrol in the newly formed Department of Molecular Biology. We'd work out some way I could join his lab once I was in Berkeley.
I'd never heard of molecular biology, but it sounded tailor made to my weird genetics-chemistry background. My first semester at Berkeley was a blur of courses in bacterial and virus genetics and falling in love with exotic men (a hazard of living at International House). As summer approached, I had to line up a supervisor for summer research projects. Time to approach Mazia. I nervously walked down the hill to the Life Sciences Building, a hulking four storey square with a central courtyard. Mazia's office, room number 1038 I think, must be on the bottom floor - I'd walk around the square until I found it. I walked slowly around the long, dark, quiet corridors, coming upon it on the last leg. The light sone through the glass-panelled door, but I hurried past - I'd do another lap while I thought of what to say. But my courage failed as I approached his office on my second lap, so round I went again. My heart beating wildly on the third lap, I made myself stop, knock. To my secret relief, there was no response, so I walked quickly away, almost bolting around the corner to escape - and ran right into the great god himself, who was fumbling with a packet of cigarettes he had just bought from the machine. "I just gave up smoking", he explained guiltily, as he sat me down at his microscope to see if I could find sea urchin chromosomes. "I do see some little dots", I said doubtfully. "Are they chromosomes? They're not at all like kangaroo chromosomes". I loved Mazia from that moment. I didn't know how much he loved me until he was dead thirty years later.
I accidentally acquired a second wonderful supervisor, again in my hour of greatest need, when I was preparing for the fiendish oral examination, a day long exercise in sadism at which you could be asked absolutely anything. My attempts to come up with a viable research proposition based on the newly discovered cell fusion in sea urchin cells had met with derision from my Molecular Biology chairman (not the helpful nurturing sort), so in desperation I returned to the thing I knew most about - X inactivation. Proposing an experiment with mouse cells (that I actually did some 15 years later), I sought help from Morgan Harris the guru of cell culture. So I ended up doing my research on mammal, rather than sea urchin cells in his idiosyncratic lab (converted shark tanks in the courtyard of LSB). It was a happy, if disturbed, few years at Berkeley, hard to concentrate through all the personal explorations and crises (ending happily in marriage) and community unrest (daily demonstrations, helicopters spreading MACE, National Guard, bomb threats).
I had to be pretty careful
not to get arrested myself, since as a Fulbright Fellow I lived at the US
Government's
pleasure on an exchange visitor visa. A crisis loomed when it seemed that
my visa might not get renewed. I confessed my worries to my sister, who
was a tutor at the new La Trobe University in Melbourne (which I would not
have otherwise heard about). She happened to mention this to an old
Adelaide colleague at La Trobe, who sent me a lectureship ad - the upshot
was that I spent 29 years in the Genetics Department at La Trobe. There's
no motivation like having 6 months to take up a job. After three years of
rather aimlessly trying this and that, I did practically all my
experiments in the next 5 months and wrote the first draft of my thesis in
three days flat, and drafts of two papers in a week.
Back in Australia, with a job and a baby on the way, you'd think that ambition might finally kick in. Not at all, although philosophically I came to realise how important to my being science was. We lived in a commune for some years which was instrumental in making me think for the first time about what it is to be a scientist. My fellow communards (teachers, psychologists, social workers) challenged me at every turn. Science was boring, science was counting things, science was arcane, meaningless. I only had to suggest ways of preventing the milk from boiling over to be accused of being a "cold-hearted scientist". I had always thought it was just commonsense. It was good training to have to defend what I did and how exciting it was gathering data and wondering what it meant.
But I was far from committed to the reality of science. I enjoyed lecturing, I loved pottering endlessly around my new lab, humming a little tune at the microscope, collecting reams of data without a very clear idea of what I would do with it. I thought I could be content to potter around with a microscope and a few flasks of cells forever.
My daughter's birth changed all that. There was no maternity leave at that time - women were expected to resign, perhaps to come back reincarnated as a part-time demonstrator. I hated demonstrating and anyway I was the sole breadwinner for four years while my husband studied for a career change. So I began 15 years of frantic juggling of childcare, feeding, kinder, lecturing, lab work - you know what that's like. I did insane things - like forgetting my baby was in the back seat until I locked the car at La Trobe, or, conversely, forgetting the samples I had slaved over all day and loaded them in the car in dry ice to take them to the airport.
But the competing claims on my time and energy had two very beneficial effects. Firstly it meant that I dropped from view after 5pm when our child minder left. No more beery 5pm discussions, no more corridor gossip. For the next 12 years I had no part in departmental politics - in fact I was blissfully ignorant of power struggles - so I survived for more than a decade without even fighting with the professor. This probably saved me from an early death or departure, as my colleagues, one by one, disappeared in a cloud of invective.
Secondly, there was no time to drift pleasantly around my lab. I had to focus, decide what I really wanted to research, plan what to do, and just do it. I'd returned to Australia with lazy thoughts of continuing my Berkeley research into control of cell growth and DNA synthesis. Now a new direction presented itself when my Adelaide colleague suggested I use my expertise in cell fusion to map genes that he worked on in kangaroos. Me? Map genes in kangaroos?? "I'm not going to be one of those scientist who end up working on the local fauna", I declared rudely. But just to be obliging I did a few fusions, eventually mapped a gene on the X - and by that time I was hooked. Marsupials were a goldmine of new information. It was both an Australian niche and of fundamental interest to the international human gene mapping community. What could be better? I am still mapping - and sequencing - kangaroo genes.
I didn't start taking my work - or myself - seriously for another several years. It took a sabbatical in the fearsomely competitive atmosphere of UC San Francisco, then a major discovery about DNA methylation from a hunch and about three weeks' lab work, to make me realise that I could actually contribute something unique and interesting. I was amazed to be invited to an international meeting - well, if I could get myself to Bombay, that is. $2000 seemed like a fortune beside our new mortgage and unanticipated school fees, and I agonized over the decision.
That meeting marked my timid entrée onto the international stage. Over the next twenty years, the JennyTech Lab road show would keep me in touch with comparative genetics internationally - as well as giving me an opportunity to blow a little trumpet for my Australian group. I quickly discovered that I made the deepest impact with the lightest touch. My work invoked "weird Australian mammals" whether I liked it or not, so I had to learn to like it and capitalize on it. To begin with I was put out when the audience laughed when I said "kangaroo", swooned if I mentioned "koala" or "platypus" and fell off their chairs if I mentioned "wombat" or "wallaroo" But I swallowed my pride and added lots of cute cuddly slides to my repertoire and soon developed a reputation as something of a comic turn. A light hearted end to many a dull conference.
This reputation was
enhanced when I unexpectedly became a ball-breaking feminist Y chromosome
knocker. I'd made my reputation looking at the evolution of the X
chromosome and had little interest (scientific, anyway) in the Y
chromosome. Then one night, I received a phone call from Boston from the
man who claimed to have isolated the long-sought testis-determining
factor, the gene that makes you male. It should be on the kangaroo Y
chromosome, he said, would I check it out? It took my students only a week
to discover that it was not on the kangaroo Y - it had to be the wrong
gene. The ensuing furore put our work on the cover of Nature and my group
on the (genetic) map. My student who did this work went on to isolate the
right gene in London, and my group continued to look at the surprising
things evolution tells us about this gene and how it works. New staff and
students in my lab looked at other genes on the Y, each of which tells a
sorry tale of decline and degradation of the Y chromosome, and led to my
now notorious
prediction that the Y will soon disappear.
Meanwhile, back at La Trobe, I had reluctantly applied for the Chair of my perpetually and boringly warring department. My children were teenagers now so I had no excuse for dodging a leadership role, however odious. The fact that I didn't get the position didn't bother me as much as it did my supporters, and there was an enquiry into possible discrimination. Although the investigation could find no infringement of due process, it was a shock to ponder, for the first time in my entire career, whether being a woman was such a great idea after all. However, the appointments committee that denied me the position did me the hugest favour, although I might not have appreciated it at the time. They were undoubtedly responsible for my continued sanity, not to mention burgeoning success with grants, high profile papers, new theories, and ultimate election to the Australian Academy of Sciences.
The biggest challenge to the fruition of my career (not to mention the continuation of me) was a cerebral haemorrhage ten years ago. It came out of the blue. Within half an hour of returning home from a heady road show in the eastern US, I was stumbling, falling, seeing double and throwing up. Neurosurgery saved my life, but left me a mess for 18 months. I had lost all my grants, which meant that I lost most of the trained people in my lab. This was the end, I thought, suddenly realising how much of me was my work. I couldn't read or walk. But I could touch type, even though my hands were so weak I typed lots of quadruple lllll and aaaa that had to be expunged. I had nothing else to do but think and plan, so I typed five grants. Uninterrupted thought is very effective - I got them all.
The most recent phase of my career - a belated blast-off - occurred when I got elected to the Australian Academy of Science a few years ago. This was an honour that delighted me but didn't portend any kind of change to anything I did or could do. How wrong I was. Overnight, the experiments I did, the thoughts I thought, the ideas I had, the words I wrote - all apparently increased in quality and persuasiveness by at least a factor of ten. It was scary to go in one jump from struggling middle-aged scientist to National Treasure (truly - that was how I was described in a reference recently!). I kept thinking of Shaw's words from Pygmalion (echoed in "My Fair Lady") "It's not what you are but how you're treated that makes you a lady". Cynical, but what could I do but embrace new opportunities - act the tough negotiator when headhunted to a position at ANU, act (with a straight face) as the "Queen of Genetics" at the international meeting.
It would be easy to get carried away - if it weren't for the rough realities of running a lab, of experiments that often don't work and students that need encouraging, of applying endlessly for grants and getting papers mauled or rejected. Certainly keeps you humble. Keeps you in touch with the fumble-fingered midge-catcher, the incompetent neophyte cytologist, the timid Jenny Nobody of Adelaide and the frenzied working mother forgetting the baby and/or the samples. And keeps you mindful of just how accidental the unfolding of a career really is.