every day. I have been incredibly happy the entire time; I can't believe this is my life. - As told to Lynne Lederman, a freelance medical writer in Mamaroneck, NY.
Scientists
Playing the Game with Nature Bonnie L. Bassler, Ph.D.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
If anyone told me I’d be working on glow-in-the-dark bacteria as an adult, I’d have said they were crazy. I wanted to be a veterinarian and signed up for biology classes at the University of California at Davis, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. Then I signed up for biochemistry. Instead of memorizing the bones and muscles, biochemistry class was filled with puzzles about figuring out how biological pathways and enzymes worked, and I fell in love with it. In graduate school at Johns Hopkins, I was working on chemotaxis in marine vibrios, ancient bacteria that are struggling because the ocean is a nutrient desert, so vibrios are not fat and happy like the E. coli in your gut. My advisor had a Navy grant, and I went to a meeting in Baltimore for PIs with similar grants. There, Mike Silverman, a shy scientist from California, gave the only talk he’d given in 10 years, on what we now call quorum sensing, how luminescent bacteria communicate with one another and act in groups by making and exchanging chemical signals. My reaction was, “Get out of here. They can’t do that. They’re bacteria.” Mike said to detect mutants in communication, all you have to do is turn the lights off and screen for mutant bacteria that are light when they shouldn’t be or are dark when they should be bright. What could be easier? I didn’t know any genetics back then, but I thought, surely I can do that. I literally ran up to him after the seminar and said, “You have to let me be your postdoc,” and he did. The 4 years I spent in Mike’s lab were a utopian experience. Some people are never lucky enough to have a real mentor, but Mike was the most generous and creative person in the world and taught me everything about being a good scientist. I was so lucky to stumble on him. Having a good mentor makes all the difference. Then I came to Princeton and continued working on quorum sensing. Back then, we didn’t understand that all bacteria probably communicate, that they know self from other, that they can integrate multiple signals, and that they are excellent models for the development of multicelVol. 42 ı No. 2 ı 2007
lularity. We always knew that what we were studying was bigger than the bioluminescence we were using as the readout for chemical communication, but we never imagined how broadly it would be spread in the bacterial world or that we’d be making anti-quorum sensing molecules or thinking about new treatments for bacterial diseases. Nature is trying to keep secrets from me, and my job is to find them out, to play the game against nature, and it’s fun and challenging. In Mike’s lab, I had fun every single day, and I have not stopped. My lab is a laughing, happygo-lucky, loud, joke-playing place. But believe me, we do work. Thinking that I am working at something bigger than glow-in-the-dark-bacteria grounds me. We are trying to understand how information gets in from the outside and how organisms manage multiple, simultaneous pieces of sensory information and correctly behave in response to these inputs. We’re never actually doing an experiment to answer those huge questions, but we are always picking at the edges of them. I’m interested in how multicellularity developed, how organisms know self from other, and how we interpret a complicated world and integrate information with high fidelity. It’s faster and simpler to do this in bacteria than in eukaryotes, and working on bacteria lets me think about those questions at a level my brain can handle, perhaps half a dozen signals, not the multitude that eukaryotes likely encounter. These bacteria have turned out to be a model for chemical signaling in higher organisms. If we could interfere with that signaling, we could have new antibiotics. I like the idea that we’re going to help people. Doing something like that is probably a decade or more away, but nonetheless it’s amazing how far quorum sensing studies have come compared to what was considered quirky, fringe science when Mike and I were working together. The beauty and the curse of science is that it can be 24 hours a day 7 days a week if you let it. I teach a daily aerobics class, and my husband and I ballroom dance, go to the theater, hike, canoe, and cook together. I didn’t have those hobbies when I was in graduate school, but there comes a time when you can do other things and have a more balanced life. I still come running in to lab every day. I have been incredibly happy the entire time; I can’t believe this is my life. - As told to Lynne Lederman, a freelance medical writer in Mamaroneck, NY. www.biotechniques.com ı BioTechniques 123
