Interview with Roger Tsien: a glowing career

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Abstract

From jellyfish to cancer diagnostics, Roger Tsien discusses the challenges of looking into a cell with Harp Minhas. Reported by Leanne Marle.

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Roger Tsien is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, US. In 2008 he was co-awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP).

What motivated you to specialise in cellular imaging?

My interest in imaging actually started as an interest in neurobiology. I wanted to see lots of neurons interacting and essentially neurons are a large number of cells interacting. They couldn’t be measured just by sticking an electrode in them as I wanted to actually see the neural populations firing away and that proved too hard to begin with. In the meantime we looked at calcium which was just a poor man’s way of getting a big chemical signal. Once we could define how to measure calcium then we could do it on lots of cells, not just neurons.

Since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry what, if anything, has changed in an unexpected way?

Well, I guess most things were expected. There was one particular case though, where I had written to a company to ask for an anticancer agent that wasn’t commercially available and I got no response to my email. I wrote again a month later saying that we still hadn’t had a response and asked for an answer, even if it was just to say no. There was still no reply. Then, a few days after the Nobel prize, I got a letter saying they hadn’t opened my previous email and that they were contacting their legal department to discuss a Material Transfer Agreement to give me the agent—so that was an unexpected bonus.

Douglas Prasher sent you the gene that created GFP in the Aequorea victoria jellyfish. If he hadn’t things could have been very different—could you comment on the importance of collaboration with other scientists and disciplines for scientific development?

Absolutely, things could have been very different—I think that GFP wouldn’t have escaped from just being a curiosity of the jellyfish without Douglas Prasher. Collaboration is absolutely crucial. We’re lucky as scientists that we can work together. Artists or authors can’t really team up or pass their work to somebody else to continue—it’s not quite the same.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, you have received numerous awards and honours throughout your career. What, in your opinion, is the secret to successful scientific research?

I got good advice from my chairman when I was an assistant professor, that was don’t worry too much about what people think is great or fashionable—you have to follow your own gut and do what you find interesting yourself and that’s the best chance you have that it will turn out to be good enough and make an impact. That’s probably the best advice.

You are a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, what does this mean?

The institute funds about 350 scientists in labs across the United States and they pay the personal salaries. They appoint scientists as opposed to research grants—they do not pick projects they pick people, so basically we get an aliquot of unrestricted money to do whatever research we want. There are also HHMI professors who are appointed for their teaching merit.

What projects are you working on at the moment?

We’ve had a big push in attempting to find synthetic molecules that will home in on cancers and will be of clinical relevance. We’re not working as much on fluorescent proteins as most people think we are. They assume that just because of the Nobel Prize I have to do that for the rest of my life and that is everything I do—if ever I show a cancer cell that’s glowing they assume it’s because I stuck GFP in it, which is not true. That’s just one of many projects.

What would you ultimately like to achieve from your research?

I would like to achieve something that could be clinically beneficial. My father and PhD supervisor both died from cancer and it would be very nice to do something in their memory if nothing else.

What do you see in the future for cellular imaging?

A lot of the difficulties arise when doing cellular imaging inside a living organism. And not a zebrafish or a worm that is very small and transparent, but inside mice or humans. Humans are the most difficult because you can’t put genes into humans. That could be the future but I don’t know—it all depends on young people designing better ways than us oldies have done so far.

What is the most rewarding aspect of your career?

I don’t know how to pick there are so many individual little bits. Sometimes it’s heart warming to find that other people have made progress with stuff we built a long time ago. Sometimes it’s seeing former students and postdocs doing well on their own.

You’re currently on the Editorial Board for Integrative Biology—what does the term integrative biology mean to you?

There’s quite a bit of discussion of what integrative biology actually means and lots of different communities are interpreting it in a different way. Integrative biology was originally interpreted as the ecological and whole animal biology (anything that’s not microbiology), but it would be nice if we could tie everything together all the way from molecules up to animal behaviour or clinical medicine. It’s a big goal; we’d have to do it in little pieces at a time.

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