Susan Hockfield

INTERVIEWER: You're the only person I can ask this question to. You are the president of the Institute at its 150th birthday. What kind of a milestone is that for you, and how does it underscore the importance of your job right now?

HOCKFIELD: Well, it's providing an opportunity for us to look back, as well look forward. And the reason I came to MIT -- I'm an outsider -- was because of the extraordinary contributions MIT has made to the nation and the world. It was a real call to service. This is just a moment when you can look back on what MIT has done, and really understand in a deep way its extraordinary role in framing up the 20th century and the 21st century.

So it's a really important moment for the Institute. It's a privilege to be president at the moment that we're celebrating the 150th. And I think it's a critical moments for our nation. I'd hoped we were going to position 150th around the opportunities that we have going forward that, frankly, we might be missing. We're at a different time in the nation from where we were 50 years ago.

I think that the opportunity to kind of think back at what we have accomplished over the last 50 years, because we marked our 100th anniversary, is really the story of the 20th century and the world, but really the story of America leading the world in the second half of the 20th century. And the lessons we can learn from that as far as going forward are going to be important, not just for MIT, but for the nation.

INTERVIEWER: How do you, as an administrator, as a leader at this institution, balance the need to understand the importance of your job, and the humility required to honor the legacy of an institution 150 years old -- balance those two to lead in a way to get something accomplished?

HOCKFIELD: That's a great question. You can't walk in the doors of the place, you can't look at the building without being consumed by humility. It is an astonishing place and it's filled with astonishing people. Its reach is astonishingly broad and important. So I think humility is a prerequisite for the job, and frankly, a prerequisite for being here.

One of the things that struck me when I first joined MIT was the surprising humility considering who I was talking to and what MIT has done. So there's a real sense of -- it's not false humility. I think it's a real sense of the magnitude of the challenges, the magnitude of the problems that we address, and how difficult it is to make any progress against them. So I think that's where the humility comes from. Also, just about anyone who walks down the halls of this place and talks to students or faculty or staff realizes how accomplished people are. So it's hard to feel that you yourself are accomplished when you're surrounded by people who are just quite remarkable.

Now, how we get things done is a really important question, and it's something that everyone wonders: how do you get anything done in a place where the premise is about individual achievement? We're an entrepreneurial culture. Universities are, by their nature, entrepreneurial about how you advance the frontiers of knowledge, how you advance your own frontiers of learning or knowing. So it's a very individual sport, in the sense. But what I always remind people when they ask me what it's like to be around the greats at MIT, assuming that that's an unpleasant or a difficult task, is if anyone on this campus imagined that they could accomplish what they want to accomplish on their own, they'd be working in their garage.

So people come here because they see the power in being part of this truly extraordinary community. My role is to harness those ambitions and recognize the synergies and create the opportunities for people that are greater than they might be able to create on their own. So for me, my job is facilitating what the community wants to do. That's where the initiatives of my presidency have come from -- they're all from the community. People imagine I brought the Energy Initiative to MIT. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I came to MIT and discovered an incredible passion, an interest in really making a difference in solving the world's energy challenge, and tremendous capabilities to do that. My job was to provide a structure through which people could exercise their ambitions and their dreams. I think that's the challenge of running -- any kind of organization that's based on individual enthusiasm, individual achievement, individual ambition.

INTERVIEWER: We're going to return to talk about the Energy Initiative. But it occurs to me to ask now just because what you just said. What's it like in that moment where you, as the president, says we can do this, we are going to do this, and then to watch it all begin to play out?

HOCKFIELD: Well it's utterly amazing. Because one of the things that I have insufficient imagination to do is to really understand what can be accomplished here. I have a rough idea, but in every case what gets done here, what people are able to think here, what people are able to dream here is invariably far beyond where my mind could get. Again, if I thought I could do this better on my own, I'd be doing it someplace else. It is very much a community activity. I describe the experience of being here and talking to any faculty member, any student, any conversation, as discovering myself in a future I had not yet imagined. That's the experience of saying, well you know you all say we'd like to do this, and if we did it this way, we could do more. And people saying well, sure we could. And then not just do more, do more and more and more, beyond what I certainly could have imagined when we launched.

INTERVIEWER: The story of your development as a scientist from the early days in your childhood, really, and sometimes it's the story of first seeing, and sometimes it's technology that enabled that seeing. Then the going from well, I can see the landscape, now I have to ask the right questions to figure out what's going on here. Is it sometimes that's what happened when you got your first microscope? You were able to see a world, and then as the fascination of just being able to see what you couldn't see before wore off, you began to formulate the questions, which resulted in the real science that you have been so privileged to do during your career?

HOCKFIELD: It's hard for me to describe what the motivation is that gets you to the place that no one's been before. That's the thrill of being a scientist-- is testing the boundaries. It's a little bit like poking on this wall and saying, is there really a wall here? And all of a sudden your hand going through and getting to someplace that you didn't know existed. I think the process of that is using a microscope or using whatever technology's at hand, because science is very often the story of new technologies. You know that quite well. It's really a discipline of your mind to take the things that you are seeing -- perhaps they're things that other people have seen also. And being able to recognize something that is non-standard. So one of the hardest things I think as a scientist is to see the glimmer of something new and not to dismiss it as just more of the same.

As I talk to scientists about how they do their work, that really is part of the, as I said, the discipline of the mind. It's why scientists, the caricature scientist is just a little off balance, right, or scholars are just a little off balance, because the ability to see things a little bit differently and push the technology a little bit further. I often say that 5 percent of science is seeing the glimmer so that you know that there's something new there. And 95 percent is stoking that glimmer till it gets to be bright enough for everyone to recognize that what you've seen is actually there. So it's 5 percent inspiration, 95 percent perspiration. The perspiration is the hard work to bring something that is just barely visible to you that you believe is there into visibility for others.

INTERVIEWER: You grew up in a family of girls, right?

HOCKFIELD: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Three sisters.

HOCKFIELD: That's right.

INTERVIEWER: Your father an executive at General Electric.

HOCKFIELD: He started at General Electric. He had just come out of law school and he was a patent attorney at General Electric, and moved through corporate America. He ended up being general counsel and vice president for HowMet, but he started at GE.

INTERVIEWER: An exciting time to both grow up as a child in America, in terms of the development of science and technology and business, and an exciting time to be an executive, it seems to me. How did you experience that as a child growing up?

HOCKFIELD: You know it's interesting. I think we had a classic, kind of 1950s, 1960s family -- lots of activity in the home, lots of focus on the kids' education and music lessons and dance lessons and pursuing whatever our interests might be. I went to junior high school and high school in Chappaqua. My father worked in Manhattan, and he was gone for most of the day and came back and he focused on us. All the focus was on the kids, quite surprisingly. So we didn't know much about what he did.

When I was in elementary school, I would go to his office from time to time and I just sure couldn't figure out what he did. He sat at a desk I said, you play with paper clips? Yeah, I loved going to the office because there were all kinds of things to fiddle with. My father was an electrical engineer before he went to the war and came back and went to law school, and so he had a real sense of the same deep desire to understand how things worked. That certainly showed in how we understood things, the dinner conversations. What he did around the house, which was fixing things, building things, making things work and understanding how they worked to make them work better. So I think that's part of what infused at least my understanding of the fun there was in the world.

INTERVIEWER: For most people, I think there's a certain kind of bravery involved in having the wherewithal to take something apart and figure out how it works. That came to you naturally, it seems. Where did that come from and what are some stories of you taking things apart?

HOCKFIELD: Naturally, we often assume that everyone thinks the same way we do, right, and how could they not because this is our perspective, our point of view of the world. I don't know where it came from. I think probably the background was watching my father take things apart to fix them. So--

INTERVIEWER: Of course you could do it.

HOCKFIELD: --Of course you take things apart. Getting them back together was never necessarily part of the program. So I just would take almost anything apart. As I said, I didn't know that it was unusual. I kind of assumed -- I never looked to see whether other people were leaving this trail of bits and pieces of things they had taken apart behind them. Of course, most people don't do that.

But I was at a friend's house and I was fiddling with the door opener, this little device that prevents the door from slamming. She said, don't do that. I said why not? She said well, because you're always taking things apart and they never get back together. I had never even recognized that this was an unusual feature of the way my mind worked. The reason I was taking it apart because I wanted to understand how they worked. And isn't that what we all have to do? Well, we probably do all do that in some way, but not everyone does it physically.

I would say one other connection is my degrees in anatomy, and what anatomy allowed me to do was the same thing, was to take things apart, and to drive an understanding of function from structure. For students I always figure out what transformation makes things make sense to you. So for some people it's anatomy, for some people it's physiology, for some people it's biochemistry or molecular biology. There are transformations in the world that are quite intuitive, and for me, structure intuitively leads to function.

INTERVIEWER: For you then, is there a kind of universality to an inquiry into function in the sense that anatomy is the same as engineering is the same physiology is the same as chemistry?

HOCKFIELD: I think so.

INTERVIEWER: Really?

HOCKFIELD: I think so.

INTERVIEWER: That's a useful insight for a place like this, I would think.

HOCKFIELD: I think so. I think that one of the reasons that engineering doesn't feel alien to me, and this was quite a fear when I came in was that I wouldn't kind of get it about engineering, is that there are a lot of commonalities between how I decode the world and how engineers decode the world. They really do focus on putting things together though, where I focus on taking things apart.

INTERVIEWER: The other passionate story that comes out of your childhood is a fascination with how people come to be, how lives become the result of choices that people made. You discovered a particular experience in the library where you discovered biographies of people. And it wasn't particular people that fascinated you so much, but it could be set down as a story of oh, that's how that person got to be that person. Describe a little bit what it was you discovered and how important that was.

HOCKFIELD: Well, I think one of the things that was fascinating for me, I discovered this set of biographies when I must have been in third or fourth grade, at the most fifth grade. It was the same sense of we think of things/people as fully formed. But that you could understand the pieces of their lives that led them to the finished product that we view of something quite static. I guess you could say that it's the same kind of mental dissection that I would do of a watch or an iron or whatever object came my way, or the brain, when I started to do brain anatomy.

But I find some things absolutely fascinating. So, Barbara McClintock, who I had the extraordinary privilege to know when I was at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, viewed the world in a way that was different from anyone I had ever spoken with. In a way, frankly, I never understood. So it was infinitely fascinating for me to talk to her, because no matter what topic we would open, she would describe that topic in a way I had never heard before. In those descriptions I would learn things about it that, of course, I had never learned before because you've got to see the relationship between things to understand how it all fits together. I'm sorry -- I have to understand the relationship between things to understand how they come together.

The other piece of human interactions, that I only late in my life discovered was interesting, was how organizations can work. That's, of course, now the thing that probably fascinates me as much as anything.

INTERVIEWER: Part of the lesson from those biographies, it seems to me, was you understanding that people got that way because of choices they made, not because of some pre-ordained track that they were on. That involved some pretty important mentoring for you, going from someone who seemed to be interested in biology versus someone who decided to become a scientist. Can you describe where that transition was important in your early education?

HOCKFIELD: Yeah. And let me kind of rephrase it, because it's the choices are the second step. Making the choice is the second step. It's seeing that choices are available, seeing that there are choices to be made. Again, when I think about my role here at MIT, it's about opening opportunities, it's not about setting out the choices or making the choices for anybody. It's just increasing an awareness of the possible.

So, great mentors for me have been the people who have opened the window just a little wider so you can see possibilities that didn't exist before. You know it's important that people in your life, who you care about and respect, affirm that you can do something. But what I think is even more important are people who revealed a greater part of the world to you, so you know that there is another set of choices that you would never have imagined existed before. I think those are the really great mentors, the people who just kind of open your mind to possibilities that you didn't know existed and it gives you a kind of freedom that you didn't have.

INTERVIEWER: Do you recall anything about that first microscope that you received in, I guess, elementary school?

HOCKFIELD: Yeah, fifth grade. Christmas.

INTERVIEWER: First slide?

HOCKFIELD: I was just -- yeah, I mean just fantastic. So here's the thing about microscopes. You look at an object and you think you understand its structure. You put it under a microscope, and every little piece of it has an extraordinary structure within the structure that you can see. You can go through a light microscope, an electron microscope, all of the orders of physics. It's a big question in physics, what is the basic building block of the physical universe? It's a great question and how fantastic it is to, at every level of resolution, to see gorgeous structure, beautiful order unfolding. As deep as you can go it just gets more and more fantastic. So you don't really get to the end of it. It's an infinitely beautiful structure. Of course, it goes out on the large scale, also. But for me, I like the micro-scale rather than the mega-scale.

INTERVIEWER: Although in each case, higher resolution becomes better questions, and higher resolutions, better questions, and it's a sort of never ending process.

HOCKFIELD: Right.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember the first slide you looked at?

HOCKFIELD: Yeah. The microscope came with a set of slides. It was a slide of some plankton. Magnificent colors. Bizarre Dr. Seussian kind of structure. Wonderful things. I just remember taking it out of the microscope, once I looked with the microscope, and holding it up, and trying to, in my mind, understand how the thing that I was looking at without magnification became the next level of resolution structure. Very exciting.

INTERVIEWER: Same thing.

HOCKFIELD: Real exciting. I mean intoxicating for me, absolutely intoxicating.

INTERVIEWER: Your undergraduate education was University of Rochester?

HOCKFIELD: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to go there?

HOCKFIELD: Why I decided to go there. It was there. Who knows? It just ended up that I was there. Not so much from choice as just college counselors said apply to these schools, and I applied to these schools. I got into Rochester, I got in some other places. I don't remember where else. And Rochester was the place I went. I was in college from 1969 to 1973. A very difficult time to be in college as it is to be in college at MIT today, or in college anywhere in America today. It was a time of enormous social upheaval, political unrest, and for people whose interests were in those things, an interesting time. But from my perspective a very distracting time. And a time that certainly brought many things good to the country, but a time of just profound, what I call, dislocation. So, a difficult time to focus on your studies, if your studies were not politics.

INTERVIEWER: Did you find a frustration with the ways in which people were working out their political anxieties versus the sense of pragmatism and an inquiry into the nature of things that is sort of sort at the center of your heart?

HOCKFIELD: I sure wish I understood things as well then as I do now. I think you just articulated better than I ever have what the conflict was for me in college. It ended up that my discovery of the thing that really made my heart sing happened after I left college, even though the glimmer was there. What I hope for every student who comes to MIT is that each of them discovers the thing that really makes his or her heart sing while they're here. Happily, I was led to the thing that made my heart sing through my experience at Rochester, but it was not in studying that I discovered it.

But I had a faculty member who I went to see after class one day -- great class. Again, so finally close to the end of my time at Rochester, I had a class in cell biology, which was a field that was just exploding in late '60s, early '70s, largely through electron microscope and other new technologies. In talking with him about a problem he had posed in class, I happened to reveal my own conflict that I didn't think medical school was the right direction for me and I didn't know what I was going to do. He looked at me, said you should get a job in a lab. And it's one of these things, yet another -- and the door opened.

INTERVIEWER: But didn't you also suggest the solution to the very problem he had posed?

HOCKFIELD: I did.

INTERVIEWER: You're burying the headline there. HOCKFIELD: That was easy. I brought that into the office. What I left the office with was a path to my future.

INTERVIEWER: And his response to your saying, well I bet you could probably solve this problem if you looked at it this way, was what?

HOCKFIELD: Well, why don't you do that? I said, how could I do that? He said, you do that work in a lab.

INTERVIEWER: Now was your question, how can I do that, in any way influenced by a sense that there were limits for women in science, a sense that you we're supposed to go to med school, a sense that I wasn't a scientist because I haven't got a science card in my wallet. What were the limitations?

HOCKFIELD: It was not knowing that there was a path. Not knowing that there was a world of being a scientist, even though I knew scientists. My parents had some friends who were scientists, but I didn't understand what it was they did. And I couldn't connect the thing, that glimmer of something that I loved with what they were doing.

So I just didn't understand, and this professor, Professor Kay, took these various disconnected pieces of my experience and put them together in a way that made sense. So it wasn't -- I didn't feel as though there were artificial barriers or boundaries. I just didn't know. And that's this whole theme of opening a possibility, revealing possibility where you didn't know there was anything there. It was creating something out of nothing, right?

INTERVIEWER: And also going from passive to active.

HOCKFIELD: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Life becomes a biography in that moment. Oh, that's how science happens.

HOCKFIELD: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: It seems like a pretty extraordinary insight, even though you seem to describe it as having come relatively late. It's a great insight that seems to have been relevant all throughout your career.

HOCKFIELD: Oh, it was a moment that changed my life, but also a moment that allowed me to understand the world and people in a completely new way. Completely new way.

INTERVIEWER: What a gift.

HOCKFIELD: Yeah. Extraordinary. Lucky. Lucky. So I described the thing about finding the thing that made my heart sing. I kind of assume everyone would do that. I wish everyone could do that. I wish everyone could be so fortunate as to find the thing that makes your heart sing and then be able to actually run with it. It's hugely fortunate.

INTERVIEWER: And a mission that you, I think, think of as part of your presidency here.

HOCKFIELD: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So what you'll get to at some point I know is becoming dean of the graduate school, at Yale.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, we'll go there in a moment.

So, describe your first experiences with an electron microscope.

HOCKFIELD: So when you see a structure and you think that if you expand it 100-fold. So if you look at the distance between the table and the chair here, and if you were to blow it up, it's still going to be space, right? Well, that's not actually true, because when you blow it up and you can actually see the details of the structure that's there. It's incredibly exciting to actually see how those structures are built, the structures that you can see with the naked eye or with the microscope. So for me the electron microscope was just exciting doesn't begin to describe it. Breathtaking. Just breathtaking.

Let's see, I got into the lab in 1973, in the spring semester of '73. I had been studying electron microscopy in a book, right, in a class. Completely different to actually get in there and drive the microscope yourself. The electron microscope is a bizarre instrument because -- I haven't been in an electron microscope in years, so probably you don't do this anymore. But at the time when I used one you sit in a completely darkened room and stare at the little fluorescent screen that fluoresced with the image of these electrons hitting it.

So it was all kind of spooky. It was like being in a submarine or something. You had these controls and you're staring through a little port because it was all under a huge vacuum. So it was all a little strange, but allows you to focus completely. No distractions outside of this screen where you were looking at the specimen you were examining.

INTERVIEWER: Your graduate school experience, it seems to me, is about this transition from knowing science to doing science. Describe what that was like as you went to Georgetown and had the experience of the NIH.

HOCKFIELD: So, I was, again, enormously fortunate because I worked in a lab. I was a lab tech for two years doing electron microscopy and learning how to do science, learning the practical things of how to do science, learning how to read the literature, learning how to develop a protocol for a set of experiments. I just got practical training.

Then when I went to graduate school, the transition was from taking the practical training, doing someone else's experiments, to the next step of figuring out a problem with the help of an advisor. I think this is very important. It's a magnificent relationship. People often stereotype this in ways that I think are quite unfair. Then building the structure that allows you to go after a particular question, a particular problem.

So, to move from being a technician to being a key member of the intellectual team that frames the problem -- framing a problem is very difficult -- and then devising the method to solve it. Easy enough to say, but that's just trial and error. I mean it's not just trial and error, it's informed trial and error, but it's doing an experiment 10 times before it works once. Advancing the knowledge step by step and doing that in conversation with other people, again, wonderful, just wonderful. I was very fortunate because before the end of my first semester at Georgetown, I got a job in a lab at NIH, and so my dissertation work was all done at the National Institute of Health in a group where they had never had a graduate student before. So lucky me, I was treated like a postdoc, so I kind of got elevated.

INTERVIEWER: Why was that though? I mean the reason that was the case had to do with the nature of your advisor.

HOCKFIELD: It had to do with the nature of my advisor -- a wonderful man, Steve Gobel. It also had to do with the fact that I had already done the boot camp. So I had already learned how to work in a lab. I had already learned how to handle chemicals and scales and all the machinery that you need to do. I wasn't making a mess. So I was value-added for them. Well, I just attribute it to my technical skills. Now think back, it was value-added in terms of my intellectual skills as well. It was incredibly exciting. My advisor had never had a graduate student before. He only had a couple of postdocs. So he didn't know he was supposed to treat me differently from a colleague. So it was perfect time for me in terms of the development of my technical/intellectual abilities. And very exciting because of what the lab was doing.

So, perhaps if I had done my dissertation work in a laboratory at Georgetown, my guess is it would have been more strictly disciplinary. But I was with a group, a pain research group. A pain research group. Not the neuroanatomy group. I was with the pain research group at the NIH. So, there were anatomists, my advisor was an anatomist. There were physiologists, there were clinicians, there were biochemists, there were pharmacologists. It was this crazy mix of people all studying pain with the idea if we understood how the brain processes pain, we can understand how to alleviate it.

This is how I grew up. This is my critical period for doing science. So this is where I came to just assume that science is done in a cross-disciplinary way. That anatomists by themselves can't solve the problems, you need to talk to the pharmacologists and the physiologists and the clinicians. In retrospect, that was an incredibly important experience as a graduate student to be in a mix of people bringing different perspectives, different technologies to a particular task, a particular problem.

INTERVIEWER: It also seems to be a very important experience for a future administrator to see how the quality of the research is dependent upon the vision to get the right people together. Perhaps you didn't recognize it at the time, but is that experience at NIH an important model for the administration of large-scale research?

HOCKFIELD: Yes. But I would, again, turn it just a little bit on its head.

INTERVIEWER: Please.

HOCKFIELD: It's about creating opportunity. It's not going out and picking you, you, and you. I mean I pick my dream team in terms of the people I work with. But I work in a particular way, and so not everyone wants to work with me. And not everyone wants to be at MIT. Not everyone wants to think outside their disciplines. So, it creates an opportunity for a certain kind of person, a certain kind of work. So what control do I have over it? I have creating opportunity, creating personality, creating a kind of culture that attracts a certain kind of person. Not to say that I'm going out and saying I'm going to choose you, you, and you because you fit.

One of the great compliments I got, and I was puzzled by it when I was putting together my senior team. Someone said, oh I get it, everyone you've hired is the same. I was thinking how could they be the same? They're all fantastically different. But they are the same in a certain attitude, a certain perspective on the world. But they're as different as can be because they have to do very different jobs.

INTERVIEWER: So, in an early stage as a graduate student, you discover the value of interdisciplinary research. It sounds to me like you're saying there that that's been a difficult -- as intuitive as that was for you as a graduate student -- that's been a difficult model to apply broadly, given the way science is done in the United States. True?

HOCKFIELD: Yes. Yes. It's hard. I'm a zealot about this. It is a very important way to make progress. I'm not going to say it's the only way to make progress because there are great discoveries and great advances that come out of more narrowly defined activities. But for me, and for a certain kind of person, progress can be made at an extraordinary pace by taking down the walls between disciplines.

INTERVIEWER: We'll come back to this as we talk about your experience here. Let's get you to Yale. The experience at Georgetown it seems to me allowed you to fall in love with the discovery of the outer reaches of science, but also to fall in love with the brain in a certain sense. Give us a sense of your discovery both at Georgetown and then on at Yale, that study of the brain was to be what you would do.

HOCKFIELD: Yes. I finished Rochester a semester early, and the job that I took at the University of Rochester Medical School was in an neuroanatomy lab. So I got into the brain fairly fast. It wasn't by choice. It wasn't choosing neuroscience, it was choosing electron microscopy that got me into the brain. It's great to like to be a neuroscientist, and I often say it's great because you can think about the enormous questions for mankind, philosophical and psychological questions, but still be grounded in something that really is quite rational, quite provable, quite scientific. I think that's probably what kept me in brain research rather than moving to another area.

The opportunities are enormous, and I think it's just the ability to explore the unknown is great in neuroscience, the rate of change in neuroscience research. So I graduated in 1979. You know those last two decades of the 20th century, the amount of neuroscience knowledge that we gained in those 20 years probably was easily equivalent to the 100 years before. So the technologies became sufficiently sophisticated. A lot of technologies became sufficiently sophisticated to allow us to explore the brain.

So it's been exciting to be part of a discipline -- it's not a discipline, it's a set of disciplines where the progress is staggering. You know, fields wax and wane in terms of coming up with really transformational ideas, and I guess wherever people are doing research you're making progress. But I think the thing that was particular with neuroscience is that it seemed like every six months or so you'd just kind of throw away all that stuff that people believe, and say, well that's not true because the paradigm was changed. So this idea of a Kuhnian view that you do standard science, which can progress quite rapidly, but it's the paradigm- shifting science that is breathtaking. That seems to be happening at -- not seems to be -- that happened at an extraordinary rate.

INTERVIEWER: And you were seeing that and had the excitement of that at Georgetown and when you moved onto Yale.

HOCKFIELD: Yes. So, at Georgetown I postdocted at UC San Francisco for a year. Again, a lot of people just kind of opening up new avenues of inquiry in neuroscience. Then I was at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for five years, and that was an enormously important period for me. I was educated as an neuroanatomist, and Cold Spring Harbor was about molecular biology. I had not, for neuroscience there wasn't any reason to pay attention to molecular biology because it wasn't relevant. Yet, it became relevant in the late '70s.

The Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on quantitative biology in 1980 was on the brain. I think many people would mark that as when the starting gun went off for molecular biology. So I had the opportunity to learn molecular biology while doing neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor. It was an important time for neuroscience and really exciting for me to be a participant.

INTERVIEWER: Recall the invitation to Cold Spring and how that came about.

HOCKFIELD: I had not yet finished my first year of postdoc and I went to Cold Spring Harbor to participate in a workshop. Cold Spring Harbor does a lot of these postgraduate activities to help people get up to the state-of-the-art. So I went to be part of a pain workshop to talk about and think about new ways to approach pain research. Two scientists at Cold Spring Harbor had just made some monoclonal antibodies that recognized cells in the nervous system of the leech. I was talking to one of these scientists and she showed me these photographs of leech nervous system stained with monoclonal antibodies. So lighting up the nervous system in extraordinary ways. I, again, remember viscerally, the feeling, as she went through these photographs, of being mesmerized. Mesmerized.

So if you look at the nervous system of any organism -- a human, a rat, a mouse, a leech -- you can't see very much. The same thing about it all looks kind of the same. It looks like a piece of manila folder. It doesn't have much natural anatomy to it, much natural structure to it. But if you put it under a microscope, there's incredibly beautiful structure. And one of the questions is how do you determine what pieces of this thing are doing what jobs?

So what these antibodies allowed you to do was pull out particular cells and particular pathways in ways we hadn't seen before. Basically, if there's a biochemical difference, it means there's going to be a functional difference too. So it provided a way to really start dissecting the brain in a new way.

INTERVIEWER: And just to make a point, up to that time, the techniques for putting brain tissue with function were incredibly crude. This got you down to the cellular level.

HOCKFIELD: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: You could put an electrode here and see what moved. But suddenly we're at a point where you can actually theorize about individual cells or groups of cells.

HOCKFIELD: Yes. [INAUDIBLE] groups of cells. It's groups of cells, because Ramon y Cajal in the 19th century figured out how to stain the brain so one cell would get stained and you could actually see that a nerve cell was this incredibly complex cell. But that cell wasn't attached to the next cell in the pathway, it was just that cell by itself. And you didn't how many of those cells there were, if that was just a single cell or it was surrounded by 10 cells like it. So it allowed you to look at categories of cells. So it really put together functional networks, was the idea.

So as an anatomist I looked at these pictures and said wow, that's weird. This particular antibody stains six cells, these six cells. And this antibody stains four cells and they overlap with these six cells. What's different? Well, what is it seeing the cell membrane? Is that what is different? Is it seeing some internal structure in these cells? What is different between these two things? So that's a question that electron microscope can solve.

So on the side, while I was doing this pain workshop, I was doing my neuroanatomy on these leech antibodies. At the end of the three weeks, I was asked if I might consider joining Cold Spring Harbor.

INTERVIEWER: This was like a memo that came in your inbox.

HOCKFIELD: Like someone came up to me and said would you think about coming here?

INTERVIEWER: Who was that?

HOCKFIELD: I think it was one of these two scientists who had done this incredible monoclonal antibody study. I said, well, I don't know. I said, well sure. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I didn't think very far down the pike. It was the opportunity to work on these antibodies was really -- I couldn't not do it. In any case, she said well I had to come back and talk to Jim Watson. I said well, sure.

So they went to visit some friends in Washington and drove back and talked to Jim Watson and he offered me a job.

INTERVIEWER: What was the pitch from Professor Watson, Dr. Watson?

HOCKFIELD: The pitch. It's very interesting. It wasn't a sense there was a pitch, there was a conversation about antibodies. We talked about the antibodies and I talked about what I had seen and what I thought could be done. He talked about his sense of neuroscience being a very important area of research for the lab. It was all really quite informal.

INTERVIEWER: The sense of mentoring wasn't so much of an issue as the idea that you were a part of this movement.

HOCKFIELD: That's right. He was an extraordinary mentor. Just an extraordinary mentor, and it's by virtue of these conversations. Mentors are thought partners. And as thought partners, they're door openers or window openers. When I have done what is called mentoring students or postdocs or colleagues, it's about a conversation about their hopes and dreams, and it has to be something that I'm excited about too. Through that conversation, I don't know in advance what I'm going to advise, but it's through conversation that opportunities are revealed that people can take that they didn't know and I didn't know existed before we had the conversation often. This is part of Jim Watson's genius.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of environment was Cold Spring Harbor for you?

HOCKFIELD: It was very intense. I mark it as the first really high-powered intellectual environment in which I allowed myself to participate, I guess. It's a very intense and wonderful place. In many ways it's like MIT. It's people racing to invent the future in a nonstop way. The thing that binds you at Cold Spring Harbor is your own mind. So as fast as you can think, as well as can think, the resources are there to put those thoughts into action. For me that is the ideal educational research environment. You want the thing that limits people's advance to be their minds and not the physical resources, not the state of the labs, or the ability to muster the resources to get an experiment done.

INTERVIEWER: You've described that part of the excitement of neuroscience is the scope of it in the sense that you can inquire about philosophical questions, perceptual questions, chemical questions, biological questions, physical questions simultaneously. In that sense is a liberal institution like Yale an ideal place for a Susan Hockfield at this stage of her research?

HOCKFIELD: Oh, it was outstanding for me to move from Cold Spring Harbor to Yale. Again, perfect timing. I had learned a considerable amount of molecular biology, had put together a technical toolkit and an intellectual toolkit to pursue the science. There weren't many neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor, which allowed me the luxury of focusing on molecular biology, and being then ready to apply these tools to neuroscience questions. It was marvelous to move to an environment where -- I don't remember if there were 85, 90 neuroscientists at Yale. It was a terrific neuroscience community. To bring this new perspective that I gained from being at Cold Spring Harbor to a community of neuroscientists and the greater liberal arts -- philosophers, psychologists, chemists. It was, again, very exciting, very productive place to be.

INTERVIEWER: It's really to draw an arc from the great conversations around your dinner table as you were growing up in Chappaqua and other places, but as a pretty much as a nomad as a child because your Dad moved around a lot. To the community of Yale, which is very much a warm community within walls where there's just a sense of we're all family here. How important was the discovery of those various communities as you moved through your academic life?

HOCKFIELD: I think for me really important. There are people who work better by themselves and people that work better with others, and I really like to work with other people. Jim Watson always says he likes to hang around with people who are smarter than he is. I love hanging around with people who are way smarter than I am. It's exciting and interesting and it certainly amplifies my ability to understand the world. So these communities were important.

Yale offered something that ended up being, again, changed my life in determining my career trajectory that brought me here. Which is at each of the residential colleges has a group of faculty fellows, and I was invited to join one of these. It was in that context that I got to have great conversations with people on our history, and chemistry, and astronomy, and the biology department, and the history department, and really extended my intellectual community across the expanse of Yale. That was terrific but it was also the thing that kind of put me in the sights of some when the dean of the graduate school position opened up.

INTERVIEWER: How quickly did you discover that the way Yale organized itself allowed, if not actually, but certainly the potential, for this great kind of mixing and sharing?

HOCKFIELD: Oh, instantly. In terms of neuroscience, I was very excited to be there. When I first got there I just called everyone whose papers I had read and said well, could we get together for lunch? What a delight to be there. Part of the reason I knew I could do that was Cold Spring Harbor has this very interesting pattern during the summer. The place has a huge number of courses and symposia and meetings. So during the summer there would be scientists from all over the world, very interactive, very social. Then during the rest of the year it was you're in your lab doing your work. So the sense that when people were around you, you're engaged with them. You had conversations. You actually did science socially, that was something that was really quite natural to me coming out of Cold Spring Harbor.

INTERVIEWER: I suspect there were encounters that you arranged at Yale that represented a particularly joyful set of contrasts. Can you describe a particular lunch or a dinner or an event or a colloquium where you said to yourself man, this is great. There's, over here -- this person and this person and this person. Man, we're cooking with gas now.

HOCKFIELD: Oh, yeah. So I'll tell you a neuroscience one. The Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology had a seminar every Thursday. One of the first years I was there, a young colleague organized and it was about molecular neurobiology. So every Thursday people who were interested this new field would come together from all over campus and hear someone talk about this new field. Of course, the conversation continued from week to week to week. You'd sit there with people from literally all over campus. You got to know them. So there was a group probably of 25 or 30 of us, and it was fantastic.

Then the Berkeley College Faculty Fellows, I remember hearing a lecture. So each of the Fellows, the Fellows would give the lectures, and then we'd have dinner and discussion. A member of the physics department, Charlie Baltay, was talking about something called gravitational lensing. Very exciting. It was just, again, kind of breathtaking. He was there and someone asked what is there beyond the expanding universe? So there was a little conversation about what there is beyond it. And one of the faculty members from the Divinity School in the Department of Religious Studies said, well, what's beyond that is the mind of God. I thought what an incredible conversation to have the chemists and the cell biologists and the physicists and the historians and religious studies professors all talking about the universe is quite a privilege.

INTERVIEWER: So let's just spend a little time talking about the science that you're most proud of and the research that you're most proud of. How did you enter into the study that would, in your view, define you as a scientist?

HOCKFIELD: So, I think it is this monoclonal antibody history, so it was getting to Cold Spring Harbor and having access to a technology that was new that allowed us to see the brain in a new way, and the components of the brain in a new way. I think my most important contribution was discovering a structure and a set of proteins that play a role in closing, what we call, critical periods in development.

So there are periods when the brain is plastic -- the connections between nerve cells, the circuitry is being modified. It's laid down when we're born, but then it's modified based on experience. So, how you use the brain, how you use your eyes early in your life determines the wiring of the visual system. It is quite settled to experience. At the end of that plastic period, many of these circuits are established, essentially for the rest of your life. The mechanism of that stabilization really was not at all known.