Bruce Alberts
President, National Academy of Sciences
Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics
University of California-San Francisco

I have had the great privilege of working as a scientist for the past thirty-five years. When I was in high school, I never dreamed that such a life was possible. Of course I knew of famous scientists such as Madame Curie, Albert Einstein, and Luther Burbank. I had even read short biographies about them. But I had never seen a living scientist. And I never realized that large numbers of men and women in the United States are paid to work as scientists-both in industries and in universities.

When I left home for college in 1956, I had tentatively decided to try to become a medical doctor, the only career I knew about that employed large numbers of people who used the chemistry I had enjoyed in high school.

After my junior year in college, I had the good fortune of spending a summer in a university research laboratory. This was a revelation-nothing like the "cookbook" laboratories that I had previously suffered through in my college science classes. Even though most of my experiments failed, I had the opportunity to keep trying to outwit Mother Nature by changing the conditions or the approach. Most important, the responsibility for success or failure was in my own hands. Suddenly excited about research, by the end of that summer I had given up my medical school plans and decided to go to graduate school to earn a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry instead.

To be a scientist, a person must enjoy solving problems. The feeling of competence one derives from solving the many small technical problems that a laboratory scientist confronts each week provides the encouragement required to attack a major scientific problem successfully. Doing science is not easy, and a person needs a great deal of stamina and resourcefulness to be successful. But success often comes suddenly and unexpectedly. During my scientific research career, there have been perhaps ten periods of real joy and excitement-an average of one every three years. At these times, one is rewarded with the rare experience of believing oneself to be the first person in the world who has ever understood how some small part of the world works! Nothing else can compare with the joy of such a discovery.

My own work has been in biology, unscrambling the puzzle of how chromosomes are copied (replicated) before a cell divides. When I started worrying about this question in 1961, the mechanism was a great mystery. Now we know that the DNA in chromosomes is replicated by tiny machines that are formed from a complex of ten to twenty proteins. And we can purify those proteins, add them to the DNA extracted from chromosomes, and get the DNA to replicate in a test tube!

As the above example demonstrates, science continually progresses, improving our understanding of the world. Perhaps for this reason, scientists are generally optimists who care deeply about the improvement of human civilization. If you decide to pursue a career as a scientist, you will therefore have the great privilege of working with a large number of highly committed, energetic, and interesting colleagues.

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