I’d been working in his lab for two years, and I’d made an interesting discovery but couldn’t find a mechanism*. I knew that most of the other postdocs tended not to meet with Bob about this sort of thing. But he was my advisor, and I needed advice.
I sat down, across the table from him in his office, and explained my predicament.
Bob: Is it X?
Me: No.
Bob: Could it by Y? Did you check Y?
Me: Yes, I checked, but that isn’t it.
Bob: Hmm. Give me a minute to think.
And then, he put his head on his hand and was silent. My typically fidgety advisor, so still. I vividly remember my disconcertion as the seconds ticked away. He thought and thought.
An eternal minute went by before he looked up at me and said, with a sense of wonder, “It could be anything.”
And that was that. He directed me to some other folks in the lab, and I left.
I remember thinking, Are you kidding me? In my naivety, I had gone to Bob, thinking he was some kind of Infallible Knower of All Things. Yet, he was as stumped as I was.
But then, a funny thing happened. Every time I saw Bob around the lab, he’d ask me, with genuine interest, if I had figured out the mechanism. Well, I hadn’t figured it out in the previous 6 months, and I didn’t see how I’d do it now. But, he kept asking me, over and over, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. So I worked harder. Sometimes, he would ask me twice in the same day! I wondered if he was operating in some unique time-space dimension that I couldn’t access.
Within another couple of months, with the help of some of my fellow postdocs, I had the answer to my mechanistic question. I wrote up a manuscript, and submitted it to a good journal. When the reviews came back, one was positive, one was negative, and the third was leaning negative. The editor was poised to reject the article based on a philosophical issue that we could not remedy with revisions.
I decided to write a rebuttal letter, and I was cautioned by everyone I knew that this would almost certainly not work. But, Bob- he said, go for it! I wrote this rather eloquent letter discussing the purpose of science and scientific communication, and backing up my opinions with citations from the journal in question. Against the odds, the paper was accepted.
When I told Bob the news in the hallway outside of his office, he excitedly embraced me and told me that he had always believed in me and that he was so proud of me for persevering. I was one of 100 people in his lab. It was in that moment that I realized that every single one of us genuinely mattered to him. I was nothing in the grand scheme of his lab, and yet he cared very much.
Experimental resources, funding, and other things matter in science. But people matter more than anything else. Bob knows this, and it's precisely why he is an incredibly remarkable man and advisor. And ultimately, it is his unfailing belief in his people that has yielded all of his amazing science and the technologies that have changed the lives of millions of patients (and counting).
I will never be Bob. But I can take the parts of him that resonate with me and make them my own. I can try to be for my students what he has been to me. A supporter. A believer. Someone who has always made me feel like I can do anything I want if I try hard enough.
--
We honored Bob at a 70th birthday symposium a couple of weeks ago. There were about 700 people in attendance, and I suspect it was way more fun for us than it was for him. I listened to many others talk about his impact on their lives, and it's clear I'm not unique. But I nonetheless wanted to honor him with this one small story.
*In science, the how can be even more important than the what.
