CAREER VIEW NATURE|Vol 443|26 October 2006

MOVERS RECRUITERS & ACADEMIA Carl Pilcher, director, NASA Institute, Moffett Field, California Made-to-measure postdocs

Eight months into my postdoc, I am of cone snails and turrids, in Berlin, diligently learning German as well as the chemical 2006: Senior scientist for and managing my research schedule of their toxins. I owe my scientific astrobiology, Astrobiology at the Berlin Natural History Museum freedom, in part, to the postdoctoral programme, NASA and the Max Delbrück Center for grant funding from the US National Headquarters, Molecular Medicine. Walking past the Science Foundation’s Discovery Corps Washington DC museum’s collections of pickled frogs, Fellowship (DCF). 2001–05: Senior scientist I realize that I’m a long way from the Tantamount to a Peace Corps for astrobiology, Universe/ University of Utah, and even farther for scientists, a DCF offers recent Astrophysics Division, from the physical-chemistry research PhD candidates and mid-career NASA Headquarters, I completed as an undergraduate. scientists one- or two-year grants Washington DC In a quest to link my PhD chemical- that support both their scientific biology training with my desire to be a research and a service-oriented research scientist at a natural-history outreach project that demonstrates museum, I designed a two-year different aspects of science to a larger Carl Pilcher proves that strategic career moves can help postdoctoral project. It focused on the lay audience. It allows scientists and scientists navigate across disciplines to a dream job. Once investigation of the peptidic toxins engineers to venture beyond the a chemistry undergraduate, he has delved into astronomy, of venomous marine cone snails lab. For example, Joseph Fortunak, science policy and eventually into the nascent field of and turrids. My short-term posts a chemistry professor at Howard astrobiology during his 30-year career. include the time in Berlin, two field University, Washington, is expanding Once Pilcher realized his true interests lay in outer expeditions to Panama in association his research by working with Nigerian space, the first-year chemistry graduate student at the with the Smithsonian Tropical scientists and industry to promote Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, began Research Institute, and a museum ‘green chemistry’ education and working with a cosmochemist and a planetary astronomer, internship at the Paris Natural to manufacture microcrystalline both interested in the formation of the Solar System. He History Museum. I’m working with a cellulose from elephant grass and used his knowledge of spectroscopy to characterize the global network of research scientists other biorenewable resources. surfaces of Jupiter’s galilean satellites, and his team went to expand my training in peptide In general, DCF awardees attempt on to discover frozen water in Saturn’s rings and on three of chemistry and acquire knowledge to translate laboratory achievements Jupiter’s moons, including Europa. in neuroscience, taxonomy and into an expanded set of professional After 12 years at the University of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea systematics. skills and a programme that serves observatory, he decided to use science to contribute to Together with the Utah Museum society. Such opportunities help public policy, and completed a master’s in public affairs of Natural History, I created a reinvent the humdrum of lab work and at Princeton University, New Jersey. Intent on moving to series of educational programmes construct new routes to success. ■ Washington DC, Pilcher soon became the science director and exhibition pieces to inform Mandë Holford is a postdoctoral of NASA’s Office of Exploration Systems — a programme high-school students about the fellow at the University of Utah. designed to identify possible human-based missions to the Moon or to Mars. Later he moved to NASA’s space-science office where he helped to create the successful unmanned GRADUATE JOURNAL missions to Mars in the 1990s. After claims were made about biological signatures in a Mars meteorite found in Antarctica, NASA created an How studies can save a astrobiology programme, which piqued Pilcher’s interest. He What’s the long-term prognosis for a patient with fibromuscular dysplasia immersed himself in a biology bootcamp including a seven- on an anti-platelet regimen? Until this month I wouldn’t have understood the week intensive microbial-physiology programme. A few question or even been particularly interested. That was before the patient with years after that he became NASA’s senior astrobiologist. this rare condition was my uncle and the person asking was my grandmother. Pilcher is excited to promote the field in his newest role Unfortunately, the kind of research I do — fundamental aspects of yeast-cell as director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute in Moffett division — doesn’t provide the answers she’s looking for. There are no side effects Field, California. The astrobiology programme faces a 50% or case studies, and certainly no patients. Although I work on yeast cells because cut in the proposed budget for this fiscal year — in part of their functional similarity to human cells, sheer curiosity is largely motivation because NASA administrators are concerned about its lack enough. That has helped me understand a lot about yeast, but it doesn’t do much of focus. Ralph Pudritz, director of McManus University’s for people like my uncle. I don’t expect patients to run to their doctors saying, “I’m Origins Institute in Ontario, Canada, suggests that the worried about the protein complexes forming at my origins of replication.” international astrobiology scene depends on the continued Having a person in my family deal with a disease that’s scarcely mentioned in success of NASA’s programme. “A discovery of the medical literature has changed my perspective. It’s not that I want to drop could transform astrobiology from an exciting but tentative what I’m doing and take up applied research — I realize important contributions to humanity come from both directed and broad research approaches. I do, field of science into as hard a science as you could imagine,” though, feel a new sense of meaning in what I do. The idea that my work may he says. some day, however indirectly, reach a patient is no longer an abstraction but an Pilcher agrees. “One of our greatest accomplishments aspiration my grandmother and I can share. ■ of the twenty-first century will be understanding the Milan de Vries is a molecular-biology graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute ■ biological potential of the Universe,” he says. of Technology, Cambridge. Virginia Gewin

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