The story is IT related but equally applicable to biosciences. One thing I try and pass on to students is that you're going to make the biggest impact where your skill sets form uncommon cross sections. (thread)
And a second/related lesson: we don't know what will be in 10, 20, or 30 years, so you always have to be thinking strategically and looking for opportunities. Heard of CRISPR? If you're in the biomedical sciences, you likely have.
For those that aren't, it's a way to cut DNA. If we can supply the cutting, cells generally can paste, so it's a way of doing gene editing. A big breakthrough, since up until now, you basically had to make bespoke proteins to edit each gene, which took a lot of time and money.
A huge breakthrough, so it's a short-list candidate for a Nobel prize every year, will potentially lead to huge advances in therapeutics, etc. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. What's that have to do with gene editing?
We've actually known about CRISPR for about 30 years. There are weird repeated bits of DNA in microbes. Nobody knew why. In the last 15 years, we've learned a lot. It turns out those bits come from viruses that infect the bacteria.
The gene editing part comes from a protein called Cas, that uses those repeated CRISPR bits to allow the bacteria to attack infecting viruses. It's part of a bacterial immune system! It turns out Cas is straightforward to hijack and use to cut almost any gene you want.
These CRISPR bits turned up in a lot of microbes and a few groups noted them for the ~20 years after the first report. It really took off in the mid-2000s when Eugene Koonin proposed the immunity idea. Could bacteria have been using this to fight off viruses?
Rodolphe Barrangou and Philippe Horvath, scientists at a yogurt manufacturer, tested it (yogurt cultures get infected with viruses too) and found that yes, virus-infected cultures carry viral DNA in their genomes. They learn from the infection!
Since then CRISPR has exploded, with the Charpentier, Doudna, Zhang, and Church labs (and many others) having worked out a lot of the biochemistry. Plenty of good articles to read, such as this one: quantamagazine.org/crispr-natural…
The point, though - in each fitful step, the field advanced because someone made a connection and brought some unique aspect of their expertise to bear on the problem. And that's how, over the last 30 years, we've gotten from weird bacterial DNA sequences to where we are.
This wouldn't have happened without people bringing unique expertise and an open mind/willingness to consider out-there ideas to bear on the problem. If you didn't know the story already, could you have imagined yogurt would play an important role?
So my message to new lab members: work hard, read broadly, and also consider that 1) your background probably causes you to make connections others don't, and 2) the constellation of information that wasn't available 10y ago means new connections are waiting for you to make them.
