Preparing to interview Robert Tjian, professor of biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology at the storied University of California, Berkeley, is a daunting task. After all, the scientist has been working in the field of molecular biochemistry since the 1970s, worked under Watson and Crick (yes, the Watson and Crick), and is now the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the organization that gives away $900 million annually in grants to groundbreaking scientists. So it’s safe to assume that he discovered his love of science as a child and kept his nose to the grindstone in order to achieve his goals, right? But that’s not exactly how it happened. Asked what kind of kid he was, he laughs and answers succinctly: “Bad. My mother was convinced I was going to be a hoodlum. I didn’t pay much attention in school—I was always playing hooky and going to the beach instead. My childhood was a lot of fun for me, and a total pain for my mother.”
Tjian had a peripatetic childhood: Born the youngest of nine children in Hong Kong, he and his family moved to Argentina shortly thereafter. When he was 5, the family headed to Brazil; he finally moved to the U.S. in high school. Tjian didn’t realize he might be destined for a career in science until middle school, when he had to make up a biology course over the summer. “They just gave me a book and said, ‘Go read this, and then we’re going to give you a bunch of exams.’ And I read the book, and understood everything. I didn’t necessarily think I was going to become a scientist, but it did strike me as funny that I could read a book with no help from teachers and completely get it. So that was my first indication. But then I went off and screwed around some more.”
He arrived at U.C. Berkeley as an undergrad in 1971, convinced that math was his future. “I immediately realized that I might’ve been brilliant as a math student in high school,” he says, “but I was nowhere compared to the geniuses that were here. And so then I thought, ‘Oh man, I better find something I’m reasonably good at.’ I changed my major about three times—I went from math, to chemistry, and finally to biology.” While at Berkeley working under Watson and Crick (who, of course, discovered the double-helix structure of DNA), he “made some discoveries of a whole world—I would say almost a universe—of a special kind of molecule that can basically read DNA and decode the genetic information.” Having decided on his field of study, he got his Ph.D. at Harvard, and eventually returned to Berkeley in 1979, where he’s taught ever since. He and his team now study molecules in order to assist in the creation of new drugs that’ll change the way we treat diseases. It sounds like a nearly overwhelming task, but it’s one that suits Tjian fine. “Watson’s advice to me was, ‘Pick a problem that’s so big that you’ve gotta work your entire life to figure it out.’”
Tjian’s work obviously isn’t just high-level nerdery—there are major human-health implications for his research. “We all hear about these diseases, whether it’s cancer, or diabetes, or Alzheimer’s, or autism, and we’re all trying to figure out: How can we make our lives better? It’s not just living longer, it’s living better. But how do we get there?” he says. “All this esoteric stuff we do—like trying to understand how to read DNA, and how the DNA information then informs how a living person operates—is at the root of understanding disease. So everything we do, ultimately, helps the people who are interested in developing therapeutics for whatever disease. That’s what we’re all motivated to do.
Tjian’s personality bucks most of the stereotypes about scientists; on the phone, he’s funny, relaxed, and totally patient with even the most remedial science questions. But his laid-back demeanor belies his fierce work ethic, and an unwillingness to tolerate slackers in his laboratory or classroom. “I have a reputation for being demanding, because I feel that doing science and being paid for it is an incredible privilege,” he explains. “So my feeling is, if people are paying you a huge amount of money to be a scientist, you better not screw around. I do expect my students and people in the lab to work, well, constantly, basically. There are no ‘weekends’ or anything. We work all the time.” That said, while he’s a rigorous leader, at least he’s a friendly one. “I’m very upbeat. So my students can come in and have their experiments be a complete disaster, and I don’t get upset. I try to buck them up, because I know they just spent two weeks doing some experiment, and then it just blows up. Even though I’m a taskmaster, I also have to be the cheerleader.”
It’s easy to imagine, given the pressing environmental issues the human race is facing, that Tjian would occasionally be pessimistic about the future of our planet. But he says that couldn’t be further from the truth. “I’m just the eternal optimist. The more I learn about both the beauty and the complexity of life, the more optimistic I am. I was born in 1949, and my father died of type 2 diabetes when he was relatively young. He basically had no treatment, because of how little we knew about type 2 diabetes back then. But now we’re attacking things like Alzheimer’s. How can you not be optimistic, now that these really complicated, tough, chronic diseases are being dealt with, and the speed with which we’ve dealt with them? People are all freaked out about Ebola right now, but hey, they already have a drug out there that seems to be working. So I’m not pessimistic.”
Though most of us will never study microscopy, or decode human DNA, Tjian says even non-geniuses would understand the basic concepts that his work is founded upon. “Here’s one of the problems with scientists: We use a lot of jargon and it makes us sound smart. It takes a certain amount of education to understand the basis of what we do, but the stuff we do is not that complicated, really. We’re trying to understand how a living cell works, and we understand more and more every day,” he explains. “The most important thing to realize about us scientists is that we don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, we have very few answers. And if we would just admit that, we’d probably be better off.”
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