A Leap of Faith, Part 1

I did my graduate work at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in what was then called the Department of Zoology. I had several important and formative experiences during those years: clear advice from my advisor, Nelson Hairston (1917-2008), about the value of well-designed experiments in ecology; an eye-opening course on the integration of ecological and evolutionary perspectives, taught by Janis Antonovics (then at Duke University, just a few miles from UNC); an abysmal failure in my own attempt at an experiment with praying mantises; an enlightening collaboration with a fellow grad student, Phil Service; and a dissertation project on the effects of forest clearcutting and competition on beetles in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina.

Although that dissertation project was reasonably successful, I realized it was not a good fit to my skills and interests. Many of my fellow students were excellent naturalists with a love for the organisms they studied. While I enjoy being outdoors, I’m not a naturalist. Instead, I’m intrigued by the conceptual questions that biologists ask about the living world. And as my graduate work moved forward, I realized that questions about evolution, including especially the mechanisms and dynamics of evolution, interested me most. However, the beetles I was studying were not well-suited to those questions. So how could I pursue my interests?

While we were finishing our doctoral projects, Phil and I spent a lot of time discussing potential systems for studying evolution. As he moved on in his career, Phil chose to study evolution using fruit flies, a long-standing model system for studying genetics. I recalled an undergrad course I had taken, where we learned about elegant experiments done with microbes, including one by Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück that showed mutations happen at random, not in response to selection.

Meanwhile, the graduate students and faculty at UNC had a seminar in which we discussed recent papers in the field of ecology. One week we read a terrific paper by Lin Chao, Bruce Levin, and Frank Stewart titled “A complex community in a simple habitat: an experimental study with bacteria and phage.” I forget who chose that paper for our seminar, but I owe that person a debt of gratitude. 

Phages are viruses that infect bacteria, and the paper provided an elegant demonstration of the interplay of ecological and evolutionary processes on a time scale of a few weeks. It documented the coevolution of E. coli and a virus, called T7, that can infect and kill the bacteria. The authors showed that the bacteria evolved resistance, then the virus evolved the ability to infect the resistant cells, and finally the bacteria evolved resistance to the viruses with the extended host range. Moreover, they showed that virus-sensitive and virus-resistant host genotypes coexisted because the sensitive types were better competitors for the limiting resources in the environment. That paper and others by Bruce Levin cemented my interest in using microbes to study evolution in action.

In March of 1981, about a year before I defended my dissertation, I wrote Bruce to ask if he would consider me for a postdoctoral position in his lab. I admitted I had no experience working with microbes, but I proposed an experiment. His team’s work showed that bacteria that evolved resistance to phage were outcompeted by their sensitive progenitors when those viruses were not present. I wondered whether the tradeoff was an unavoidable metabolic cost, or whether bacteria could evolve compensatory changes that reduced the cost of resistance. My proposed experiment suggested a way to look for such compensatory changes.

Bruce invited me to visit his lab and give a talk at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that spring. I remember him greeting me when I got off a bus at the town square and being surprised by just how young he looked. Although he was 40 years old and a full professor, Bruce could easily have passed for an undergrad. More importantly, I recall our intense discussions over the next two days with Bruce at a chalkboard, writing equations that described the growth of various interacting microbes, and using terms that I barely understood.

Despite my limited experience and knowledge of microbiology, Bruce offered me a postdoctoral position in his lab. I was thrilled, but also worried about doing research in a new field where I lacked experience and knowledge. Nonetheless, I took that leap of faith. And I’m so glad I did.

[Nelson Hairston after his retirement from UNC (left) and Bruce Levin in the mid-1980s (right).]

Advertisement

Coach Izzo and me

Chalk up another great year for the Michigan State men’s basketball team and coach Tom Izzo. The Spartans were co-champions of the Big10 and won the conference’s grueling tournament. And in the NCAA’s March Madness, they made it all the way to the Final Four, knocking out the top-seeded team in the process.

Being a fan of this team got me thinking: Coach and I have a lot in common. We’ve both been doing our jobs, mostly at MSU, for a long time. Coach Izzo came here as a part-time assistant in 1983, becoming head coach in 1995. I was on the faculty at UC-Irvine starting in 1985, before moving here in 1991.

But the real similarities are deeper and more important:

First and foremost, we’ve both been fortunate to be surrounded by talented and hard-working students who listen to our ideas, experiment with them, develop them in their own ways, and translate them into meaningful outcomes—winning big games and making new discoveries.

That’s not to say there aren’t frustrations along the way: games lost, grants and papers rejected, grinding practice on the court and repetition in the lab, and even occasional conflicts. But our students are usually resilient—they overcome those setbacks and frustrations, and they go on to productive lives as players and coaches, researchers and teachers, and other careers as well.

We also both had mentors who helped us start our own careers. In Coach Izzo’s case, one mentor was Jud Heathcote, the previous head coach who hired him as an assistant. My mentors included my doctoral advisor, Nelson Hairston, and my postdoctoral supervisor, Bruce Levin. Coach Izzo and I also had friends who helped shape our careers early on: Steve Mariucci, who went on to become an NFL coach; and Phil Service, who did important work on life-history evolution.

Coach Izzo and I also both benefitted, I think, from early successes—again, largely due to our students—that helped establish our reputations, allowing us to retain our jobs and thrive by recruiting more talented, hard-working students. For Tom Izzo, it was players like Mateen Cleaves, Charlie Bell, and Mo Peterson who took the Spartans to the Sweet 16 in his 3^rd year as head coach and to the Final Four the next year, and who won the 1999-2000 National Championship. For me, the early students included Judy Bouma, Felisa Smith, John Mittler, Mike Travisano, Paul Turner, and Farida Vasi, and postdocs Toai Nguyen and Valeria Souza.

Coach Izzo has also had assistant coaches and staff, who I imagine do a lot of the heavy lifting. While some might eventually become head coaches of their own teams, many others labor in relative obscurity. In a similar vein, I’ve had outstanding lab managers including Sue Simpson, Lynette Ekunwe, and—for over 20 years, before retiring last year—Neerja Hajela.

Coach Izzo and I have both had deep benches—students who helped the team succeed without being in the limelight themselves. For Coach Izzo, they include the walk-ons and others who see limited action in games, but who compete against the starters every day in practice, helping everyone become even better. I think of three undergraduates who joined my lab when it was just getting started in Irvine (all Vietnamese refugees, by the way) who asked if they could work in my lab. Trinh Nguyen, Quang Phan, and Loan Duong prepared media and performed experiments like some incredible three-brained, six-handed machine, setting a high standard for everyone who followed in their footsteps.

Coach Izzo and I are nearly the same age. Retirement might be easier, but neither of us is ready for that. It’s too much fun when you’ve got talent to encourage and guide like Cassius Winston, Joshua Langford, Nick Ward, Xavier Tillman, and Aaron Henry—and on my team Jay Bundy, Kyle Card, Nkrumah Grant, Minako Izutsu, and Devin Lake.

Of course, there’s more that Coach Izzo and I have in common—we were lucky to be born into circumstances that allowed us to pursue our dreams without the obstacles that many others face.

Last but not least, Coach Izzo and I have had supportive partners who’ve accepted our peculiar obsessions and the long hours and frequent travel that our work entails.

Go Green! Go Students!!