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Following nature's challenges

Nature Medicine volume 18, pages 1483–1485 (2012)Cite this article

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It is a great honor to be recognized by the Lasker Foundation for solving some problems that I have worked on in the past with outstanding collaborators. I emphasize the collaborators because it is a critical element of what I wish to convey in this essay.

Having grown up in the Midwest with parents who were children during the Great Depression and World War II, I was provided with a strong appreciation of delayed gratification and independence. My studies at Albion College in Michigan emphasized math and chemistry, with a strong dose of physics that grounded me in the basic sciences. But my father, who was a chemist for Dow Chemical, kept trying to convince me that the instant gratification of curing people would be better than waiting five to fifteen years as he did for his ideas to become products. To test this view, I worked as a hospital orderly on the night shift, where I came to realize that most treatments were based on the idea of “do no harm” and that the understanding of the underlying biology at the time was elementary at best. In the fall of 1967, while on a research program at Argonne National labs in Illinois, I decided to become a biochemist and study biomedical problems, because there was a lot that could be discovered. I chose to enter the chemistry program at Caltech because there were no boundaries between departments there, and I could move to biology or physics to follow my interests.

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Figure 1: Opposite direction of movement of HMM beads on either side of the indifferent zone.

References

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Acknowledgements

This essay was greatly aided by the help of L. Kenney. I am very grateful to the US National Institutes of Health for their funding of our lab and for the freedom those grants afforded that made much of my work possible. At a personal level, my career was supported by family and friends through rough and easy times.

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  1. Michael P Sheetz is Director of the Mechanobiology Institute of Singapore, National University of Singapore, Singapore,

    Michael P Sheetz

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  1. Michael P Sheetz
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Correspondence to Michael P Sheetz.

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Sheetz, M. Following nature's challenges. Nat Med 18, 1483–1485 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.2957

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