Ira Mellman

Cell Biologist

Q1. Can you talk about your role here at Yale in the lab?

A1. I’m responsible for a group of maybe 24 people who spend most of their lives doing experiments in the laboratory. What they do is up to them and is largely initiated by them, but I help in the sense that I help to find scientific problems to become interested in, and help them work out strategies for experiments to address these problems. So what that means is I have a moral responsibility to train them and help them develop their own skill set and help them develop their own knowledge base so that they can do the best science they can possibly do. And I think this is something not just at universities but it’s imbued in the entire scientific culture, whether you’re at a company, a biotech industry or anything else, is that there’s always a very strong sense of helping new people who are junior to you, letting them benefit from your experience so there can be this great continuity that is passed on, where knowledge is passed on from person to person.

Q2. Does everyone start with a particular focus that everyone is working towards?

A2. We start here worrying about how cells do their jobs. Probably most people don’t really think about it very much but the body is filled with billions of cells, but they really only a couple hundred basic cell types. But among those cell types they’re really different. They look different, they act different, they do different things. What strikes us as cell biologists is why does a neurocell look like a neurocell and a lymphocyte look different? And if cells look differently one can make very safe assumption that they’re constructed in different ways and they also have different functions. So what we try do is to connect the different functions of cells with the ways they look, so that really is the core problem, and you can apply that problem to any problem, that approach rather, to any problem in biology.

Q3. Did science play a role in your growing up?

A3. I started music lessons very young and was very much encouraged and promoted to do as much music as possible. I had classical music, and that became jazz, and that became rock and popular music. I really thought that this was what my career was going to be. I went off to Oberlin College in Ohio in part just to get out of New York for a while. What happened was that Oberlin is not just a music conservatory but also has a college attached to it and all the students are encouraged to not just do music but also do other things as well. Very soon after I had my first laboratory experience with a young faculty member who had just arrived from UC Berkeley and Michigan, by the name of David Miller, I realized that science was fun. You could read about things and you could reenact those things in the laboratory and you could discuss those things with like minded individuals. And find that you get excited about them, it was, the process of just conceiving questions and then trying to come up with answers for those questions was not only challenging but extremely satisfying when you got a result you could share with other people.

Q4. Do you think most people have a great interest in science when they come in?

A4. It can turn out that you don’t really have a great initial abiding interest in science. I don’t’ think I ever did. I just felt it was something really neat to do. I could be just as happy doing five other things. But this just turned out to be incredibly cool and incredibly challenging and incredibly stimulating and happy environment in which to work, which I just don’t see anywhere else in the landscape of possible jobs that I could have done. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job. I’ve been doing this for you know, 25 or 30 years now, and, and I don’t feel—I still have not held a job in that way.

Q5. What are the misconceptions students have of science?

A5. Probably in no particular order there’s boring. And certainly there’s a lot of tedium involved in the process but I would maintain there’s a lot of tedium involved in everything. And here you’re assigning it to yourself. You’re not doing it because somebody else is telling you to do it.            Another is maybe because scientists are nerdy. Maybe that’s true, but I haven’t been too impressed with how cool many other people are either, so maybe that’s a matter of personal preference, but I’ve worked with people at all levels who have come from all sorts of different types of things. And who have come here, to careers and to interest in science from many different walks of life, from all over the world. It’s an incredibly diverse group of people.

Q6. What are the basic traits needed for this career?

A6. I think the traits that are required are impossible to quantify. It gets back to this issue of science and scientists are so diverse in their personalities and so diverse in their views. You can have people who have basically been working on the same thing for 20 or 30 years. You can have people who change what they work on every five years. Both are necessary. In order to be part of the first group, to work on something for 30 years, I guess you have to be pretty patient and pretty focused. And not let yourself be distracted by other interesting things because you really have a deep overriding commitment to the problem you’re working on. If you’re too curious you end up looking around for all sorts of other things. Which is also fine because those are the people that define new areas and define new problems by asking questions that have never been asked before.
           
Q7. Today you still play music – how did you manage that?

A7. After I got to Yale we recruited a British colleague who was working for a company. He was absolutely a mad and wild guitarist. He had all this equipment and he had heard that I used to play and one or two members of the faculty used to play. So this guy forced us all to get together and I was totally resistant to it but he was so enthusiastic that I had to get involved. So I thought I’m going to start writing music again and it just became an incredible trip. So this group the Cellmates we cut a CD, we play at all sorts of gigs around the country. We’ve been down as far as Washington to play, up as far north as Maine, all up and down New England. Most of them are science oriented since we’ve pioneered the new genre of bio-rock. A lot of the original material is kind of ambiguously about science or biology. Some of it incredibly tasteless at times!