The video features an engaging conversation with Caroline, a Nobel Prize winner in life sciences, led by Sofia Iskak, a biomedicine student at the Karolinska Institute. Caroline shares her journey from a childhood surrounded by scientific gadgets to pursuing a career in organic chemistry. Surprisingly, although she started on a pre-med track, her passion shifted after taking organic chemistry in her second year at Harvard, eventually solidifying her career path in chemistry.

Caroline elaborates on her unpredictable career journey and emphasizes her focus on personal interests rather than long-term planning. She shares insights on choosing her Ph.D. project at UC Berkeley, detailing her decision to delve into a new research area, glycobiology, due to the professor's enthusiasm and the new lab's energy. Reflecting on her transition to academia, she discusses the challenges she faced stepping into a professor's role without a formal plan or experience, highlighting the importance of navigating academia as a young woman.

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. affinity [əˈfɪnɪti] - (noun) - A natural liking for or attraction to a person, thing, idea, etc. - Synonyms: (inclination, penchant, affection)

But then, to my surprise, I really had an affinity for the subject and I really enjoyed it, and I was thinking about it all the time.

2. glycobiology [ˌɡlaɪkoʊbaɪˈɑːlədʒi] - (noun) - The branch of science that studies the structure, biosynthesis, and biology of saccharides (sugar chains) that are widely distributed in nature. - Synonyms: (carbohydrate biology, sugar biology, glycochemistry)

This is now in 1988, and he had basically an interest in synthesis of carbohydrate analogs, where the carbohydrate analogs could be used as tools to study glycobiology

3. analogs [ˈænəˌlɔgz] - (noun) - Something similar or comparable to something else either in general or in some specific detail. - Synonyms: (equivalent, counterpart, homologue)

He had basically an interest in synthesis of carbohydrate analogs, where the carbohydrate analogs could be used as tools to study glycobiology.

4. mentor [ˈmɛntɔr] - (verb / noun) - To advise or train (someone), especially a younger colleague. - Synonyms: (advise, guide, instruct)

I think being able to mentor each student or trainee in my lab as an individual was something that it took some time to learn.

5. serendipity [ˌsɛrənˈdɪpɪti] - (noun) - The occurrence of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. - Synonyms: (fortune, fluke, luck)

Being open to serendipity and evolving interests can lead to unexpected career satisfaction.

6. interdisciplinary [ˌɪntərˈdɪsəplɪˌnɛri] - (adjective) - Relating to more than one branch of knowledge. - Synonyms: (multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdepartmental)

Especially if you work in an interdisciplinary area, because there's lots of different fields you need to keep up with.

7. sacrifice [ˈsækrɪˌfaɪs] - (verb / noun) - To give up (something valued) for the sake of other considerations. - Synonyms: (relinquish, forfeit, give up)

It is important that they don't sacrifice all of those interests, because otherwise they'll be very unhappy, and they won't be creative, and they eventually won't be productive either.

8. morbid [ˈmɔːrbɪd] - (adjective) - Characterized by an abnormal and unhealthy interest in disturbing and unpleasant subjects, especially death and disease. - Synonyms: (macabre, grim, ghoulish)

It's the kind of subject where it might start with a morbid curiosity.

9. transitional [trænˈzɪʃənl] - (adjective) - Relating to or characteristic of a change or transition. - Synonyms: (interim, temporary, changeover)

And the transition from being a postdoctoral fellow or a graduate student to becoming a professor or a lab PI, the head of the lab, that's a big transition.

10. hierarchies [ˈhaɪərˌɑrki] - (noun) - A system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority. - Synonyms: (ranking, order, pecking order)

You know how there's a hierarchy in medicine where today surgeons consider themselves to be at the top of this hierarchy.

Carolyn Bertozzi - "If you learned something, it's not a failure." - Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022

It's such an honor to be here to talk to you about your Nobel Prize and also your career in life science. And my name is Sofia Iskak. I'm a third year bachelor student at Karlinska Institute, where I'm studying biomedicine. Wonderful. Thank you for having me here.

Yes. So I want to start with a question that probably you've heard a lot, but what did inspire you to do science? That's a good question. You know, I grew up in a science family with a father who was a physics professor at Mitz in Cambridge, USA. And so I had a household full of gadgets and science objects and computers and things like that, and I was okay in my science classes, but I didn't really commit to a life in science until I was probably in my second year of college. So were you a good student, both in high school and at the university? College, yes, I was a pretty good student in high school. Not like the best of the best, but solid in a lot of different subjects. And I played sports and I played in music groups. Yeah, I do a lot of different things. Yeah. I wasn't entirely school and class oriented, but I worked hard enough to do well.

Did you have any other favorite subjects apart from science, which wasn't your favorite subject, apparently. I liked some science classes I really did like as a kid. I liked biology. That was one that I found really interesting, to be honest. My chemistry experiences before college were not so great, and so I didn't really give much thought to chemistry. I didn't hate chemistry, but I wouldn't say that I thought about it as a potential career, but, no, I would say my focus before college was more on sports and music, if anything, interesting.

And then you started studying biology as your undergrad program to become a pre med or. Exactly. Okay. That's right. So I went to Harvard University, and in my freshman year, I signed up for the classes that you would take if you're preparing for medical school. And I declared myself a biology major, and then I was on that track. And then in my second year of college is when I took organic chemistry because it was a requirement for the pre med, not because I wanted to take it, but because I had to take it. But then, to my surprise, I really had an affinity for the subject and I really enjoyed it, and I was thinking about it all the time. So by the end of my second year of college, I had made the decision to switch my major to chemistry and to be an organic chemist.

Interesting. So was your career clear to you, after that point, did you know always that you're going to stick with chemistry? I wouldn't say that I really gave any thought to my career as an adult, really. I was more living in the moment. I really enjoyed organic chemistry, and I was reading books from the library, and I loved to solve the problems, and I was looking for a research opportunity. But if somebody had asked me back then what my career might look like, you know, on a longer timeline, I don't think I would have been able to, you know, predict. I didn't really have much of a long term thought.

So when the time came to choose your PhD project, was it easy? Did you know what you wanted to do? Well, I knew I wanted to do organic synthesis, and in my head, I thought if I could do chemistry where there's applications in biology, that that might be even more interesting. And so I joined the lab of a brand new assistant professor at UC Berkeley. This is now in 1988, and he had basically an interest in synthesis of carbohydrate analogs, where the carbohydrate analogs could be used as tools to study glycobiology. And I had never heard of glycobiology, and I didn't know anything about sugars or any of that, so it was all very foreign to me. But he was very enthusiastic, and he made it sound very exciting. And the idea of being among the first graduate students to join a brand new lab and get the lab off the ground from scratch was really exciting as a concept. So there were many things that drew me to that research area, but it wasn't just the science of the project. It was also to work with this person and to work in a lab that's brand new, and there were other factors involved.

So did your career turn out everything you expected it to be, or not career, but work in academia and research? Well, you know, I don't know that I had expectations, to be honest. When I applied for jobs at that point, I was a postdoctoral fellow in an immunology lab at the UC San Francisco medical school. So I had left chemistry to do this postdoctoral fellowship in a totally different area, and I hadn't really given a whole lot of thought to my long term career ideas. I was really, again, thinking very short term, like, this is what I'm interested in right now, and I want to learn more about this and learn some immunology skills and use the chemistry skills in this immunology lab. So I really was not a very good long term planner or thinker, and I applied for academic jobs really on the encouragement of a friend of mine who was at Stanford as a professor, and I had known him since my undergraduate days because I had done an internship at a place called Bell Labs in the United States, working in the area of physical chemistry. And I knew, and so we were friends, and we kept in touch, and he encouraged me to apply for a faculty opening at Stanford.

And then I thought, well, I guess I have nothing to lose. Why not? It was sort of on a whim almost, you know? And then I started organizing my application, and I needed some letters of recommendation, so I went back to Berkeley to my professors there, where I had been a PhD student, and I told them, applying for this job, and they said, well, we have a job, too. Maybe you should also apply to our job. Right. And then it happened again at UC San Francisco. They had a job. So I applied to those three jobs, all in the Bay Area, and I ended up getting an offer from Berkeley to become an assistant professor there. And that was really the first time that I took a step back and asked myself, do I want this job? You know, I had applied for these jobs without really thinking, is this the career path I really want? Will I be happy in this job? And, you know, I had to really think it through.

So how old were you at that point? 28 or so. Yeah, it worked out. Yeah, I see. Right. I think nobody would dispute that now. But in that moment, I was very uncertain as to whether becoming a professor was a good idea for me, whether I would have be happy and fulfilled and how I would do the job, and I didn't really have. So what was your thought process there? What were the things that you considered when agreeing to that job?

Well, there was no question that it was a great opportunity. So that was clear, a huge opportunity, and I felt like I should give it a go. You know, if someone puts an opportunity before you, you know, you feel like, okay, you don't want to turn it down. I mean, you'll be regretful. Probably that's how I ended up here. You did? Yeah. This is an opportunity. Me, too. But I remember having a conversation with my father, who is a professor. Right. It was then. He's retired now, but he was a professor at MIT. And I said to him, you know, I'm really not sure if this is really what I want to do. I didn't have a whole lot of confidence. I had ideas, and I had research projects that I wanted to pursue. So that wasn't the problem. The problem was just I didn't really have a lot of confidence in my ability to sort of survive in academia.

You know, academia back then wasn't all that friendly to women. And I pictured myself in a department, you know, with four women out of 75 faculty, and, you know, I pictured myself trying to get grants funded and trying to get papers published and trying to mentor students. And, you know, I had some fear about whether I could handle all of that with all the pressures of being in a minority situation. And I talked to my dad about it, and I remember he said, well, he said, you need to have a job. You need to have some job, right? And this is a good job offer. It's a good opportunity, so why not try it? And if you don't like it, you can always move on and do other things later, but, you know, give it a try for a few years and see what happens.

Well, great that you did take it. Yes. Well, now I'm very glad, but it took me a couple of years, honestly, to feel like I had made the right decision. Things were a bit rough for me for the first two years. Yeah. So what were the most challenging parts of? Well, it was a new job, which I had no skills at and no experience doing, and the transition from being a postdoctoral fellow or a graduate student to becoming a professor or a lab PI, the head of the lab, that's a big transition. And the things I was good at that gave me success as a graduate student and a postdoctoral fellow were not really relevant to what you need to be good at, to be a professor and to run a lab.

And so I had to learn on the job all the skills that you need, like the mentorship skills, the skills to raise money to support your research, the skills to communicate your work, and compel people to invest in your lab and compel people to join your lab. And it just took me a few years to make all the mistakes that you have to make and then get better at the job. What was the most difficult skill to learn? That's a good question. I think being able to mentor each student or trainee in my lab as an individual was something that it took some time to learn.

When I started out, I made the classic rookie mistake that professors make, which is to assume that the trainees that join your lab have the same priorities and the same interests as you do. And, of course, they don't, because they're not clones of you, they're individuals. So, you know, I interacted with my young students as if they should read my mind right, as if they should know exactly what to do, as I would do it. And of course, they were individuals who had their own interests and their own minds and their own personalities. And it took me a few years to kind of back off and get to know people as individuals and tailor the project and tailor my interaction style so that it worked well for them and it wasn't just coming from me alone.

So which values do you look in? Your mentees and students? What do you want them to be at the starting point? Well, all I really care about when they start in my lab is that they're motivated, curious, committed, you know, and that they have some basic skills in, you know, how to think about experiments and how to design experiments. Of course, there's a lot to learn still, but just having just that kind of basic foundation in what it means to do an experiment and what the scientific method means. Right. And just an understanding of what you're trying to accomplish as a graduate student, which is to learn new knowledge and to give it to the world. Right.

If they have that sort of fundamental commitment, understanding, and they're serious about learning, nothing else really matters. It doesn't matter whether they had a lot of training in biology or chemistry or whether they came from a different field and they're transitioning into something new. They will catch up quickly, regardless of their background. It's more to do with the commitment and the seriousness, you know, and just having the dedication to the research.

How do you teach your students to deal with mistakes and failed experiments? I know that there can be a lot of frustration with nothing's working and you're feeling stuck. So how do you deal with that yourself, and what do you teach your students? I experienced plenty of frustration as a graduate student and a postdoc, and I think, first and foremost is to teach students what it means to do a good experiment. Like, what does a good experiment look like and what are the controls? You know, a good experiment is one in which you know what question you're asking. You set up controls to eliminate unwanted outcomes and so that you can interpret the data in a meaningful way. And then the experimentalist has to be careful, and they have to document everything, and they have to think about safety, and they have to think about their data analytics. And if everything is well thought out and the experiment is well executed, then I really feel like there's no such thing as failure. There might be an outcome you didn't anticipate. Right.

There might be an outcome that is disappointing because maybe your hypothesis was incorrect, and you just have to follow the data, and you have to learn from the data, and you might be surprised. But if you did a good experiment so that you learn something from it, it's not a failure. It's just new knowledge that might prompt you to change your hypothesis. Do you have a strategy to revisit your hypothesis? And how do you go back from the results that you haven't expected to see? And how do you teach your students to where to look next? Well, fortunately, I think the students I've had have pretty good instincts about that, but there have been circumstances where, you know, we had a hypothesis, the experiments were well done, and we were wrong. Okay. That means you have to sit back and think about, you know, what do you do next? Sometimes you come up with the next hypothesis and try that, and you're really exploring and trying to find the truth.

Graduate students are on a clock. They can't work forever trying to understand the truth of a particular system. And so there are some strategic decisions that you have to make, which are sometimes disappointing. And once in a while, it might happen that a student is working, trying to get clarity on a system or trying to invent something or make a molecule, and years go by, and they're just not getting there. And maybe if they had ten years, they could get there, or 15 years or 20 years, they could get there. So it's not that you've lost confidence in their ability to get there, it's just the reality is they need to finish their PhD thesis in five or six years.

So there are times where we will sit down and kind of take a high level view of what's been going on in a frustrating project, and we might terminate the project. And then it's incumbent on me to put forth a proposal for another project, which I think has a higher probability of leading to a story that is publishable within a shorter period of time. So that's my job in the lab, is to make sure that everybody has a project that will produce enough interpretable results so that they can publish papers, tell a good story, apply for jobs, and get employment. I mean, there's a very pragmatic issue, sometimes at stake.

Speaking of PhD students, I've met lots of overworked ones. Do you manage to keep your work life balance, and do you teach your students and mentees how to do that, and how to clear their heads and relax and get that time off research? Yes. I do talk to my students about the importance of balance. I'm not sure that I am a good role model for this, so I talk about it. I don't necessarily live it that well because I tend I have a tendency to over commit myself, and then I end up with long nights and trying to meet deadlines that I wished I hadn't agreed to, but I did.

But what I do with my lab is every year, I give group meeting to my group in the first group meeting of the year, like the first week of January. And every year, I give a very similar presentation. So some of my students have heard this now five times. Okay. But I think you can't really hear it too much. And in this group meeting, I talk about many different things that I think are important to be a successful researcher. I talk about lab safety. I talk about doing good experiments, as we just discussed. I talk about being honest with your data, even when it frustrates you, and the importance of integrity and to behave with the highest standards of ethics.

And I also talk about figuring out how to manage their time efficiently so that they can be productive at work and be happy in their life outside of work. Some of my coworkers have families. They have children, and there's obligations with their children. And I understand that regardless of whether they have a family, I think everybody needs time where they're exercising. Right. That's very important. They need time when they're exploring other creative activities, whether it's music on the side. Right. Or some of them like to. They have hobbies, you know, and some of them are interested in art, and some of them actually do improv comedy. They like to go to these improv nights at comedy houses in the city. It is important that they don't sacrifice all of those interests, because otherwise they'll be very unhappy, and they won't be creative, and they eventually won't be productive either.

How does your work schedule? Well, it's changed a lot during COVID I think, is the funny thing. But looking back before COVID I have three children, and so I understand the demands on your schedule. When you have kids that have to get to school, you know, they have to get picked up, they have to work on homework, they have a lot of activities on the weekends and so on. And so that was a big part of my life. During COVID of course, a lot of that stopped, and for a year and a half, they were going to school out of the house, you know, on Zoom. So that was pretty disruptive for all of our schedules.

Now things have mostly returned back to the old days, but there's still more work from home and Zoom meetings from home than there used to be. So a typical day for me might have kind of a combination of doing meetings on Zoom, and we do these meetings on Zoom for convenience because there's people in different buildings, different around campus and off sites and so on. And it's now more convenient to do that on Zoom. But then I also am spending another part of the day in my office, so it's a hybrid. But I'm teaching now in person again, so we don't teach on Zoom anymore. So I lecture three days a week to undergraduates. What about articles? I know that there are thousands of articles out there, and as a good researcher, you need to keep up. Do you have a strategy for that? How do you read? Okay, I have a strategy, but I don't know that it's the best, most effective strategy.

The literature is overwhelming, especially if you work in an interdisciplinary area, because there's lots of different fields you need to keep up with. And so I need to keep up with the literature in chemistry, in chemical biology, in biology, and immunology, and cancer biology, glycobiology. And then I like to read things that are outside of the research areas of my lab just so I can be fresh and informed. So I have tried over the years a number of different strategies. The one that has worked best for me, and I hate to say it, is Twitter. Okay. So I follow a number of journals on Twitter. And journals generally have a Twitter feed where each paper comes out as a tweet, and they cycle these tweets. So if you're following on Twitter, you can see quickly a lot of recent papers from the different journals that are coming into your feed. Now, a lot of the people I follow on Twitter who are scientists, they are reading similar journals because they're scientists with overlapping interest. So if I miss a paper from the journal's Twitter feed, someone else that I follow will probably retweet it, and I'll see it.

So there's so many people following related journals that I have found that eventually I will see it on Twitter. And Twitter has been more effective for me to scan the literature regularly than any other medium, and I've tried quite a few. Then it's. But it's not perfect. It's something because it can be definitely overwhelming, especially if you start working on something new. You're like, where do I start? I did a better job at this when I was a student and a postdoc because I had more time. Now my time is very compressed because I have a lot of obligations not just running the lab, but also I'm an institute director, and I run a graduate program. So I have other administrative duties. I just don't have the time I used to have.

What about popular science? Do you read any of the recent books? And would you recommend anything for people who might be inspired to do science after this talk, or just in general, from time to time, read science oriented popular books? And there are a few that I would recommend. Absolutely. Which ones? So there's different genres of books that I enjoy. I really like books that are focused around, like, an interesting topic that's both scientific but of just, like, human interest. So, for example, I'm a big fan of Mary Roach. She's an author. She lives in San Francisco. And I.

The first book I read that she wrote was a book called Stiff, and it's a book about what happens to the human body when we die. And it's actually scientifically fascinating. Yeah, you're right. It's the kind of subject where it might start with a morbid curiosity. Right. But it's just a really interesting book. And she talks about the physiology of decomposition as well as the social science of how people treat death and how people study death, all the way from medical doctors and forensic scientists to the FBI, where they have to investigate a homicide, and they need to figure out how long has the body been deceased. And there's a scientific approach to that. So that's an example of a book that I recommend.

Any chemistry related books? Chemistry related books. There's a book called Ether Day, which is a book about the history of anesthesia, and that's a chemistry story. But there's a lot of interesting human personalities behind that evolution, as there are always. And so I learned a lot about the history of anesthesia, how it basically came to be practiced in the medical profession. And what's interesting is it started with dentistry. And back in the 17 hundreds and 18 hundreds, the medical professions were much more primitive.

And you know how there's a hierarchy in medicine where today surgeons consider themselves to be at the top of this hierarchy, at least in the US. I don't know if it's the same in Sweden. Perhaps not in the surgeon. Okay, well, a surgeon in the US has a very prestigious position within the medical professions. But before anesthesia, that was not the case, because surgery was barbaric without anesthesia, and nobody would want to do such a thing. Right? It was horrific. So dentistry used to be much more prestigious, more refined, more elegant component of the medical professions. And the dentists are the ones that actually first brought anesthesia into the medical practice and used it to do procedures in the mouth. And then of course, it became more widely used, and then surgery became a more refined practice. So I recommend that book, too. It's called ether day.

Wonderful. Both of them are going on my list. Okay. And I would like to thank you for this talk. It was a real pleasure. And I hope, perhaps to meet you sometime in the future. That would be great. Starting in my career. Come and postdoc in the United States, you know, when you're done with your PhD. It would be wonderful. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

Innovation, Science, Education, Chemistry, Research Challenges, Mentorship, Nobel Prize