Berkeley Lab Researcher Gets Inspired at Confab With Nobels
When people ask Greg Alushin what he did this summer, he could tell them he went on a yacht cruise with a Swedish countess on Lake Constance in Bavaria. But he actually did something even more exciting than that—Alushin was one of a select group of young researchers chosen to attend a week of lectures and lunches with Nobel laureates.
At the 61st annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany—an event founded by a Swedish aristocratic family after the second World War—566 young researchers from 77 countries mixed with Nobels and nobles for scientific exchange and inspiration. This year’s meeting, which took place from June 26 to July 1, was dedicated to physiology and medicine.
The researchers were chosen from more than 20,000 applicants worldwide. The United States sent 70 young scientists. Alushin, a graduate student working in the lab of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Eva Nogales, was one of two students sent by UC Berkeley, which, instead of using a competitive process, simply selected the first two people to apply.
“There was a funny day. We were discussing a paper when Eva burst into the room and said, ‘Greg, you have only one hour to write an application for this conference,’” Alushin recalled. “So I sat down, wrote an essay in an hour, filled out the application and sent it.”
German biochemist Robert Huber (right) was one of a number of Nobel laureates that Berkeley Lab grad student Greg Alushin (with tie) met at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany this summer.
Alushin has worked in Nogales’ lab for almost three years studying how cells move their chromosomes when they divide. He says he was most excited to meet the laureates closest to his own field, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 for their work on the structure of ribosomes. “I didn’t get to have one-on-one conversations with either of them, but they did have small discussion sessions,” he said. “I went to both of those. They were great.”
A total of 23 Nobel laureates attended the conference, giving lectures in the morning and talks in the afternoon where the attendees could ask questions. “The sessions I liked the best were mixed: the historic story of their discovery with the story of their personal life going on at the time—what the experience was like and what led up to it,” Alushin said. “It was inspirational—the idea you should do what you’re really interested in, and sometimes it will lead to something.”
One of the more interesting stories he heard came from Yonath, who worked for decades on a problem that many people thought impossible. “She had to coax this thing (a ribosome) to form a crystal, which is hard to do. But she knew there was evidence it could work,” Alushin said. “One time she had a bike accident and couldn’t work in the lab for awhile, so she was reading books at the library. She found out that when polar bears hibernate, their ribosomes come together and form tiny arrays like crystals. That inspired her to try for the next 30 years. So you shouldn’t just work on blind belief; you always want to have some sort of evidence to start you off.”
Besides meeting laureates, another valuable part of the conference was talking to other young scientists from around the world and learning how things are done in different countries. “A lot of students from other countries expressed frustration at the hierarchical way things are done,” he said. “They’re often assigned a problem and have to grind away at it. That’s not the way it is in my lab at all.”
With global health as the theme of the meeting, organizers hoped to get young scientists interested in neglected diseases. Some discussion panels included sociologists and another featured Bill Gates. The discussions prompted Alushin, who loves basic science but is also motivated to pursue a research area with societal benefit, to think more about his own career path.
“I think basic research is very, very important for medicine and health,” he said. “But you really have to love the research for its own sake and know that, even if you do the best possible job you can, there’s always a chance it will get killed in clinical trials. I’m definitely motivated to do something that I think will at least help people, and I am getting more interested in biology for energy. I think my skills can contribute more immediately in that field.”
Other takeaway messages from the Nobel laureates he’d heard before but was glad to hear again: “Take notes, pay attention to what actually happens, don’t discard something if you don’t get the result you didn’t expect,” he said. “It was pretty much always when they got the result they didn’t expect that led to something new. It was good to have that reinforced.”
Then the last day of the conference was topped off with a tour on a yacht belonging to the local German state and a visit to the island belonging to Countess Bettina Bernadotte, whose family has been a patron of the meetings since their inception.
Back in Berkeley, the coda to his summer may be even more exciting yet. Alushin was chosen to participate in an online dialogue with Martin Chalfie, co-recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and someone whose work he admires. Follow their conversation as it unfolds.
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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 12 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.
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