The Life of a Researcher

My primary mentor, Dr. Marc Caron, was out of town this past week, so I interviewed the lab PI, Dr. Larry Barak, instead. Dr. Barak has been working in the Caron lab for almost 23 years now. He majored in physics and math at the University of Michigan, then went on to Cornell where he got his PhD. He later returned to the University of Michigan to get his MD. After ten years of working as a pediatrician, he decided that he wanted to get back into research. Through a fellowship program funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he was able to find a job at the Caron Lab where he has been working ever since.

Curious about how Dr. Barak first became interested in research, I asked him about his first research experience. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he had a work study job potting electrode tubes at the National Accelerator Laboratory. Although the job was fairly routine, it caused him to lean towards research as a career.

Dr. Barak’s research focuses primarily on G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and their implication in addiction. He does this research in conjunction with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) which funds his research. I asked him if his academic background as a math and physics major helped him to approach scientific problems from a different perspective. Surrounded by molecular biologists and biochemists, he finds that this is often the case. He told me that the best way to solve a complex scientific problem is to engage it through multiple academic disciplines. For this reason, he says he takes a team based approach to problem solving.  When I inquired about the steps he takes when trying to answer a scientific question in the lab, he offered me a bit of sage advise, “you have to participate in the problem before you can solve the problem.” If you can’t fully articulate the question, then you won’t know where to start looking for the solution.

Having spent nearly 23 years in the Caron lab, I asked Dr. Barak about how things have changed since he first arrived. Unsurprisingly, many of the procedures and pieces of lab equipment that were routinely used when he first arrived in 1992 are now outmoded. He described to me how much of his work is moving towards interrogating cellular processes in real time via confocal microscopy. He told me about the new ability of researchers to use fluorescent proteins to view cellular processes in live cells. In relation to Dr. Barak’s work with NIDA, this new method of imaging cells provides researchers with a better way of looking at the effects of certain drugs on specific cellular processes.

I asked Dr. Barak if there was anything he would like to change about the world of research. He feels that the US needs to change the way it funds research. Repeatedly having to apply for grants is a significant drain on the valuable time of a researcher. Although, on the other hand, guaranteed funding isn’t necessarily ideal either. It doesn’t promote creativity or supply sufficient pressure on researchers to engage important research questions. We need a funding system that is somewhere in the intermediate, Dr. Barak told me.

Before tying up the interview, I asked Dr. Barak if he had any funny stories to tell from his 23 years in the Caron lab. He couldn’t think of any fires or major catastrophes, but he did recall one time when an unnamed someone left the burner on under a coffee pot resulting in so much smoke that the lab had to be evacuated. The event was quite ironic. Apparently scientists don’t make the best coffee after all.

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