David Botstein on Becoming a Scientist
  David Botstein     Biography    
Recorded: 28 May 2003

I don’t know. I mean, I went to college with a very strong desire to be a physicist. And I discovered that physics was not for me. College was—and American colleges are very good at this. I discovered that the coding problem was an interesting problem and I got into that. What I really wanted to do is I wanted to be able to do something in which I actually contributed materially to the science. And that was what I was interested in finding and I was lucky enough to find it.

David Botstein is a prominent geneticist whose advocacy for gene mapping was crucial in laying the groundwork for the Human Genome Project. Botstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan for his research on bacteriophage synthesis. As a member of the MIT faculty he continued working with phage P22 DNA and discovered many bacterial and yeast genes. He served as Vice President of Science at Genentech before becoming professor at the Stanford School of Medicine where he led in sequencing the first large eucaryotic genome.

On July 1, 2003 he was appointed as Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. At Princeton he will continue to expound upon genome projects, explore the relationship between genes within the genome, and uncover how diseases like cancer alter the expression of genes.

Botstein researched at the CSHL while on sabbatical from 1974-1975. At the 1986 CSHL symposium on Human Genetics he played a crucial role in advocating for the Human Genome Project. While serving on the National Research Council Committee he emphasized that money be laid aside to fund the sequencing of other simpler organisms with which the human genome can be compared. Like Jim Watson, he has passionately supported the Human Genome Project since its inception.

SCIENTISTS SPEAKING ABOUT BECOMING A SCIENTIST
Left         Right