Decision to Study Science

When I went to Stanford, I decided I would major in science. But, ironically, in high school I really disliked biology because it was all descriptive. It was botany, it was zoology, there was never a mention of DNA or RNA. There was no molecular biology. And so, when I went to Stanford, I didn't think I would like biology, but I took biology and chemistry and physics and math. And at that point, Jim Watson's book, Molecular Biology of the Gene, came out and I read that when I was a sophomore and I realized, oh my gosh, biology can be really mechanistic. And so it was because of his book that I decided to major in biology.

So what year was it? '64?

No, it was in '67.

'67, right. He got Nobel Prize '64. Right. So, you graduated in 19-

'71.

Studying Abroad in Europe

I went abroad, I went to Germany and I lived in Germany. And that was just mind boggling because I've been raised in the Central Valley of California with intellectually rich parents, but I didn't see the sites. When I moved to Europe, I got to go to museums and see all these famous artists and all this famous works, and I was just dazzled by clearly what my uncle had always seen. And so, I spent a semester in Germany, and then I spent a summer in Austria, in Vienna, working at the end of my sophomore year. And then I returned back to my junior year at Stanford.

Working in David Clayton’s Lab

I applied to both graduate school and medical school. Actually, as I graduated, I took a year off and I applied to graduate school and medical school. And I was fortunate enough that David Clayton at Stanford Medical School allowed me to work in his lab to do research. And this is the first time I was able to do research. I really disliked the biology labs that I took in college because they required you to get a specific answer. And I wasn't interested in getting an answer that was already known. And when I got to do research with David Clayton, I realized you can ask a question about something. You can't even imagine how it works, and you can design experiments and figure out experimentally yourself what happens. And that was such a freeing feeling that I decided I wanted to go to graduate school and I went to graduate school. I was just dazzled by what research could do.

Dr. Barbara Meyer is a genetics, genomics and development professor in the molecular and cell biology department at University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as an adjunct professor in the biochemistry and biophysics department at University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine and an HHMI investigator. Dr. Meyer completed her undergraduate studies at Stanford University and began her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and finished at Harvard University. During her post-doctoral work, she researched how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans at the Cambridge University Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Dr. Sydney Brenner.

Dr. Meyer received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Stanford University in 1971, her Master of Science in Molecular Biology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1975, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in 1979. She then began post-doctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to research how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans. After completing her work at the MRC, she established her first lab at MIT to further analyze sex determination mechanisms.

Dr. Meyer was a tenured professor at MIT until 1990 where she became a genetics, genomics, and development professor at the University of California-Berkeley. In 1995, she became a member of the American Association of Cell Biology and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also became an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1997, where she and her lab successfully identified the master gene involved in sex determination. This breakthrough has helped advance research on chromosome repression and X chromosome dosage compensation.

Dr. Meyer has received many awards for her work, including the Genetics Society of America Medal in 2010, the Francis Amory Prize in Medicine and Physiology by the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2017, the E.B. Wilson Medal by the American Society for Cell Biology’s highest honor for science, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, and was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine all in 2018.