I Fell in Love by Reading his Papers

I of course read all the literature at the time on dosage conversation in flies and X-inactivation. And he wrote, Tom Cline, wrote all these single author, extremely dense, extremely rigorous genetics papers about sex determination, dosage compensation. And I thought he must be 80 years old because who has single author papers that are that brilliant? And I just couldn't imagine who this person was because everyone who had such seminal contributions were much older than I was. And because I went to scientific meetings, I eventually met him and discovered he was only three years older than me. I said, this is impossible. I was extremely intimidated and I followed his work and followed his work, and I had fallen in love with his papers. I'd fallen in love with him through his papers. This is a really nerdy thing to say.

I Admired his Creativity and Kindness

I think I told you I fell in love with his mind by reading his papers because I was trying to figure out my own experiments in nematodes and I was hoping that I might have results as interesting as his. And he was so creative, his genetics were so creative, hard for people to understand, but I could understand it and I just had complete respect for him. And when I met him and he was such a kind person, I couldn't believe it, but I was still scared until years later. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I just admired him. And then we discovered that when I worked in Ptashne's lab, it was actually one door down from where he was working in his lab for a PhD. And we missed seeing each other by just a few months. And so, it's kind of amazing that we ended up together.

I Was Intimidated When We First Met

So, when I finally met him, by that point, I was actually a postdoc when I first met him. and I already had a job as a professor, I hadn't taken it yet. So, he was kind of amazed that here I was a postdoc, but I already had my job lined up. But he was this great figure in the field. And so, I was really intimidated and stayed intimidated for years until finally I had the courage to tell him many years later that I really liked him. He was giving a seminar at Harvard when I was a professor at MIT. So, I went to lunch with him and told him how Mark Ptashne invited me over to talk to him. And I had gone to lunch with him and I told him I was really excited about his work and him, and eventually he invited me to give a seminar at Princeton. And this is embarrassing, but during my seminar, I told him after my seminar, I told him I was in love with him.

Falling in Love and Building a Life Together

Yes. I told him I was in love with him and I hardly knew him. And so, we started going out. I was in love with your papers, and then I found you and you were such a kind person, and you were only three years older than me. I couldn't believe it. And so, we started going out and a month later we decided to get married, and that was 37 years ago. Oh yeah, so I, at that point, was an assistant professor at MIT and he was a tenured professor at Princeton and we commuted for four years. So, we lived apart because I needed to actually get my lab together and be successful as a scientist and publish all my work so that we could go on the job market together. And so, after four years, we went on the job market together, and both of us got jobs at Berkeley.

Helping Each Other Write

Oh, we do. We do. We do. But we don't always talk science. He does. He does, absolutely. I read all of his papers. I read all of his papers and edited his papers. He read my papers. We criticize each other's papers. We are great colleagues for each other. Mark Ptashne was a difficult person to work for, but he was a great person to work for because he demanded clarity in writing and he liked to simplify things, sometimes more than I liked, but he simplified things and made you write really clearly and that was amazing training for me. And Tom had these brilliant papers, but he needed some help making them simpler to understand because his mind was so smart, he could understand everything. And so, we spent a lot of time helping each other write.

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.