Brown and Goldstein (U Texas Southwestern): The Joys of Collaboration

Well, I think we should tell the audience how this collaboration works. Basically, we run a joint laboratory. All the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have two mentors. They don't have one mentor, so Joe and I co-mentor everyone. And when we meet with our students and fellows, 90% of the time we're both in the room together. Very frequently, we give them opposite suggestions. Like a phosphate buffer or a tris buffer? And the clever ones will do both. But the fact is, we frequently argue about the details of an experiment, but never about the general direction of where we're going. We obviously both share a certain worldview of science and how it should be done and the rigor of science, and that's something we absolutely share. But we do argue about details sometimes. A lot of the students and fellows, when they first come in, they try to play one of us off on the other when an experiment doesn't work. But they rapidly learn they can't do that. So anyway, that takes them a little while to figure out. But one thing I think, from some of our early experiments where we saw these enormous changes when we were comparing normal and FH homozygote mutant cells, sort of taught us a lesson, especially in the type of work that we do, that we always wanted to focus on large changes. And a lot of our students and fellows, when they come in, wonder why we don't pay attention to certain results when the changes are less than twofold in particular experiments. And so that's one thing that we have learned, that both of us really try to teach all of our students and postdocs about the focus on the large changes. You'll never be able to work out a mechanism on the small things. Well, you know, when we have our research conferences and the students or postdocs present to our research group, Joe and I always sit in the back of the room. If we can't see the change from the back of the room, we're not interested in it. But the fact is, I want to say something else about collaborations. When you do get an exciting result, you know, in my opinion, what makes a result exciting is that it opens up a whole new area of investigation. The most exciting results, they may solve one problem, but if they're really exciting, they open up a whole new line of inquiry. That's what makes a result exciting. Like when we did the experiment with FH homozygotes and found they couldn't bind LDL, suddenly there were a million more things that we could do to work that out. Well, the excitement when you have somebody standing right there with you and you're looking at the machine that's reading out the results and you see these all-or-none changes, and immediately there's this dialogue of, what are we going to do next? It just makes those moments, which maybe in the 40 years, maybe we've had, I don't know, 20 of those moments, maybe. So there are a lot of interesting stories that we don't have time to tell, but I would say about half the time that we've had exciting results, one of us has usually been out of town. We always, for about the first 10 years, let me just say, we would meet every Saturday and Sunday and plan the week's experiments for the next week, the way we had it set up in our early days of working in cultured fibroblasts. We would always get our assays, if they were started in the morning, we would always have the results by 4 or 5 o'clock each day. But in order to really move ahead, we had to plan experiments ahead of time. So we would sit down on the Saturday and Sunday and plan every experiment. In those days, we only had a tissue culture technician and one technician that did a lot of the biochemical assays. And about half the time, when a result would come out, one of us may not be there. And if it was an exciting result, we would always track the other one down, no matter where they were in the world, to discuss the experiments and go forth. And so I think that's a memorable thing of our early days of our collaboration. I can tell you what the difference between Joe and me is, okay? It's very simple. When we used to look at, through a phase contrast microscope, look at cells in a dish. Right, there we are. I would go to the microscope and zoom into the very highest power because I really wanted to see the detail of what a cell looked like. And then Joe would step up and immediately zoom to the lowest power to see what the pattern of it all was. And I think that that, in a way, really expresses that we do have a slightly different focus. The partnership couldn't survive if we were both identical. So obviously, each of us has some tendency to think in some different but highly complementary way. And that works out very well. We're very different in terms of our personal likes, too. Joe is a great connoisseur of art and has a wonderful art collection. And I collect grandchildren.