INTERVIEW

Tania Baker

Interviewed by Rabiya Tuma

This article also appears in BioMedNet's Conference Reporter.

Posted June 8, 2001 · Issue 104

Background

Biography
Tania Baker began her science career working as a undergraduate laboratory aide in Dick Burgess' lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she met Carol Gross. When Gross started her own lab, Baker joined as an undergraduate researcher and, according to Gross, Baker "did a dissertation's worth of work in two years while taking classes." From there Baker went to Stanford University, where she obtained her doctorate in 1998 with Arthur Kornberg on the initiation of DNA replication. She then joined Kiyoshi Mizuuchi's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as a postdoctoral fellow. She became a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in 1992 and has just received the Eli Lilly Award from the American Society for Microbiology.

What led you into research?

I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin, and I was sort of struggling to figure out what I wanted to do. I was working as a student aide in Dick Burgess' lab - that was where I met Carol [Gross]. She was a staff scientist in his lab at that time. She would come in really early - she had relatively young children at the time - so she would come in really early to do a few experiments and then go home to make breakfast for her children. I was the lab aide that cleaned up the lab, put away the dishes. So I was there early in the morning also, before the graduate student got there. That is how we got to know each other. We'd be the only two there, and we would talk, and she really encouraged me.

Who has most inspired and/or influenced your work?

I've really had great mentors. Carol, she was really the one who encouraged me to major in a hard science. I was a physical therapy major at the time, but I really liked my science courses, and she really encouraged me to go to graduate school.

I participated in this Cold Spring Harbor undergraduate research program that they had. That was really great because I had a summer to work in a different lab, and I found out that I really liked that lab as well. I really liked thinking about science, and things went well there. It was good for me to have two lab experiences as an undergraduate and to realize that I liked them both; it wasn't just that I really liked Carol.

Then I had a really incredible mentor as a graduate student, Arthur Kornberg. We worked together really well. I am really interested in how protein machines work, characterizing how biological molecules work in a more mechanistic fashion, and I learned that sort of approach first from him.

My postdoc mentor was Kiyoshi Mizuuchi and he is a really brilliant man. He thinks very hard about experiments. He has beautiful, beautiful experimental design. He still worked in the lab, and I really gained a great appreciation of experimental design and how to really look at data and to never ignore anything the experiment is trying to tell you, to thoroughly analyze any experiment that you do. You can have your ideas, but the data is really the only thing that is telling you what is going on.

What was your best experiment?

The experiment that was probably the most exciting for me was probably when I was in graduate school and I was trying to dissect the different proteins that were involved in preparing the DNA for the initiation of replication. DNA prior to replication is double-stranded, and it needs to be made into the two single-stranded pieces that are the template strands prior to replication. I was dissecting the role of different proteins in that initiation process, and there was an experiment I did using different nucleotide cofactors to try to figure out which protein was doing which activity. I had predicted which set of cofactors should allow it to happen and which wouldn't. When I saw that gel, my heart was pounding. Nobody was around to tell. I was just there in the darkroom by myself, but that was a really exciting night.

Did you run down the hall?

I think I probably did find someone to tell.

When I first started up as an assistant professor at MIT, I had a small group, and I was doing a lot of experiments myself. I usually would get my data around seven o'clock in the evening, and there was nobody in my lab anymore because I had only a couple of undergraduates and a technician at that point. I would go and show the janitor my gels.

What was your most disastrous moment in the lab?

I haven't really had a lot of disastrous moments. I tell this to the people in my lab, too. Sometimes you're disappointed - because when you get a good result then you are always trying to do this two-fold thing of trying to do the follow-up experiments to move forward from that answer, and at the same time you are trying to rule out artifactual means by which you could have gotten that result, so that you could have been tricked into thinking it was really the right thing but it really wasn't.

So you are simultaneously doing these two things and every time you do one of the experiments you sort of say: "Is this the day I am going to find out that it wasn't really true?" Even if you find out that it wasn't as exciting as you thought, I enjoy the process of going through the steps to find out. So as long as I feel like I am doing that in a rather effective manner, then I feel like I am being an effective scientist.

What are the qualities of a successful researcher?

You have to care very much about what you're doing, you have to work really hard, you have to be organized and be able to balance multiple things. I think a good memory really helps because you're sorting through data and literature and remembering little bits of facts or observations and trying to bring them together into some sort of pattern. I think a vivid memory or imagination can be helpful.

And dealing with stress well can be a big help, too, because there is always something new and exciting going on. There's always a rejection or disappointment as well as the good stuff going on, so you have to roll with the punches.

Which scientific idea (yours or others') do you regret the most?

I don't have very much time to think about the big picture of scientific discourse these days, but I think that the large amount of press [regarding speculations] that HIV wasn't really causative of the disease AIDS was really harmful. That's one that comes to mind, because it hurts a lot of people and slows the progress that can be made against a terrible epidemic.

What is the greatest unanswered scientific question?

There are a lot. Obviously neurobiology is a big thing these days, the molecular basis of consciousness.

There are many things that the basic principles we do understand are not sufficient to explain.

What are your current research interests?

My lab is focusing basically on two areas. One is on the mechanism of transposition. How DNA elements move from one site to another in the genome. We are interested in understanding the mechanism of catalysis. Then we are also very interested in how mobile genetic elements, in general, communicate with the genome. Most of them do not insert into a very sequence specific manner, but they show different types of regional specificity and that is a very interesting problem.

We're very interested in understanding the true mechanistic basis of how these enzymes of the Hsp family can unfold other proteins. How the machine actually works and how it uses energy to do that. And there are a lot of questions with regard to substrate specificity that we are working hard on.

What are your scientific plans for the next five years?

I think that my scientific plans are fairly similar to what I've been doing over the last five years: to have my research group at MIT, to train my people, help them figure out what they want to do at the same time as figure out the answer to some of these questions. No big change.

If you could work with any scientist (historical or current), who would it be?

That is something I have not thought about at all. I actually feel very fortunate to be working in the MIT community where there are really extraordinary scientists and there are really bright, engaged people. I think that is a very good thing about our current community.

Who awarded you your first grant and what was it for?

Before I came to MIT, I wrote a regular NIH proposal, an RO1, on trying to figure out the mu transposase active sites. And that was funded the first time around, so I was very fortunate.