In this interview, Doug Melton recounts his path from a high‑school student more interested in sports to a scientist inspired by a Scientific American article on John Gurdon's cloning of frogs, which sparked his fascination with how differentiated cells retain all genetic information. He describes how his undergraduate experience at the University of Illinois opened his eyes to academic inquiry and how teaching undergraduate courses at Harvard keeps him focused on big, important questions. Melton explains the developmental‑biology approach to treating degenerative diseases like type 1 diabetes: instead of studying the disease after it occurs, researchers should understand how pancreatic beta cells are normally built and then apply that knowledge to regenerate the missing tissue. He credits HHMI funding and his tenured Harvard position for giving him the flexibility to shift research directions without the pressure of constant grant writing. Finally, he offers career advice, emphasizing that science can be a unique, fun, and socially beneficial path for those willing to ask fundamental questions about nature.
Chapters
In high school, I was interested in science, but probably more interested in tennis and basketball. And I had a very good experience by going to a local large state school, the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. And it was there that I really was introduced I would say, to the possibilities of an academic life, of devoting oneself to try to ask and answer a question about how the world works, or to think about philosophy, or think about other intellectual endeavors, let's call them. And I found that really life-changing. I got very excited about doing science. While I was there at the University of Illinois, I read probably a Scientific American article about cloning by John Gurdon in England, and I thought that was one of the coolest experiments I had ever read. It asked a simple question about whether the cells in our body retain all the DNA or they lose it during development. It was an elegant design, and cloning the frog showed that differentiated cells retain all the information to make a whole frog. And that really excited me about science. Some scientists don't find teaching to be a helpful or an interesting part of their job. I'm maybe unusual in that I do. For me, when I give a course, be it on stem cells and cloning or development in general, to stand up in front of the undergraduates requires that I clarify my thinking and make sure that I try to see the big picture. And the big picture, I mean specifically to include the most important questions. Sometimes it's possible after years of working in an area to find yourself down an alley which you might find interesting, but someone needs to tell you, you know, that question isn't all that important or interesting. And lecturing to Harvard undergraduates keeps me on my toes, so I really value being here at the undergraduate college, and I wouldn't change it for anything. Well, when one thinks about degenerative diseases like diabetes, where some one part of the body goes wrong, in the case of diabetes, the pancreatic beta cells being destroyed, the medical, the biomedical enterprise in a way has traditionally approached that by looking at the end stage of the disease, looking at a patient that's already suffered from it. And you might think of that in an analogy of looking at a car accident and trying to figure out how to fix the car. A developmental biologist thinks of it differently. Developmental biologists study how body parts are normally made. And so the analogy with the car accident would be if you wanted to fix a broken car, you wouldn't spend your time at car accidents. You would go to the factory and see how do you make a car. And that's really what a developmental biologist does is to to say, can we understand how the body's tissues, like the pancreatic beta cells, are normally made and then use that information to try to fix people, to cure them when they suffer from a disease where that tissue is missing? I, I like to think that the approach we've taken, which is a kind of developmental biologist approach, understanding how the pancreas is normally made, and then using that information to try to figure out how to make more of that tissue. But that was an approach that hadn't really been, let's say, popular in the scientific community, but my colleagues and I have really pushed on that idea. There are a number of other fortunate things that made it possible for us to do this. One is HHMI funding. I mean, one of the great things about HHMI is that I didn't have to give up all of my grants and write all new grants, that I am allowed the flexibility to refocus our efforts. And to be fair, I also was in the very fortunate position of being a tenured professor at Harvard, so it wasn't like I had to be concerned about career issues. I could really focus on the scientific matter. So I wouldn't want you to think that I did something heroic. I mean, for all the people who could make a shift, I was in a good position to make a shift. I think if someone's thinking about a career and you're trying to imagine what you could do in life that is unique, fun, and good for society, science has a lot to offer. If we look back on the recent history in civilization, scientific advances have had an enormous impact on how people think and act and what they do. It's also fun to try to ask and answer questions about how nature works, so I think it's a wonderful career.
