Ron Evans grew up in Los Angeles and became a scientist studying how hormones control genes. At Salk Institute, he discovered nuclear hormone receptors, tiny genetic switches that regulate networks of genes, work that won him the Lasker Award, often called the American Nobel.
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I was born in Los Angeles, raised in Los Angeles, and went to school there. My father was a physician and built a career there as a medical doctor, and I had a brother and a sister. We were raised relatively modestly while my father was building his medical practice. I was always good in the sciences. There was no mentoring by my father, particular encouragement to do that, but science and math were strengths. And so I kind of tracked along that, and I presumed by the time I was having my career crisis of what I would do with my life at, in the 9th grade, that I would go into some type of science. I did an undergraduate major in microbiology, and during that time I began to do research in a laboratory as an undergraduate research project and published a paper and became more committed to research as a career. And so I had a very productive time as a student. The first thing I did after completing my graduate studies at UCLA was to choose a lab to do postgraduate studies, Jim Darnell's lab at Rockefeller University. At that stage, I basically lived in the lab. I loved the lab and I spent all my time there, probably 60 or 70 hours a week. And many of us did. And the goal for my work at that time was to understand how hormones control the genome. And that was a very avant-garde question at that stage. Little was known about how genes were controlled. So when I came to the Salk Institute as a young assistant professor, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and began studying how hormones control the activity of genes. And that directly led to the series of experiments on the area of my major interest, which is— are called nuclear hormone receptors. And these receptors are small genetic switches that control the activity of networks of genes. The Lasker Award in basic medical research was given to myself and two other colleagues for our work in understanding and discovering these molecular switches that respond to hormones. The Lasker Prize is often considered the American Nobel, and the reason for that is because the Lasker committee or the jury is comprised of a collection of Nobel laureates and outstanding biomedical scientists and leaders in the country, and takes many years of consideration because they pore over the award in exquisite detail. So receiving the Lasker Award is a tremendous honor for me and great recognition for our field of hormone signaling, a field that has been very exciting and has made tremendous advances. It's always nice to be honored. I have a daughter, and my wife Ellen is a scientist as well. She got a PhD in molecular neurobiology, and she studies the biology of the stress system in the brain, which is a very interesting area. So we're kind of a science family. I'm running a big lab. My wife is running a very active outreach program. And my daughter, who has an excellent head for science, is an art history major at Columbia University and enjoying it very well. We do a fair amount of traveling together as well. We all love to ski, we love to travel, we love to travel internationally. My daughter, being raised in a science family, and has traveled around the world basically with us. I don't look at this as a job, and I don't think I ever have looked at it. And so for me, the challenge of understanding the unknown Being able to find or work out a new fact from nature, to be able to describe something in words and being the first to know that is just exciting. It's an age-old hunt for knowledge. We're trying to understand life. When you make a discovery, which is a fact, it gives you some profound philosophical insight into what we are and who we are and why we're here. So it's not a job, it's just really, it's the ultimate challenge for me.
