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Second-Career Scientists

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By Chris Woolston

Long before Danny Kohl embarked on a successful career as a biologist and a biophysicist, he drove a cab in Berkeley, Calif. (That was back in the early 1950s, when traffic in the Bay Area still moved.) Before that, he worked at a nearby Chrysler plant that abruptly shut down.

A longtime coordinator of undergraduate research at Washington University in St. Louis (and now a professor emeritus), Kohl has spent his academic career uncovering scientific potential in unexpected places: ditch diggers, older homemakers, disadvantaged kids with borderline grades but plenty of pluck.

Kohl is living proof that there's room for second chances in science. While plenty of scientists jump ship for careers in medicine or writing or law, other professionals end up going in the opposite direction. Unfulfilled with their current jobs, they feel drawn to physics or chemistry or biology. And, like Kohl, they often display unusual determination and enthusiasm when they get there.

Academic science is a tough calling, Kohl says, but it can make for a great second career. "Unless you suffered some sort of brain damage as a child, you can do science," he says. "You just have to want it bad enough."

Even if you want it bad enough, some second-career scientists run into difficulties adjusting to the academic world. One Ph.D. scientist contacted for this column said she didn't want to discuss her former career in medicine because she says she often encounters "bias" from colleagues who followed a more traditional career path into academe.

Still other graduate students who have made midcareer shifts into science say they have encountered little resistance. Kohl has helped many nontraditional students start new lives in the laboratory. And when those students started to doubt themselves, Kohl would often remind them of his own past. As he puts it, "If an ex-cab driver can do this, so can you."

His own career aspirations in academic science began to emerge as he approached his 30s. He was ready for a little more stability for himself and his family, so he decided to go back to school to study engineering, a hot field in the age of Sputnik.

He floundered in mechanical drawing ("my hands just poured with sweat," he says), but another required course -- physics -- quickly grabbed his imagination. "I didn't know anything about physics when I started," he says. "It was a total blank. I remember coming home and being really excited. I asked my wife, 'Do you know what forces are on you in an elevator?'"

From Games to the Genome

Back in the mid-1990s, Bill Gates unwittingly drove a great mind into the biological sciences. Jim Kent, a programmer who wrote several successful animation programs for computer games -- including the Autodesk Animator -- was burning out in the world of Windows. Codes needed to be rewritten every three months to keep up with constant "upgrades," and everything just seemed unnecessarily complicated.

One day, Kent received the developer's platform for Microsoft Windows 95, which filled 12 CD's. It was just too much. Twelve CD's? The entire human genome would fit on one CD, he thought to himself. It wouldn't be the last time that the human genome crossed his mind.

At the age of 36, Kent quit the computer business and signed up for a Biology 101 class at the College of Marin, a community college not far from San Francisco. He had a master's degree in math, he read biology textbooks in his spare time, and he pretty much destroyed the grading curve for the rest of the class.

He also had big ambitions: "I was probably the only one taking Biology 101 with the intention of becoming a research scientist in the next couple of years," he says. Sure enough, he entered the Ph.D. biology program at the University of California at Santa Cruz just two years later.

All he did there was write a computer program that could assemble the huge jumble of DNA information from the Human Genome Project into a cohesive whole. The New York Times called him the "hero" of the genome project -- not bad for a grad student working on a second career. Kent got his Ph.D. in 2002 and still works on human-genome research at Santa Cruz.

Lampreys and Lawyers

It's hard to believe now, but Jeff Jorgensen wasn't always obsessed with lampreys. In another life, the graduate student in biology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spent nine years working as a book buyer for the Elliot Bay Book Company, a Seattle bookstore.

He would read advance copies of books and decide which titles to carry on the shelves -- pretty good duty for a guy with a love for literature and a bachelor's degree in economics. But something funny happens to people who read books all day. They start getting ideas.

Jorgensen's mind really started to spin after reading a series of books on conservation and natural history, notably David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo (Scribner, 1996), which chronicles the work of conservationists worldwide.

"That one really spoke to me," Jorgensen says. Before long, he was acing biology classes at a nearby community college.(For the record, not everyone who reads The Song of the Dodo is inspired to become a scientist. Some are inspired to become science writers.)

Today, Jorgensen is a 39-year-old graduate student on the verge of getting his master's degree. He spends most of his time modeling the population dynamics of parasitic lampreys and the species they prey on in the Great Lakes.

He's fascinated with his work, and he feels well-prepared to find a good job with a state agency. "I can't believe I'm getting paid to do what I do," he says. "I'm very lucky to have found something that's my passion."

Speaking of creatures that feed off others, 32-year-old Damon Thurston of Menlo Park, Calif., is ready to get out of the legal business. After five years practicing law, he says he was "tired of being a parasitic force on society." Like Jorgensen, he found his true calling in books. "I started reading Richard Feynman and Timothy Ferris, and I realized that I was interested in practicing physics," he says.

A bachelor's degree in environmental studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara gave him a little exposure to science, but he wasn't exactly ready to jump into the laboratory. Looking for guidance, he contacted Susan Lea, the graduate adviser for the department of physics and astronomy at San Francisco State University, a department known for "retraining" people from other fields.

Lea told him what he needed to do to start preparing for a career in physics (essentially math, math, and more math), and he was soon on his way. He still practices law part time, but he's looking forward to getting his master's degree at San Francisco State and moving on to a job in industry. "People say you can do anything with a law degree, but that's not true," he says. "You can only do one thing. A physics degree really does give you options."

Getting It Right the Second Time

"Second-career scientists" like Thurston often bring considerable strengths to their field, Lea says.

"They have a more mature outlook on things, and they let the younger students know that you really have to work sometimes," she says. "Some young people have an idea that this is supposed to be easy. Then they get to graduate school and become resentful."

For his part, Thurston believes those years in law school made him a better scientist. "It's easier for me to stand up and talk to people, and I'm a better writer than most," he says.

So far, Thurston, Kent, and Jorgensen all say they feel accepted in their new careers. "If you have something to contribute, [your background] doesn't matter," Jorgensen says.

A certain ex-cab driver puts it another way: "Research is for you if you love it."