SEGMENT 2: Dr. Gibbons and Dr. Susan Harbison discuss her career path and advice for young investigators

Dr. Gary H. Gibbons, Director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute:  I also understand you have an interesting background in that you started off as an engineer before moving into genetics. Tell me a little bit about that.

Dr. Susan Harbison, NHLBI:  I did. I was an aerospace engineer, and I worked for McDonnell Aircraft Company as well as for the Naval Aviation Depot. That was for the Department of Defense. I wrote maintenance and structural repair instructions on a variety of different naval aircraft, the A4, the C130, and the H53 helicopter. I did some work too on the Tomahawk Cruise Missile. So, one thing I realized while I was doing that work was that I was really interested in those projects where I had to gain a lot of data and then try to synthesize or figure out what was going on with it. Like, looking at maintenance records to try to figure out how long a structural component would last, and therefore what the fatigue life or the flight critical part would be. So, I knew I was really interested in research. 

I was in sort of a production environment at the time. And along came the human genome project, and I really got fascinated with genetics. I thought it was really intriguing that there was the possibility that we could quantify or define risk to disease and understand, perhaps, our own evolution by comparing different organisms and different species, to also look at, or understand physiological processes like lifespan. So, I got really interested in it. I was also, I had a couple of basenjis, those are dogs, and I was showing them. So, I got very interested in animal breeding. So, I thought perhaps a venture into quantitative genetics would be well-suited to my computational and mathematical background.  So, I started working as a PhD student in a treatment case laboratory at NC State. 

Dr. Gibbons:  That’s fascinating. As part of our audience, we often have young investigators, perhaps related to your unique journey, any words of advice or wisdom that you might impart to young investigators?

Dr. Harbison:  Okay. So, one thing to definitely have in mind is a research question that you are very passionately interested in, and the willpower to follow it up with a lot of perseverance.  This is because as anyone who has spent a lot of time in the lab realizes and most experiments don’t work out. So, you have to be able to continually try, try again, in the face of repeated failure. Then the other thing to recognize too is that even when your experiment does work out, that you must realize that now you have to publish that work, and it’s not always easy to do that. Sometimes it will take a submission to several different journals before it’s accepted, especially if the work is really novel or controversial. That process usually strengthens the paper, and it’s something that you end up being proud of at the end. But for the very young investigators, there is this tendency and it was certainly true for me as well to think that well I’m going to go in and do this experiment and everything is going to be great, and a lot of times it doesn’t work out that way. 

Dr. Gibbons:  Good, good. Well thank you very much.