From the scientist’s view: a conversation with… Buzz Baum
Buzz Baum is a Group Leader in the Cell Biology Division at the LMB.
Buzz completed his Ph.D. working with Paul Nurse studying the cell cycle in fission yeast. Shifting focus to cell shape, Buzz moved to Harvard Medical School to work with Norbert Perrimon on cell shape in flies. He started his own research group at University College London, now looking at cancer cells. In 2020, he moved his group to the LMB’s Cell Biology Division.
Inspired by discussions with his cousin David Baum (more on this below), Buzz changed his research focus to the evolutionary path of eukaryotic cells, crucial to the development of life on Earth. In looking to explain the complexity of eukaryotic cells, the pair put forth an ‘inside-out’ argument, whereby an ancestral cell slowly enclosed neighbouring bacterium to create internal membrane compartments. Now, Buzz’s group works to further test this theory using archaeal cells as a model to study evolution.
We recently talked to Buzz about his research and career in science. Here are some of the interview highlights, or scroll to the bottom of the page to find the full video.
What is your earliest memory of science or scientific discovery?
I’ve always loved nature, but one thing that happened to me when I was a kid, is that I couldn’t sleep one night, and my dad said that he had heard an owl on his way back home. He said, “Why don’t you go to bed and see if you can listen and hear the owl?” He thought I would go to sleep listening for the owl, but I didn’t. I got out of bed, opened the window and looked out into the dark with the curtain behind me. Suddenly there was a bang and I fell backwards off the chair. The owl hit my window and fell sideways. We spent the night sort of staring at each other, both a bit stumped, and in the morning it flew away.
I thought that was quite a formative experience because it made me think that nature is not just something that you look at – it also looks at you. In some sense, we share a planet and organisms are just as alive as us. They have desires and autonomy like we do. For me, that’s always been an interesting thing about doing biology, is this idea that organisms aren’t just things you study, they’re real entities unto themselves.
Has there been a pivotal experiment or moment that really moved your research and understanding forward?
The major thing actually happened in 2014, in discussions with my cousin. He’s a biologist, but he’s an evolutionary biologist. When he was a student, he had this idea about a way of thinking about evolution of complex cells. I was always quite interested in his perspective. Then in 2013/14 we started talking about the origins of complex cells; about his idea that instead of one cell swallowing another one, they could have grown together to form complex cells. We spent a year and a half working together on this as an idea, reading hundreds of papers to try to think is there a way to reconcile all that data with a new way of thinking about how origin of complex cells arose?
That was really exciting because the problem that I always have with cell biology is that a lot of time when you teach cell biology, you list all the things that cells contain; they have Golgi, endoplasmic reticulum, and endoplasmic membrane, and it’s really boring as a student because you have to learn all these things. But when we started thinking about the origins and having a model, it suddenly became clear that there are ways to think about it in a logical way. Because if you understand how things arose instead of just being a list of things that are there, you suddenly have a perspective – the cell makes sense in the context of its history. So that was super exciting. And in a way that pivoted my whole lab.
I spent years after that, trying to test the model directly. That proved almost impossible, but then we realised that because our cells have their origins in archaea, we could just do archaeal cell biology. Since then, there have been a few things where sometimes that’s felt like a stupid thing to do – to pivot completely to do archaea was a kind of slightly mad. But there were a few moments where we thought it’s going to work.
One of those moments was when it took us five years to build a microscope that worked at 75 degrees centigrade, because that’s really hot and water evaporates fast and the cells die. After five years, we finally got it working. The trick was simple. You have to heat the lid, not the base. We heat the lid, suddenly, we can image them and when we saw the cells dividing, one archaea cell becoming two, I immediately felt like we made a good decision, because they do it in a way that’s like an animal cell, like a cancer cell. So we thought if we can look at archaea dividing live, we can start to understand the origins of complex cell division, which is what many of the people in the lab are studying. That was a moment where I thought this mad decision we made to switch direction to archaea may be a good one.
Who has been the biggest influence on your scientific career – your ‘scientific hero’? How has their work influenced you or made your research possible?
In terms of scientific heroes, Paul Nurse, who I did my PhD with, he’s a brilliant mentor and scientist. He really likes students. You feel known by him. He knows your flaws, which is a bit worrying as a student, but it’s very useful because he really helped me to shape the way I think. He knew the things I did badly and helped with those. And I try to be the same kind of supervisor as Paul.
Also, in Paul’s lab, there’s always this love for yeast. The idea that you love your organism and you really think what it’s like to be that organism, I think that was something I really got from him. Finally, from Paul, is that also a bit like physicists, they’re always asking the simplest possible question. So instead of asking, ‘What does this pathway do in cancer cells under this certain condition and methods of metastasis?’, in Paul’s lab we’d always ask something really sort of stupid. Like, ‘If you make cells longer, do they get wider?’ Or ‘If a cell is going faster, does it divide at the same size?’ And what I like about archaea is that because we know nothing, we can ask those simple questions again and make new answers. How does one cell become two? How, when you become two, do you make sure each of the two cells gets half and not less than half or more than half? All those really simple questions, I think are really the things that I first got from Paul’s lab.
What do you think makes a good scientist?
My two brothers and my mum are artists. So when I think about what a career in science is like, it is a bit like being an artist, where the real great thing about it is that you can do whatever you want. You can wake up in the morning, do an experiment you thought of (I tell my lab usually not to do that), but you definitely can. And sometimes those things change the way the path of science goes. That freedom is what science is. And artists look at the world and try to understand it. We do the same with slightly different tools. We look at the world and try to understand it. That to me is what’s special about science. It’s a funny career path, but you’re free.
I think that the thing you need to be a scientist then, from my perspective, is you need to be really curious about the world. You want to be free to study the world and see things for the first time. And if that’s enough for you, to be the first person to see this new thing and understand it, maybe make mistakes, and also have time where you don’t understand the thing. That journey of exploration – if that animates you, you can do science.
What do you think will be the most significant scientific breakthrough in the next 5-10 years?
Thinking about scientific breakthroughs in the future is hard. One of the amazing things about being a person in the world, you realise the future is completely unknown. The past is done. It’s very hard for me to say what I think will be future breakthroughs. I think neuroscience is clearly booming, but the other area I think is booming, which we’re moving into, is ecology. Cell biology in the environment. I don’t think there’ll be a big breakthrough there in terms of discovery, necessarily. I don’t know what the breakthrough would be. But I do think in terms of studying organisms, in context of ecology, environment and evolution is going to be a new way of looking at things. So instead of studying organisms you’ve taken from the environment and put in the lab, we’re going to almost move the lab into the wild and study, for example, the microbiota living in our guts, how that affects human health. That’s two different organisms, us and the microbiota living together, depends on what you eat, on the weather, all these sorts of things – that’s biology in context,
We’re trying to do that, but I think lots of other people are. For me, that’s a very exciting way of studying biology as it really should be studied. How do living things live? That hasn’t been done much, but it’s starting. That’s what I think will be exciting in the next five years. I would expect lots of places to start working on cells in ecological situations and in the context of evolution.
Buzz was interviewed for the LMB Alumni Newsletter on 8th November 2023
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