H. Robert Horvitz ’68

INTERVIEWER: Today is March 2nd, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. I'm speaking today with H. Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of cancer biology at MIT, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002 for discovering and characterizing the genes controlling cell death in microscopic worms known as the C. elegans. Bob, who's a 1968 graduate of MIT, is also an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and for the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and a member of the MIT Center for Cancer Research. Bob, thank you for talking to us.

In your Nobel speech, you noted that your parents raised you to ask two questions, how and why. How important are those questions in science and what makes them important?

HORVITZ: Well, I think I would back up from that a moment and say what my parents taught me most was to respect and appreciate other people -- something that is important in science and life well beyond that. Asking questions about what goes on around you is something that I believe all people should do.

But, of course, asking and then attempting to find ways to answer questions is at the core of scientific inquiry. So growing up hearing what is this, how does it happen, what's the basis of it, why, how? Those are really at the core of science and I think although we certainly didn't know it at the time were key in setting the stage for the subsequent scientific careers, not only of myself, but also of my little sister.

INTERVIEWER: Who went into biology also.

HORVITZ: Who went into biology also, although with a completely different history, a completely different set of early interest, and a completely different approach and interest in the field of biology. But yes, we both ended up as scientists, we both ended up as biologists, and people are often amused when they discover we're related.

INTERVIEWER: You also said that your parents' belief in you gave you the confidence to go into science. Can you talk about the role that self-confidence plays in science research?

HORVITZ: Well, again, I would say confidence is key in all walks of life, and it's just very important for any individual, and in science in particular where you're exploring the unknown. You have to have the faith that one, you can do something, and two, that it might be of some earthly interest, at least to you, if not beyond that. And what my parents did, and, you know, I think it's something all good parents should do, is basically reinforce over and over the statement "do your best -- if you do your best, that's all we ask." And whatever happened, sometimes good, sometimes not so good, they would say "if you're doing your best, we support you."

INTERVIEWER: That's actually a heavy burden I think to feel like you've got this whole open-ended quest to do well again and again.

HORVITZ: But the best doesn't necessarily mean be manic and unilateral -- best means approach life in some way that's reasonable. So I think I learned from them not only to strive, but also to balance. And, you know, they again, taught me about people -- you know, do things that are going to be helpful to people. My father always had a smile for everybody around, he learned bits and pieces of more languages than I can even name and could often talk to people a little bit in each of their own languages. And he carried in his pocket candy, and if he saw a kid he'd give the kid candy, if he went to a teller at the bank and the teller was scowling, before he'd say anything he'd take out a piece of candy and the person would smile, and, you know, that is doing your best, it's doing your best in all walks.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me some more about your parents -- who were they, what did they do?

HORVITZ: Both of my parents were first generation born in the US from parents who had come to the US from Eastern Europe, basically. My father wanted fundamentally to be a professional baseball player, but he couldn't see -- his eyes were at least as bad as mine, and he also was too poor to afford a pair of glasses. So he didn't get to play a lot of baseball, and at one point in school one of his teachers actually bought him a pair of glasses, which helped him with the school work, but I guess not enough to do baseball. He was always, again, asking questions like why. He was very interested in science. He wanted to become a chemist, but he had to earn a living, and so he didn't do that. He went to night school in basically accounting and he became involved in finance, eventually moving to be vice president of a company in the US based upon his knowledge of accounting and finance. And again, with all of that he really dedicated himself to the field he was working in.

One of the things that has amused me is that in this context he ended up at a variety of meetings where finance and accounting were intersecting with the emerging world of computing machines, first accounting machines, and then a little bit later computers. And one of the final sentences in an article he wrote in the '50s, which has always echoed with me, is he says "The possibility that computers might have business applications is something that should be considered seriously." So that was prescient, and what was striking about him that I think really I absorbed was the fact that he loved numbers. He played with numbers, numbers were his friends, he always enjoyed anything that involved numbers, and I think he instilled that interest in numbers in me and no doubt was very much related to what much later eventually sent me to MIT.

My mother grew up at a time when opportunities for women I think were rather limited. She became a school teacher, a very dedicated, and from what her students have told me, the ones that I've encountered, a very good school teacher. Her area of expertise was really English literature, but as elementary school teachers progressed, they often moved to areas that they had less training in, and she ended up as a teacher basically of science, and went and got a Masters Degree in astronomy at one point so that she could better teach science. And so she was always at home, you know, thinking first about English and then later about science, and I grew up in an environment where I had the math from my father -- I also had the English from my father. He could work a double crostic or a crossword puzzle, even one of the diagramless crossword puzzles by just sitting down and filling it in -- never flinched, never erased anything, he just did the whole thing. His knowledge was amazing, and he was vastly smarter than I ever hope to be. And so he had the combination of the English and interest in science, and my mother had the interest in English and science, and all of that instilled in me I think a great respect for both areas of inquiry.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any friends or relatives who were scientists?

HORVITZ: Yes and no. Not really any friends or relatives, except a cousin who was a few years older than me and actually very instrumental. And he, like I, had grown up in Chicago. He, unlike I, was very involved in sports. He became a serious football player who was recruited to play college football, broke his nose three times, decided this was not the way to live, went back to school and became a biologist. And he was the one who interested me in biology, he supplied me with fruit flies drosophila to do a science fair project when I was in high school. And much later when I was thinking about what to do for postdoctoral research, I talked extensively with him and he encouraged me to basically enter the area that has really been the basis of my career ever since. So, he was very influential in science, and also he moved to Europe for his own scientific inquiries and encouraged me with the idea that broadening one's experience in that way would be a good thing.

INTERVIEWER: With all these little relationships to science, it wasn't really till your senior year of college that you decided to head in that direction yourself. Are you surprised in looking back that it took that long for it to flourish within you for that kind of passion to begin to develop?

HORVITZ: I'm not sure that I've ever, to this day, decided on a direction. I've tried to follow my interests, and my interests have always been very broad. So, as an undergraduate, I majored at MIT both in math and in economics, and I took many courses in both computer science and psychology. So there were a variety of interests. I became very involved in student government, and that led me into thinking about other possible professional pursuits, maybe law, maybe business. There was some temptation of medicine. So there were many, many different fields that I was considering. And indeed, it wasn't until my senior year that I ever took a course in biology. I had in my junior year been exposed to an unusual course that was co-taught from the humanities electrical engineering and psychology departments by Jerry Lettvin, of course, called "The Biological Basis of Perception and Knowledge." And that intrigued me with the possibility of maybe using some of my math to understand biological problems of the brain, but it wasn't really a course in biology.

I did take a course in biology my first semester of my senior year because an ex-roommate and good friend, Al Singer, said to me biology had become interesting. My exposure to biology previously in high school was basically dried plants and stuffed animals and a lot of formaldehyde and it didn't seem very lively. But I took a course from Cy Levinthal when I was a senior, and I loved the relationships between chemistry and biology that emerged very early on in that course.

And, in fact, it was Cy who was pivotal in encouraging me to pursue a possible interest in biology. I went to him six months, I'm sorry, six weeks into the course and I said Doctor Levinthal, I'm taking 701, your introductory biology course. I'm majoring in math and economics, I know nothing about biology other than what you've lectured on, and I'm thinking maybe I want to go to graduate school in biology, am I crazy? And what Cy said was my undergraduate degree was in physics, my PhD is in physics, and I'm teaching your biology course -- you would be starting early. And importantly, in response to my question, he said, and I'll write you a letter of recommendation. So, that moved me into biology.

But even then, it was an experiment. I had no idea if I would like it, I had no idea if I would be able to do it, and I felt that if it didn't work after a year of graduate school I could go back and do something else, maybe go work for IBM -- something I had done for four summers before, or pursue some other interest. So it wasn't a decision, it was an experiment, and frankly, that's the way I regard all of life -- there shouldn't be decisions, there should be experiments, and if the experiment doesn't work, you do something else.

INTERVIEWER: You seem to have always been an incredibly hard worker. You talk in your Nobel biography statement about when you studied, I think, in high school, how you tried to think of every possible question a teacher might ask on a test and then wrote down both the questions and the answers, how did you develop that approach and why -- I mean it seemed some very focused and disciplined.

HORVITZ: Excessive might be a description. But I tended to do things very thoroughly. And in studying I found that writing things out put them in my brain much better than simply reading them. And so I tried to write out what I could. I would write notes from course material, and the easiest way to study I found was to think about what kind of questions might the teacher ask. So I would write them down, and then having written them down, I would write down the answers. And then I would study these until I could do all answers from all of the questions and all questions from all of the answers. And it probably was a bit of overkill, but frankly in the grand scheme of things, I don't even think I spent all that much time on it.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Did your friends work that hard? I mean did you have a circle of people, or did they say gee, whiz, why do you do this, or did they not even notice?

HORVITZ: I don't know if it ever was a topic of conversation. Certainly, my friends were highly varied in the degree to which they took academics seriously -- some were very, very serious. One of my high school friends was Marty Chalfie who received the Nobel Prize recently in chemistry, and he was a very serious student, he was also a very serious swimmer. Others of my friends were not serious at all. So I think we each did our own thing. It wasn't that we did this together, but rather that we each pursued what we thought was appropriate.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think made you work so hard? Does it get back to your parents telling you to do your best, and when you thought about best, it was really saying I need to think about what it takes and do it?

HORVITZ: You know, so this is basically a nature/nurture question. So, to what extent was this intrinsic in me, and to what extent was it imposed by my environment, and as an experimental scientist, I can say there's no experiment, there's no control, so there is no me separate from either my environment or my parents. So I can't really say what it was. There's no question that my parents instilled in me a sense of responsibility and a desire to "do my best," but at the same time, you know, there was something in me that really did drive me to do this, and in thinking about it, you know, my sister also has always been an incredibly hard worker and very, very dedicated and probably works harder than I do to this day.

INTERVIEWER: Do you employ this kind of exhaustive approach in your science and is part of what's contributed to your success, do you think?

HORVITZ: I think I've always tried to be thorough in my science, but it's not possible to be exhaustive, because the universe of science is far too broad. So what I try to do is to learn things broadly, think about problems in terms of what seems appropriate to try to approach, and again, do my best. But exhaustive is not possible in this context.

INTERVIEWER: Although, I mean in thinking about your initial research with the worms in England, it sounded like one of the attractions of studying that, both for other people who focused on it and for you, was that there were a limited number of cells in this animal, and that you could in some way begin to take them systematically and look at all of them, which I think you did do, which in the end turned out to be an enormous amount of work, but a surmountable one.

HORVITZ: Right. So, the animal I worked on, the roundworm, the nematode C. elegans, Coenorhabditis elegans, indeed is the simplest animal that has been studied in any detail at all, and that was what really drew me to this animal. I mean just as an example, if you look at a nervous system and you say how many nerve cells do we have -- we have about 10 to the twelfth, 10 to the eleventh to 10 to the twelfth, a billion billion nerve cells. How many does C. elegans have? 302. And we know them all -- each one has a name and it's been possible to define the entire wiring diagram of the animal. So, this cellular simplicity really offered in the beginning the promise, and today it's much a reality of an analysis at a level of resolution that simply isn't possible with more complicated animals. And, in fact, I have one scientific publication in Chinese, which I can not read and I wrote in English and was translated by a student, and the title of it is Toward the Complete Understanding of an Animal. And the promise of the article was that because C. elegans is so simple, we could imagine understanding its biology at a level of resolution that couldn't be matched by any of the other organisms that tend to be studied.

INTERVIEWER: I think one of the things that was interesting to me as I looked at your career, was that you do pay attention to detail, and yet you seem to keep the big picture in mind, too -- it's the forest and the trees. And you've said that in graduate school you learned to focus on important questions, ones you thought tractable, but also worth pursuing. How did you learn that? I mean that seems like an important lesson.

HORVITZ: Well, I have been extremely fortunate in my mentors throughout my career. I mean as an undergraduate here at MIT I did a thesis in mathematical economics with Bob Solow. The experience could not have been more stimulating or more humbling. I then went to Harvard and worked with Jim Watson, James Watson of Watson and Crick, double helix, and Wally Gilbert, one of the pioneers in methodologies for DNA sequencing. And after that, I went and worked as a postdoc with Sydney Brenner, who is a brilliant and highly creative scientist. So, all of these people, plus mentors I've had since then, have been extremely influential. And I think the basic principles of how to approach science were really principles I learned from Jim Watson. And what Jim said in essence, was first you ought to do something that's tractable -- the most important problem in the world you won't get any place if you can't do something. And second, it's just as easy to work on an important problem than an unimportant problem, and so do something tractable that's important. Now, identifying tractable and identifying important is another issue, but as principles, I think those two are fundamental and really what I've tried to adhere to throughout my career, and I think they came from Jim.

INTERVIEWER: Do you recall how he conveyed it? Was it over a year or two of working, or did you sit over a beer one day and he said let me tell you about science and how to approach it? How did it come through?

HORVITZ: I'm sure it was neither. It was implicit and everything that went on, and Jim has never been one subtle with words, and I'm sure he made those statements explicitly many times, not casually over a beer, but just in the context of the science that went on in the laboratory.

INTERVIEWER: And those are probably lessons that are appropriate for graduate level researchers to think about more so than undergraduates? I mean in thinking about education and what to give students when, and as you're training researchers, even undergraduates at MIT, are those things you can begin to introduce or is it too early?

HORVITZ: I think the ideas can be introduced very early, but the opportunity to really explore, and in particular, to make mistakes and to de-bug problems and to then move forward require more time than most undergraduates have, at least in biomedicine. So, they can get exposed to the principles, but it's very hard to learn by doing in a project that's independent and where you are responsible, you take ownership for solving the problems, and that's what you really have to learn to do to become a good scientist.

INTERVIEWER: Are there ever times when you don't see a big important question that also seems doable or tractable and where you might be tempted to say well, I'll work on these smaller things for the moment and it'll come along, or do you sit back then and say hm, it just doesn't pay to do it that way, let me just sort of bide my time, or what's the pacing like?

HORVITZ: Small and big are not two distinct categories in this context in science, and they interplay. So, in order to make any kind of big discovery, you have to be doing something that's very nitty-gritty. At the same time, and something I believe very firmly, if you pursue at an appropriate high level of resolution and analysis, something in detail that interfaces with a problem that's general, you're going to find out something new and that something new is going to be important.

So, I think to really be an experimental biologist, you have to love the mundane, you have to love doing the boring, you have to love doing the same thing over and over again just because it's fun and you get a little bit of a puzzle here and there. That people who go into this research because they want to make a breakthrough that's going to land them on the New York Times front page, I think hardly ever make progress. You have to go into it because there's something in you that says you like the puzzle solving of doing science, and if you do that well and choose a problem, you're going to find something that will be interesting. But it should be all balanced in an appropriate way.

INTERVIEWER: As you began your research on the worms in England, how conscious of all of these questions and answers were you? I mean part of it was you had though about where did you want to live and where was there a lab you could work in, so there were lots of factors coming into play, but were you also thinking about these lessons from Dr. Watson?

HORVITZ: Going to England was a personal experiment, just like entering biology was. I had actually never been in Cambridge, England, I had never met Sydney Brenner, I did something I would never advise any of my own graduate students to do, which is just go dive in and see what happens. And what appealed to me was the level of unknown and the apparent potential of working with this organism. But the animal was essentially unexplored experimentally. The techniques for its study were almost nonexistent. People told me that it would likely be a career dead-end to go to England and work with Sydney Brenner on a worm. But when I looked at it, it seemed to me that there was potential. So, it was potential to do something different and it appealed to me, but I had no idea if it was going to work, and again, I figured if it wasn't working, I would find something else to do.

I can say that the group of us working on the worm in these early days never dreamed that we would make contributions that have gotten the kinds of recognition that the contributions I've achieved, and we talked about that -- I remember talking about it with John Sulston in Stockholm. You know, who would have ever guessed, and the answer is not us. We were doing something because we found it interesting, we found it challenging, and it was coming from within us to pursue it. And I think one has to remember, these were very early days, and when you do something very early, it's not popular. By the time it's popular it's late.

So, people were very skeptical. It was exceedingly uncertain. We had no idea where it was going to go. We had no idea if we would find anything interesting, we have no idea if we would find anything general -- we were working on a worm. And yet what emerged were findings that are of essentially universal nature in animal biology and fundamental to human disease and have opened whole areas of inquiry, and also novel approaches to human therapeutics. Could we have known that in the beginning? Absolutely not. Could we have hoped we would find something of interest? Sure, but we did it because our hearts drove us to do it.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think you felt less pressure in terms of time and maybe money than graduate students or postdocs do today, that there was something -- that there's something now that just pushes -- puts more pressure on people to feel that there are going to be payoffs when they make decisions to take next steps that you didn't, or did people feel it then too, and you were more of a free spirit in some ways?

HORVITZ: I think there's a lot more pressure that people feel today. Now, people is a broad word, but there are kids who are worried about getting into kindergarten. What school can they go to in elementary school or middle school or high school, and getting into college today. I mean the difference between what I did in college applications and what high school students are doing today in college applications is not describable, it's just incredible. And I think this pressure continues throughout. I think in general graduate students feel a lot more pressure, postdocs feel a lot more pressure, junior faculty -- a phrase that I hate because I don't think there are junior and senior, I think there are younger and older and less experienced and more experienced -- but the younger faculty feel enormous pressure. And everything has metrics that are externally defined, and I think it is completely counterproductive to both science and humanity, and it's something that I care very, very much about, because I think this pressure doesn't do people any good, and actually doesn't do the scientific progress any good.

INTERVIEWER: Do you find ways to diffuse it so that it doesn't impede work, say, in your lab?

HORVITZ: Well, I try to talk to the people in my lab and other younger people that I can chat with about these issues and about taking chances and about following what's in their hearts rather than following what they should do. I mean a student recently came to me and said, I'm not sure I want to go on and do a postdoc in an area related to what I'm doing, and I said, that's fine -- there's no reason you have to do that, you should think about what you want to do and go on and do what's inside you. So I do have those conversations. I also have had the privilege to be able to think about some of these things on a larger scale.

So, recently I was a member of a committee that was established by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, located here in Cambridge, and the committee was to basically look into issues of science and technology in the United States, not just biomedicine, but the whole issue of science and technology and what are the problems beyond there's not enough funding, because everybody knows there's not enough funding, that's categorically true, but the mandate of this group was to say what beyond simple dollars is a problem in the country. And the group was very diligent and looked into many of the science and technology agencies and groups in the country, including NIH, NSF, NASA, DOE, DOD, we could go on, and what we found was striking, because there was a commonality of issues. And what we ended up very simplistically was with two recommendations and then a variety of ways to think about implementing them, and the first recommendation relates directly to what we've just been talking about, which is the issue of young people and the ability to really explore. And we focused in particular on beginning investigators, people in a first "academic" or equivalent job, and said that the way everything is structured in this country today stifles creativity, makes people encouraged to do the mundane, to do the safe, instead of doing the riskier things that could lead to bigger discoveries.

And then related to that, but also separable in some ways, is the fact that all of the funding that goes on basically discourages high risk, high reward research, okay, young and old. And what we argued is that nationally we should find mechanisms to support younger people better in their most creative years, and more generally support high risk, high return research. so, we'll see -- that's a relatively recent report. While it certainly has had visibility, we'll see if it has impact.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Let's go back to your time at MIT -- how did you get here, what prompted you to come to MIT as a student?

HORVITZ: Another experiment. I grew up in Chicago, actually in the City of Chicago until my last year of elementary school, 8th grade there, and then in a nearby Chicago suburb. And the expectation was from peers and relatives, college is good, and the college of choice is the University of Illinois. If somebody were to do something really out-of-the-box, you would go to another Midwest school, the best being discussed at that point was the University of Michigan. So, my expectation was I would go to the University of Illinois, and if I wanted to explore I would think about the University of Michigan.

Two things happened. First, I went to the University of Michigan to visit on the weekend of a Michigan-MIchigan State football game, and what I experienced said I don't want to be here, and Michigan was out. I was then scheduled to go to visit the University of Illinois on the weekend just after JFK was assassinated. Everything stopped, I never got there, and so I never saw it and it became a question mark. In the meantime, I had applied to MIT. I had applied to MIT not because it had ever occurred to me to apply to MIT, but because I had a guidance counselor who said, I think you should apply to one school in the East. I said, okay, I don't know anything about East, you pick it, I'll apply. So she picked it, she picked MIT and I applied. So I had applications into Illinois, and I never actually sent one into Michigan, MIT, and also Cornell, because I knew it was a good school, it was almost East. And then I met a couple of people from MIT and I liked them, I liked the students, and they told me about it and I was interested and I said, okay, I'll do that. So I came to MIT having never seen the campus, having never been in Boston -- another experiment.

INTERVIEWER: What were your first reactions when you got here and you said, hm, and now here I am for four years?

HORVITZ: Well, I think one of the memorable first experiences was sitting in Kresge Auditorium when the then dean of students, Fred Fassett got up front and expressed what was then the MIT philosophy. And what he said was look to your left, look to your right, one of you is not going to be here when it's time to graduate. It was a memorable statement. And it was a statement that, you know, sort of echoed the you have to do it philosophy, but I think misstated the kind of supporting environment that MIT could really be for people who fit appropriately, and I think most people certainly did fit appropriately. But that was a very early image of MIT.

After that as a student I got very involved in many aspects of MIT, and the more I did the more I loved it. Now when I say loved it, what I would say I loved is the experience. I'm very hesitant to say that I loved the institution, and the reason from that comes from another one of my mentors. After I came back to MIT as a faculty member, one of the people I had the real privilege of having lunches with almost every day was Salvador Luria. And Salvador -- I've had very few heroes in my life, and Salva was one of my heroes. He was incredibly wise and deeply knowledgeable.

And I remember one of the first things he said to me, he said, never be loyal to an institution, be loyal to people. People may be key in an institution and that will drive your involvement, but it's not the institution that matters, it's the people. Now Salva was one of the leaders at MIT, he founded the MIT Cancer Center, he was a Nobel Laureate for pioneering the modern field of molecular biology, but he was very smart. And I always try to keep that in mind, people.

INTERVIEWER: What were your classmates like at that time? Did you arrive here and say gee, they're a bunch of people like me, or had you had that experience in high school and so it wasn't such a change?

HORVITZ: I think MIT at that point, and probably now but I'm not so sure it's as much true, was quite varied and with unusual people. Most of the people if you really thought about it had something that was a little bit unusual about them, and that was very stimulating because you got to know, I got to know different kinds of people, people with different interests, different backgrounds, and very often people who had some passion about something. And it was that passion that I think really was fundamental to the MIT student community. Some students were passionate about their studies, some students were passionate about other things, but it was just an interesting group of people. And some of the people that I knew then, I do still have some contact with. Of course, I could say the same thing about my high school, that I still maintain contact with some of my friends from high school as well.

INTERVIEWER: What made you choose to live in a fraternity when you came, and that was a decision you had to make pretty early.

HORVITZ: I think what I learned about the fraternity, and of course, it was very hard to learn much in the few days that one had to examine these things, appealed to me because of the independence of the living group. So basically the fraternity was run by the students. The students had responsibility for management of the finances, for hiring and firing the cook, for keeping things clean and neat for the upkeep of the building, and basically, you went in and suddenly you were an adult. And it appealed to me and I think I learned an enormous amount from it. I can't do the compare and contrast -- if I had lived in some other living group I'm sure the experience would have been different but also very stimulating and it would have learned a lot from it, but the experience that I had for me was I think very formative.

INTERVIEWER: Given your reaction to the Michigan campus at football time, you didn't say is this culture going to be a little bit of that partying rah-rah, whatever, that apparently turned you off there.

HORVITZ: Well, fraternities have had for many years labels associated with them, and I have to say that the fraternity experience I had was a little different from those classic labels. So when the fraternity I was in talked about competition, there was some talk about sports, but a lot of it was we want to be academically better than, and then they pick some other fraternity in competition. So academics were very much a part of the fraternity mentality, and, in fact, achievement and involvement in student activities. You know, the number of people from the fraternities who got involved in a diversity of student activities was huge and very, very much encouraged. So it was responsible involvement rather than irresponsible involvement that I saw as very much the theme.

INTERVIEWER: You were involved in quite a few extracurricular activities and pretty intensively. Can you talk about some of those?

HORVITZ: Sure. I mean I began with an involvement in the student newspaper, The Tech. I had been very involved in my high school student newspaper, and in fact, my high school student newspaper was run by the senior English teacher who informed me with great dismay that if I went to MIT it would be a personal disaster because all of my interest in English and literature would disappear forever. But despite that, I came, I think that didn't happen, but I did continue with my interest in journalism in the school newspaper. So, I began with The Tech, and on the feature staff, my first article had to do with high-speed ground transportation in the northeast corridor, a problem that remains to this day. My peak article was when we came out with The Tech and beat the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald to the stands with an article about the New England blackout in November of 1965 -- that was a great coup, and luckily the elevator I was in when it began, although it shook, didn't close until I got out. And I had lots of experiences there with the paper. I became Features editor and then later managing editor. As managing editor, I got to spend overnight twice a week at the Cambridge Chronicle on Mass Ave where I learned what Irish whiskey was really about and somehow managed to put the paper to bed at the same time. I was also involved on the finance board and the activities board and--.

INTERVIEWER: Of the student government.

HORVITZ: Of the student government, and very involved in student activities in general. And then had the honor of being elected undergraduate association president where I was the representative of the student body to the students, to the administration, and to the outside public, and that gave me a phenomenal opportunity to meet and get to know a variety of people including, you know, many really key people at MIT. So my student government activities were major and probably took more time than my studying.

INTERVIEWER: But you seem to have done well in your studying also. How did you balance the two -- did you sleep at all?

HORVITZ: Yeah, balance was not the operative word. My grades were fine but my studying, no doubt, suffered because I spent fewer hours on it than I should have. I often left studying to the very last minute, I did lots of things I would never suggest to my daughter or my students, but at the end of the day, you know, I got a pretty broad exposure to a variety of areas of academic interest, and I think I learned a lot both from the courses and also from my other experiences.

INTERVIEWER: What made you decide to run for student government president? Had you ever held elective offices before? Where did this come from?

HORVITZ: One of the responsibilities of the student government president, the UAP, was responsibility over the many student activities, and I had spent an enormous amount of time with a great diversity of student activities and I felt I understood what was going on in terms of student activities. At the same time there were issues concerning students at MIT that I felt I would like to be able to express and maybe help make some changes. So I had causes that I believed in. Now, of course, in the grand scheme of things and looking at the world many years later, some of these causes might have been a bit parochial, particularly when you think about what was going on in the world in the late 60s. But nonetheless, they were important to us and I felt I could help with them and I really dedicated myself to trying to do that.

INTERVIEWER: Do you recall any of them in particular?

HORVITZ: Well, there were a number of them. One that I felt very strongly about was that the way freshman were introduced to living groups was, in fact, I would say very one-sided -- they came for a period of time before classes started called rush week, and they were introduced to fraternities but not really introduced to any of the alternative living accommodations, like dormitories. And one of the things that I helped change was to change rush week to a residence week where residences were more generally shown to incoming students.

Another thing that got changed that was one of our causes and it got changed I think soon afterwards, but maybe at the same time, I don't remember the details, had to do with the living accommodations of women on campus. Women had to live in a dormitory -- off campus for women was off limits. Men could live off campus but not women, and that didn't seem right and that got changed also. So, accommodations, how people live, what kinds of responsibility students were allowed to take for their own lives with something that was very important. And then there were lots of other things that got altered, something like field day, which is an opportunity for one class to murder another class got modified in a way that became a little less destructive to human bones.

INTERVIEWER: Have you been politically active since that election? I mean did it wet your appetite for being a political figure?

HORVITZ: Well, political is a funny word because, you know, in a sense being UAP was political because there was an election and a vote, but the job obviously involved things that were political only insofar as they meant dealing with people. When I think of political today, I think do I interface with the governor or the president, and so on and so forth. And the answer there is yes, I have. I've met four presidents, including our current president, President Obama and chatted with him in different contexts. I've been involved in a variety of campaigns in the last two elections. I actually helped write some of the science position paper statements for the Obama campaign in this last election. And I've also been very involved in issues that interface between science and politics.

So for many years I've worked with a group that has as a focus inside the beltway activities of educating congress about science, and particularly biomedicine, and advocating for appropriate support for scientific endeavors. I was very involved and a member of a committee that was established by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, National Academies of Science on human embryonic stem cell research, and our committee basically came up with guidelines for how stem cells could be used in ways that would be, I think, ethically important, and these guidelines have now provided the basis for institutional policies for organizations around the country and actually around the world, and were, in fact, the basis for the executive order that was issued by President Obama just a month after he came into office changing the way the government deals with stem cell policy. And in part because of that involvement, I had the honor of being on stage with President Obama for the signing of that executive order. I watched over his shoulder as he used five consecutive pens to do two letters here and two letters there as he signed his name so that five different people would get pens from the signing -- I didn't get a pen.

INTERVIEWER: You have to do another bill. So, you see the political process as one that can be used and shaped and influenced and you've been willing to take that on in ways that you thought were important to science and biology.

HORVITZ: Well, obviously, politics are very important and very complicated. And my feeling is that the best way I can have impact is take an area I know something about, which is science, and particularly biomedical science, and try to influence policy. I mean what I think is crucially important is that political decisions, and let me word it another way, decisions made by politicians, because political decisions might have a different meaning, decisions made by politicians should be based on a knowledge of science where science can have an impact on them. Science shouldn't be ignored, science should be a driver. We should understand the scientific implications of our current state of knowledge, we should understand what we know and what we don't know, and policy should be based on that. Science shouldn't be ignored, and science shouldn't be modified to fit a political agenda. And so I feel very, very strongly about that and have expressed that view in a variety of ways many, many times.

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever taught a course here at MIT or anywhere else in science policy or do you talk to your -- the people in your lab -- postdocs, grad students, undergrads about science policy and how it gets formed and how you can get involved in the formation?

HORVITZ: I haven't taught a course per se, but recently there has been a group of graduate students who are interested, and from a variety of departments at MIT who are interested in science policy. And I recently met with that group and shared with them some of my experiences and thoughts and encouraged them, if it were their interest, to become actively involved, either as students or later in other contexts because there are many opportunities for people knowledgeable about science to try to use that knowledge to influence policy. And the more scientifically knowledgeable people are involved in policy decisions, I think the better it is for everybody.

INTERVIEWER: When you delivered the Killian lecture a few years ago, you decried the reduced funding for science research, which is a kind of policy outcome as well. Can you talk about what's been happening on that front and why is going down rather than up and whether you think there's a way to reverse it?

HORVITZ: Well, it's going down because money is tight. Money is always tight and one has to define priorities, and the priorities can be complicated. Is it better to pay for heating for poor people or the next scientific experiment? And that's not a question that's easy to answer. What one has to do is really evaluate in some meaningful way what the value is of scientific progress. And in many ways that's easy -- we can just look around the world and see, in terms of our lives, how science has influenced our lives and our health. But people don't always do that in an appropriate way. So when one looks at the funding for science in this country, it has really suffered from what it was, let us say, right after World War II where Vannevar Bush from MIT, in fact, had a real impact on advancing the investment of government in science.