LAB FUN: Jon Beckwith is pictured with his camera in the middle of a collage of his lab members enjoying hikes, beach days, and more.COURTESY OF MEHMET BERKMENWhen Mehmet Berkmen was accepted to Jon Beckwith’s bacterial genetics lab at Harvard as a postdoctoral scholar in 2000, others joked that he was about to join a mafia. Berkmen, who was getting his PhD from the University of Vienna but doing most of his research at the University of Houston, was alarmed. He knew that Beckwith had been part of the team that, in 1969, was the first to isolate a bacterial gene, lacZ, from an intact chromosome, and that his lab had continued to turn out seminal research on topics including gene expression regulation, protein secretion, and disulfide bonds. He imagined Beckwith marshaling regimented phalanxes of postdocs as they crisply turned out results and dominated the field.
But Beckwith turned out to be humble and shy. And despite its famous productivity, the lab was such a warm, friendly place that, according to Berkmen, now a staff scientist at New England Biolabs, members cry when they have to leave, and they get together every three years for reunions that draw people who weren’t even members of the lab. The term “mafia,” it turned out, was a term of endearment used among lab members. Far from being a pejorative, it just “means that we are very, very connected,” says Jennifer Leeds, who was a postdoc in the lab between 1996 and 2001 and is now head of antibacterial discovery at Novartis. “We are a family.”
The strong ties and shared values fostered in a ...
