MEET A BIOL MEMBER:
Eric Kool
George A. and Hilda M. Daubert Professor of Chemistry
Stanford University
In his lab at Stanford University, Professor of Chemistry Eric Kool “uses the tools of chemistry to study the structures, interactions and biological activities of nucleic acids and the enzymes that process them.” As a member of the Division of Biological Chemistry, Kool was awarded both the Biopolymers Murray Goodman Memorial Prize in 2019 and the Ronald Breslow Biomimetic Chemistry Award in 2015. He answers questions about his life and career, including how he “thinks he might have been a drummer in a mediocre jazz or rock band" if he wasn’t a scientist, in this question-style profile.
What project, discovery, or accomplishment are you very proud of even though few people know about it?
I’m still proud of my lab’s early work with circular oligonucleotides. I think we came up with some pretty novel and useful stuff, including methods for making them and strategies for how they can be engineered to bind to RNA or DNA. And although people may be more generally aware of using circular DNAs for DNA amplification (“rolling circle amplification”), they may not know about our “rolling circle transcription” (RCT) work. RCT makes RNA really efficiently and, I think, has been under-utilized. Anyway, since our current research is far removed from this early work, most people don’t know about it.
If you weren't a scientist, what career would you choose instead?
I might have been a drummer in a mediocre jazz or rock band. I’ve always liked playing music (my father is a musician), and played drums in multiple bands when I was younger. Public gigs can be a lot of fun.
When you were 15, what kind of career did you think you wanted?
I might have been a drummer in a mediocre jazz or rock band. I’ve always liked playing music (my father is a musician), and played drums in multiple bands when I was younger. Public gigs can be a lot of fun.
What is one way your field has changed since you began working in it?
Our field is much more biological than it once was, with cell culture, sequencing, CRISPR, cloning, and animal studies all accepted as part of the work, and publishable in chemistry journals. This didn’t use to be the case – earlier chemists working with DNA initially focused on synthesis and modification chemistry, with maybe a bit of thermodynamics added in. I have really enjoyed learning more biology and medicine as the field has evolved.
How do you explain what you do to non-scientists at dinner parties or family reunions?
I tell them “My lab modifies DNA and RNA for applications in medicine, and I also teach organic chemistry to college students.” I usually don’t get a lot of follow up questions or comments, except from some physicians, who often describe their past trauma of taking organic chemistry in college. I try to avoid inflicting that trauma!
What were you most afraid of when you were first starting out in your field?
Peer review. Early in my career I found it scary to put my success as an academic in the hands of two anonymous reviewers at every stage, for publication and grants. Over time I’ve mellowed a bit on this!
If you had a $1 billion-dollar budget, ample facilities, and ten years to work on a problem outside your current field, what problem would you pick and why?
I would build a team of biologists and chemists with the goal of constructing “enantio-life”. It would be fun, and likely useful as well, to build a living bacterial cell from the ground up, constructed from the mirror image of DNA/RNA/protein/carbohydrate. Actually I think this is likely to happen in the next ten or twenty years anyway without me – people are starting to make real progress in this direction. I’ll be excited to see it become real.
Whom would you most like to acknowledge for helping you get to this point in your career?
I definitely acknowledge my PhD advisor, the late Ronald Breslow. He was incredibly brilliant, inquisitive and enthusiastic about science. And he provided an exciting lab environment, where I got to meet world-class chemists.