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Structural biologist Cynthia Wolberger has spent much of the last decade trying to understand the behavior of Sir2 enzymes, also called sirtuins, which affect gene expression, metabolism, and aging.
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“There are many fields that I find difficult, but at the moment I am struggling to understand neural networks and machine-learning algorithms. The applications of computational sciences to biological problems are tantalizing, but their language, conceptual processes, strategies for validation, and controls are very different from those of experimental biology. Luckily, we have good collaborators to interact with, but we do spend a lot of time just trying to figure out if we're really talking about the same thing!”

“For me, bioinformatics is now particularly challenging. With the current flood of genome sequencing and analysis, researchers are drowning in data. Although scientists have found countless molecular differences between even closely related organisms, it's difficult to know how to sort through all these data and then build on them with further experiments that really capture evolution at the molecular level and explain the diversity of life.”

“Discussions about the big bang and related topics come up in social gatherings with close professional colleagues or when my children ask me questions related to the origins of life. But cosmology is a field that is not intuitive to me. Theories like the big bang create uncertainty in my world ... in a Heisenberg sort of way.”

“Astronomy is the hardest for me to understand, due to my weakness in math and physics. Still, concepts like `black holes,' `supernovae,' and `big bangs' are intellectually seductive and hard to resist. It is also healthy to feel `small' sometimes, and nothing makes you feel small like the universe.”