Ernest Retzel

Rapid DNA sequencing: Technology addressing new problems, solving them, and handing back entire new visions.
 

It has been a circuitous path to get where I have gotten, influenced perhaps more by serendipity than I should admit to. At times, I have made choices very deliberately, and at other times, not so much. In this bio, I will concentrate more on the part of my life closest to your lives, the choices through high school and college, and less about my later career.
 
I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, a city not as well known for science as for automobiles and trade unions. And I did indeed grow up in the city, rather than the suburbs. At the time, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the country, and was largely a blue-collar world, vibrant in ways that are hard to define. It has always been a diverse city, with racial and ethnic minorities, large populations of Poles, Jews, Italians, Greeks, Somalis and more, indeed, the city of Hamtramck was a largely Polish city, separate but entirely surrounded by Detroit. It was also a time of educational experimentation, and, from grade school through my undergraduate work, I was lucky enough to be part of those experiments. Though the administrators and teachers never referred to us as "gifted," based on tests we never really paid attention to, they did pull some of us into classes that were more advanced. Sometime later, K12 schools generally would abandon those types of classes to "mainstreaming." But for me, those were the difference between where I got and where I might have gone.
 
During the eighth grade, I got an invitation to attend an all-city school, Cass Technical High School, then considered the second, best public high school in the country. The school was in the heart of Detroit, and we took the city buses an hour each way to get there. It was really an extraordinary school, with some 26 curricula that ranged from refrigeration to art to organic chemistry. I jumped at the chance to attend for all the wrong reasons, my neighborhood high school was one of the most violent in the city. And, again, the schools didn�t really tell us why we were being invited, but at the time it didn't matter. In retrospect, it was an extraordinary opportunity. And, because there were so many choices, I began my rather eclectic selection of coursework, French and Art History, Auto Mechanics and Welding, Organic Chemistry and Microbiology.
 
My choice of college was again for the right and the wrong reasons. Most of my fellow students were heading to the University of Michigan; I chose Michigan State University, yet another experimental school. Modeled after "residential colleges" like Antioch College, the goal of Justin Morrill College within MSU was to provide a liberal arts education, but within the context of the larger (45,000 student) university. We lived together for the first two years in dormitories set aside for our college, with classrooms and faculty offices all in the same building. Intense language study was assumed, and taught at four different incoming skill levels. The college had the "hook" of attracting full professors from the larger university to teach their choice of classes to tiny classes of 7-10 students. Among the classes I remember were The Politics of Hunger in America and Global History of Science and Technology. And still I graduated with my degree in Microbiology, and nearly a BA in French.
 
Three years as a technician at the Michigan Cancer Foundation in Detroit led me to understand that I didn�t want to be a technician forever. And, with the help of my (as I now understand, famous) boss, I started my quest to find a graduate school. I decided against doing it part-time as a technician in his lab, and also chose not to choose the most renowned schools. There were good reasons for this then, and in retrospect, even better ones I didn't understand until later. The University of Minnesota was my choice, and I have never regretted it. My Ph.D. is in Microbiology, with a minor in Biochemistry.
 
I have had the luck of developing my career when so many of the things that we take for granted were being discovered. I began my work in virology, which rapidly became molecular virology. I evolved from the reductionist molecular virology to viral pathogenesis, where I learned to look at the whole system involved, not just a component studied in isolation. At one point, I made a leap of faith to jump from virology to bioinformatics, from a field I knew well to one that wasn't really invented yet. And another leap took me from human and animal research to plant biology. Now, with the technology of high-throughput DNA sequencing, all the threads of my work are being woven into one fabric, with bioinformatics underpinning diverse plant and animal projects.
 
And if I were to offer a couple quotes that have been the most useful in my life, they are, "You don't have to be smart, you just have to be stubborn," and "The harder you work, the harder it is too surrender."