I was always fascinated by behaviour. But by temperament and training, I am interested in a mechanistic and molecular understanding of biological processes, and that guided my graduate work. Working on the molecular biology of cancer as a graduate student was an incredibly exciting and rewarding experience, but the oncogene field already had a lot of brilliant people in it, and it wasn't clear to me what I'd contribute if I stayed in that area. By contrast, when I started my postdoctoral research there were only a few groups using genetic approaches to study behaviour (an approach that had been largely initiated by Seymour Benzer, with his seminal work in Drosophila), so that seemed like an area where there was an opportunity to be part of a new field. Indeed, the pieces were falling into place for a mechanistic analysis of behaviour.
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