Episode 3: Dr. Elaine Fuchs

In this episode, we meet Dr. Elaine Fuchs, a head of lab at Rockefeller whose research explores how stem cells communicate, and how failures to communicate contribute to inflammation, aging, and cancer. Beyond the lab, we learn about Dr. Fuch’s previous jobs counting snails and driving mail trucks, her encounters with two presidents and a pope, and how being a scientist starts with being curious.

Beyond the Lab is produced by RockEDU Science Outreach and was recorded during the 2024 Summer Science Research Program (SSRP). To learn more, visit rockefeller.edu/outreach.

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Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Elaine: All right. 

Jacob: Okay. Are you recording? 

Leora: Ok. Are you just gonna…? Okay. 

Hana: Ready? 

Leora: Yeah. 

Elaine: We’re all destined to become scientists as children. And so it’s really I think the experiences throughout life that really close those doors. What we have to do as educators is really to try to make sure that we keep those doors open for children because they’re naturally curious. Who wouldn’t be more interested in finding out about yourself, right? Which is basically science. 

Hana: Hi everyone! We’re Hana, 

Leora: Leora, 

Jacob: and Jacob, 

Hana: And this is,

In unison: Beyond the Lab!

Leora: Welcome to Beyond the Lab, the podcast where we discuss all things not science with the world’s leading scientists. Today we’re honored to have Dr. Elaine Fuchs, a Head of Lab at The Rockefeller University. Dr. Fuchs pioneered reverse genetics approaches, which assess protein function first and then assess its role in development and disease. Her groundbreaking research on skin stem cells and their production of hair and skin has made significant impacts in the field. She’s an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and has been awarded the National Medal of Science–the United States’ highest award for scientific contributions–by President Barack Obama. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Fuchs! 

Elaine: My pleasure. 

Hana: But first, an icebreaker! So, Dr. Fuchs, can you please tell us: what is your favorite cuisine? 

Elaine: Oh my goodness. Well, that’s very easy. 

Hana: Mm-hmm. 

Elaine: Favorite cuisine is Japanese food, and more specifically, sushi. 

Hana: Oh, that’s a good one. 

Jacob: That is a good one.

Hana: What about you, Jacob? 

Jacob: I also love sushi, and I also really like Indian food. 

Elaine: Mm, I do too.  

Leora: What about you, Hana? 

Hana: My favorite cuisines are actually probably like South Asian food or Japanese as well. Also Italian’s good. I feel like nobody dislikes Italian food.

Elaine: I’ll go along with that too. 

Hana: Yeah, right? What about you, Leora? 

Leora: I’m gonna agree with the sushi and the Italian food. I like good pasta, good sushi. 

Jacob: So the way that we like to start off this podcast is by talking a little bit about your childhood. You know, how you grew up. So can you tell us a little bit about where you grew up, what your life was like as a child?

Elaine: So I grew up southwest of Chicago, what was then a very small suburb of Chicago. It was the place where if someone in your family worked at Argonne National Laboratories, then that’s where you lived. So it was out in the middle of the corn fields, with the exception that here was this national laboratory that was not too far away.

And my father was a geochemist– [he] worked at Argonne National Labs and he never had his PhD. He came straight out of World War II right after his undergraduate degree. And yet he ran his own laboratory of one person and an occasional student, and he discovered extraterrestrial minerals that are now found on Earth that are found in meteorites. He worked on the lunar samples when I was a child. They weren’t very interesting because they’re too close to earth. They didn’t have anything that earth didn’t have. 

So I got really excited by the fact that my dad would study and learn and discover things that no one had ever discovered before. My sister was also a scientist. She’s four years older and she became a neuroscientist. So we were both inspired by the family. My aunt who lived next door, my dad’s sister, was one of the early feminists. But she had worked at Argonne National Labs as a technician in radiology. And so in that sense you could say, well, I grew up destined to become a scientist. 

But I have to say it was my mother who was a housewife essentially, who made us butterfly nets when we were little and suggested that we go out in the fields and see what we could find. And she was the one who was always encouraging us to why not become a scientist? If that’s what you wanna do, then you should do it. My dad was, well, maybe…maybe I should become a secretary. And, so it’s really who you have in your life–whether it’s a parent, whether it’s a teacher who happens to inspire you, whether it’s another acquaintance–it’s really who encourages you, who fuels your imagination and really your pursuit of what you wanna do in life that really guides who you’re going to be. 

Jacob: And in school before college–elementary school, high school–were there any subjects other than science that you really enjoyed? 

Elaine: Hmm, well I think if you ask any 7-year-old, what would they rather do: would they rather sit inside the house and read a history book, or would they rather go out in the fields and explore?

I think the answer is pretty clear, right? So we all have this natural curiosity as children. We’re all destined to become scientists as children. And so it’s really I think the experiences throughout life that really close those doors. I think what we have to do as educators is really to try to make sure that we keep those doors open for children because they’re naturally curious and they naturally enjoy biology. What’s out there? Who wouldn’t be more interested in finding out about yourself, right? Which is basically science. 

Jacob: We heard that you had some odd jobs when you were growing up. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that?

Elaine: Oh goodness. Well, I really wanted to go to work when I was in high school. My father said, “there’ll be plenty of time for you to work in your life and why don’t you enjoy your summers?” And so that’s what I did in high school. I basically would read and go to the pool and swim. But then when I was in college I thought, okay, now I’m gonna work.

And my first job was a job working for the Field Museum in Chicago; still exists. And up on the top research floors of that museum are amazing things. They have a library that has all these hand-painted books of different plants and flowers and animals, and they have drawers of all sorts of amazing stuffed animals from the wild and in closets full of pelts and things like that, that were collected by the museum over the years. But for me, my job was to count the number of ridges and whorls that existed on these microscopic snails that my boss went out and collected in the South Pacific. 

Jacob: Oh, wow. 

Elaine: So he had this job of going out there and collecting all these species. I had the job of looking under the microscope and going 1, 2, 3, 98, 97, 99,… And so that didn’t last for very long. I worked a summer there and then I found out that as a college student, you could apply to work at the post office for people that were on summer holiday. And you could apply either by taking some exam or you could apply on the basis of grades.

And so I was a good student in college and so I applied, and I would deliver mail during the summer with a lot of people thinking that I had stolen the truck. [What] was I doing delivering the mail? And all because there weren’t too many women. There weren’t too many young women who were delivering the mail back then. But yeah, it was a great summer job. 

Jacob: And you, you talked just now a little bit about, maybe it was not exactly discrimination, but some comments that you got being a woman as a mail person. Can you talk about maybe some comments that you got when you decided that you wanted to go into science?

Elaine: Well, when I was [an] undergraduate, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to major in. I decided to major in chemistry. And so the mandatory for chemistry majors were three physics classes. And so I was one of three women in a class of 200 men. 

Leora: Wow. 

Hana: Wow. 

Elaine: And it was a little bit of a challenge. I remember having the distinct memory of thinking, well, if I’m in the class and I do well on an exam, I thought the teacher’s gonna think that I’m cheating. And how would I even think that, right? If I hadn’t been exposed to this feeling that science was a man’s world, particularly physics. So I decided at that time, well, I just have to get the best grade in the class. Then people started to take me seriously.

But you look at that and say: that’s a high bar to feel that you have to do something when, why can’t I just do 50%? Why can’t I just be average in a class? Then I went to graduate school and my graduate advisor, unbeknownst to me when I accepted, had said that women didn’t belong in science. Again, I thought, well I just have to demonstrate that I do belong in science. And so I look back at those experiences and I feel that if you take a negative and you turn it into a positive, then it can have some very good effects. And I felt at that point, rather than to be upset by it or to be discouraged by it, I would just make sure that I was taken seriously. 

And you know, I look back at that and I think it’s really not a bad thing. It’s good to be humble. It’s good to think you can always do better and it’s good to try your best and try your hardest. It was a challenge, but you learn from those experiences and I think it has shaped who I am. Now that I have had a modicum of success of my career, I look back and say, “well, what can I do to make sure that that people aren’t faced with that same horrendous challenge that I was faced with, or I felt I was faced with, in order to be able to be successful in a field and at a time when women were not taken seriously?” 

Jacob: And you mentioned grad school–you had kind of an unusual application, right? Is that true? 

Elaine: Oh, yes. So I hadn’t really hadn’t thought seriously about going to graduate school. It was right during the Vietnam War era, and I was very much involved in the politics of the time. And so I thought I was excited about going to the Peace Corps, and I wanted to go to the Peace Corps.

I read about various different countries and I was intrigued by Chile. The president was a communist, and yet he was elected by a country that had been a hundred years of a democracy. So it was during the Cold War and I thought there’s something there that I don’t understand that I wanted to understand, and so I took a course in Latin American history. I took Spanish, don’t ask me to say much in Spanish, but I actually got accepted to Uganda and I thought about for about a week: “can I learn Swahili?” And I decided yes I could. And then I started to look at their president, who was Idi Amin, and he was a real dictator and was jailing people and it wasn’t the place I wanted to go.

So my default pathway was graduate school. But then I had decided I’m not going to take my GRE exams, which we had to take at the time, graduate record exams. And so I wrote instead a three-page essay, saying, “I’m not taking these exams. I just spent four years taking exams.” So I said, “if you don’t think that I’m a student that can do well in your program and that you need to have me take another exam to prove that, then I’m probably not the student for you.” And I got accepted to all the places I applied to. Now, just maybe five years ago, they stopped the requirement to take graduate record exams at universities for graduate school. And so it took them some 30 years to get that message that it really…

I don’t think taking exams is a measure. What’s a measure is: how passionate are you about what you wanna study? How serious are you about learning and about trying? I don’t think that where you’re at at the point at which you’re applying doesn’t necessarily mean who you will be. So they have to judge that more like: how many students have enrolled in these SSRP programs, or Rock U programs, and gotten inspired by science? To me, that’s a measure of how a student is going to do, not so much a measure of: did you take an exam? What’s your grade point average? And all those kinds of things. 

Jacob: Thank you so much for talking a little bit about how you got into science and your beginnings in science. Now we’re gonna move on to our next segment.

Hana: My favorite segment: Dr. Fuch’s favorite things! 

Elaine: Oh my gosh! 

Hana: So there is a rumor that you’re the most stylish Head of Lab here at Rockefeller, Dr. Fuchs. Can you tell us about your favorite clothing brands? 

Elaine: Oh my gosh, my favorite clothing brands. Well, I like to wear Japanese clothing. I like sort of unusual clothes. There is a designer by the name of Mieko Mintz, who is a New York designer, and she does just totally far out clothes. Between sort of T-shirts and jeans and her clothing [is] more or less what I like to wear. But it’s really unusual, unusual things. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling with my husband, and before that with me, and I think that has shaped the kinds of things that I enjoy wearing. I used to buy clothes from all the countries that I was visiting and would wear those. So yeah, [I] kind of gravitated toward that. 

Hana: Yeah, and we’re gonna ask you a little more about this later, we know that you love to travel, but do you have a favorite vacation spot or a favorite place to travel to?

Elaine: That one’s a real tough one. The most times that we’ve returned to places have been six different times in Indonesia, Malaysia. This coming winter will be the seventh time in India. In Africa, I think six different times. So I really love taking photographs. In another life, I’d be a photographer wannabe. I always have been a photographer wannabe. 

And so I really enjoy sort of essentially putting yourself in a place where you could have been born in any country of the world, right? How would you, how would that be? And I can never put myself in a position of if I was born doing something else. But the closest I can get to it is that if you’re in a remote town in Indonesia, I got the sense my mother’s skills that she had, in terms of gardening, in terms of sewing, in terms of, of canning, were so much more valuable than any skill I have. Depending upon where you’re at, at any given time, you get a sense that who you are and what you are really depends upon your passion. But where you are on a spectrum really depends upon context. So I think it helps to keep you humble and feeling like there’s never a hierarchy and there shouldn’t be. 

Hana: Yeah, that’s a great point. And after a long week of work in the lab, do you have a favorite way to unwind and relax? 

Elaine: Ah, let’s see. At the end of the week… Is there ever an end of the week? My husband and I like to go out. We like different kinds of music. If there’s a Spanish flamenco troop in town, chances are we’ve tried to get tickets for that. Indian music I like as well. When I was in Chicago, we had season tickets to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And then when I moved to New York, it was initially season tickets to the opera, more recently season tickets to the ballet. I haven’t stuck with any one particular thing, but I like a lot of different kinds of cultural activities and New York is great for that.

Hana: Yeah, that sounds really nice. Do you have any favorite restaurants in the city? 

Elaine: Well, Sushi Seki is about a half a block away from where we live, which is probably not a good thing. It’s too close. And then there’s all sorts of different Japanese restaurants in town. I’m mentoring a woman who is from Sarawak in Borneo, where I’ve also been visiting. She’s a postdoc at Columbia University in a neuroscience program, and so she’s been taking me to various different Malaysian restaurants or Indonesian restaurants in town. And there’s actually a very good Indian restaurant Moti Mahal, which is just down the street from us as well. So yeah, some good places. Haven’t been to a Pakistani restaurant yet. 

Hana: Oh, well, so I’ll give you some recommendations. 

Elaine: Give me some recommendations. 

Hana: Totally, I will. 

Leora: So our last segment focuses on your current life. So first question is just about your journey to Rockefeller and why you chose to work here? 

Elaine: Ah, yeah, I had been at the University of Chicago for many years, and my husband was at University of Illinois for many years, and we had a conversation one day saying, “[are we] gonna be in Chicago for our entire careers and or are we gonna just try to shake things up, see what it would be like surrounding ourselves with a whole new set of colleagues?”

And we started the conversation of “well, where would you like to be?” My husband said the best place for him would be teachers’ college at Columbia University in New York. And I said, “well, best place for me would probably be a place like Rockefeller University.” He said, “well, there’s this place at Columbia that’s opened up.” I said, “why don’t you apply for that?” ‘Cause I thought, “well, philosopher, it’s gonna be hard.” I’ve heard that it’s hard for a philosopher to find jobs. He applied for it, and as soon as I found out that he was listed at the top on paper, I thought,” okay, he’s gonna get the job,” because he’s so much better in person than he is on paper, which turned out to be the case. And so at that point I looked at Princeton, at Yale, at Columbia, at Sloan Kettering, at Rockefeller, and Rockefeller was definitely where I wanted to be. And so, you know, sometimes you look at [a] situation and say, “well, this is impossible.” It’s impossible to just say, “well, this would be the best place, this would be the best place.” Two body problem. And yet if you never try, you never know. 

Leora: What are some hobbies you like to do besides traveling outside of the lab? 

Elaine: I skied for a number of years with my husband, and before that I had been learning how to ski, but really seriously started skiing then. That went on until about six or seven years ago, and I was really loving it. I took lessons every single time so that I was getting pretty good at being able to control myself on a nice steep blue slope as long as it didn’t have moguls on it. The feeling of being out there in, up at the top of a mountain and, and you have all these beautiful vistas. About five or six years ago, I started to realize that when your reflexes aren’t quite as good as they used to be on a ski slope, it’s probably not a good idea to keep skiing. And I would see friends of mine that were in casts and all, and I sort of thought, “well, maybe, I’ll stop before I end up needing a cast.” But swimming is something that I have always loved to do and continue to do. Swimming and snorkeling. 

Leora: So we read about it, and we also saw the pictures walking into your lab, but you met Barack Obama. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I think our listeners would find that very interesting.

Elaine: Yeah. I was here at Rockefeller, my administrative assistant got the phone call from the White House. And actually she thought it was a crank call, so she hung up. 

Leora: Oh, that’s so funny. 

Elaine: It wasn’t Barack on the phone, but it was basically somebody from the administration. And then they called back, and she hung up again. And finally–they were persistent–she had contacted me. I was at a meeting, [and] she said, “well, the White House was calling about something. I don’t know if it was really the White House, and they said you were gonna be getting the National Medal of Science.” And so I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a crank call, but at that time it’s from the president and given at the White House.

President Obama: Now, it’s also a real pleasure to have so many distinguished researchers and innovators joining us.. 

Elaine: And he gave a talk about the importance of science in the world. 

President Obama: Although I must admit that I have an ulterior motive for presenting these awards today. You see, Sasha has a science fair coming up and I was thinking that you guys could give us a few tips. Michelle and I are a little rusty on our science. In all seriousness, it is a privilege to present these medals. 

Elaine: He would really educate himself to make sure that biomedical science is so important, to human health and to disease. Funding of biomedical science in the United States is really critical, and I think [he was] really energizing people to science. So he would be a good one for you guys to interview. 

Hana: Can you, can you arrange that, Dr. Fuchs? 

Elaine: I don’t think I can arrange that, you’ll have to go on your own. But that was really nice and at the time my father had passed away, and my mom had decided she was never going to travel again. And I said, “well Mom, this would be the White House.” She said, “oh, I’m going!” So she was there, she was in a wheelchair, but we basically made sure that she could be there for the ceremony. Yeah, it was a very special time.

Leora: We’ve heard you met the Pope also. 

Elaine: Oh yeah, a few people! So, well, presidents… I gave the convocation address to the University of Chicago in 1999, and that was the year that Clinton had asked to give the convocation address at the University of Chicago. But the University of Chicago had this policy where their convocation address was always given by a faculty member, not by anybody else. And so our president at the time told the Clinton office I was giving the convocation address. I said, “look, it’s fine, he said that…” But they said, “no, no, no, we want you to give it.” But they arranged it so that I gave the convocation address, and then Clinton gave an end to [the] address after convocation to the students. And so I had the opportunity to meet him as well, which was very special. 

But then the Pope… I had gotten a letter, not too long ago, just before the pandemic saying that I had been appointed for life on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. And I have to say that I actually didn’t even know that it existed, but it turns out that it is the oldest scientific academy that has existed. It’s [been] since the 1600s. 

And as far as I understand, the history of why the Catholic Church has a scientific advisory committee is that back in the 1600s, they made a slight mistake about Galileo thinking that the sun revolved around the earth, not the earth revolving around the sun. And so apparently they burned somebody. I mean not they, but they arranged to have someone burned at the stake because of that belief. And then Galileo was kicked out of Rome to Venice because of his beliefs. And then after they realized that they made a little mistake, then they decided they were not gonna make another scientific mistake. And so they at that point appointed a scientific advisory board and they’ve had one ever since. 

It’s actually quite wonderful. I mean, the current Pope is [a] really remarkable individual. He really cares about climate change. He wanted to have a symposium on stem cell research [and] wanted to understand that better. And since I work on adult stem cells, it wasn’t controversial, but he was open to learning about embryonic stem cells, learning about various different things. And he also was very interested in life on other planets. And so the symposia that they put together are really high class scientists from around the world thinking about important problems of the day. Fortunately they don’t ask what my own beliefs are. They don’t care about the scientists, what they believe in–they just want us to give advice on the basis of the science that we do. 

Jacob: It’s very cool. I don’t think we knew about this either. 

Elaine: Yeah, not very many people do, but it’s quite a remarkable group of people.

Leora: Do you ever find it difficult to balance all your research and all your work and your home life? And how do you find that balance? 

Elaine: Well, I don’t have children, so that makes it a little easier to balance. But that decision was actually a decision that was [not] made because of not wanting to have children or feeling that my science was cutting in too much to my personal life. It was really these other things, the love that I’ve had for traveling, for the arts, for photography, and for the science, in terms of the educating, the mentorship. And so I think it was a decision that we actively made. But it really wasn’t a driving force of feeling like I don’t have time to do that. It’s just we only have 24 hours to every day, and how are you gonna spend those 24 hours? 

I’ve never really felt that, and I think this is actually really important, I’ve never felt that the science is over here, and my personal life is over here. I’ve always felt that it’s really important to intertwine the two. And so ever since I was a graduate student, I was traveling. I travel at least a month every year. So I always felt like if I can’t succeed in science doing these other things, then maybe science isn’t right for me. But I had to really meld what I was doing with my outside activities. 

So I guess the answer that I have for you, but I think it’s really good advice, [is] that whatever you decide to do in life, it’s really important not to feel like you’re deprived by working, right? That working should be an enjoyable experience; [it] should be something you wanna do. It’s important not to be stressed about “I’ve gotta do this.” But it’s really important to find something that you’re really excited about doing and that you’re really passionate about doing because we spend a lot of time. Science, I devote a lot of time to science, but if I weren’t continuing to change the questions that we address in the laboratory– I have a constant flux of new graduate students, new high school students coming in and transitioning to bigger and better things. I feel that it’s constantly energizing, and [the] questions we’re asking, we’re still excited about. It’s hard not to be as enthusiastic now that I’ve had a lot of experience in the field as I was when I first started. 

Leora: One last question What advice you’d give to– ‘Cause our podcast is geared towards young kids, younger students like college, high school, around our age, who are thinking about science but aren’t a hundred percent sure, and they just wanna know what the people are like. So just any advice that you would give to these people? 

Elaine: Yeah. I would say the best way to find out if you’re excited by science is to try a laboratory course. Because you can sit in a classroom and read a book about biology, but I was never excited by biology from doing that. I always thought it was a lot of memorization and why did I need to memorize that? And what was that useful for? But it wasn’t until I got in the lab and I started to do an experiment where you’re asking a question that no one knows the answer to, and you are designing, learning how to design an experiment [to] answer that question. I really got excited at that point. And so I think if you’re doing some hands-on science, my guess is that any of you who are thinking about science as a vocation will be hooked. And that, I think, would be my first piece of advice. 

And the second piece of advice is really to follow your passion. Really follow what you’re excited by, and you can revisit that all throughout your life. Just keep asking yourself, am I doing something that I really feel is exciting, that I really feel is meaningful? And if it’s not, you can change it. We’re all capable of directing our lives. And what’s fun about finishing off your high school degree going into college, you start to gain more and more independence. 

There’ll be a time where you are the one that’s, that’s controlling your life. It’s no longer your parents controlling your life and dictating this is what you’re going to do or the like, but you get some say in the matter. And I think it’s that crafting, which starts with parents, teachers, friends, but then it ends up you’re in control. And so it’s really trying to find what you really like to do. 

Hana: Thank you for that. 

Jacob: Thank you so much, and see you next time on… 

In unison: Beyond the Lab!

Emily: Thanks to our interviewee, Dr. Elaine Fuchs, and thank you for listening. If you like what you heard, please share our podcast with family, friends, and anyone you know who loves science and stories of the people behind it. Beyond The Lab is a production of RockEDU Science Outreach at The Rockefeller University in New York City.

It was produced and hosted by Hana, Leora, and Jacob during their participation in the Summer Science Research Program. It was also produced by Emily Costa and Laura Pellicer, with assistance from Lizzie Krish. Our cover art was designed by Jeanne Garbarino, and our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

To learn more about Beyond the Lab or RockEDU, please visit www.rockefeller.edu/outreach. 

Hana: Really, anyone can be a scientist. You just have to have the curiosity. 

Elaine: Exactly! Alright. 

Jacob: Okay. 

Elaine: I think we’ve covered all the bases. 

Hana: Yeah, definitely!