Episode 4: Jeffrey Friedman

In this episode, we meet Dr. Jeff Friedman, a Head of Lab at The Rockefeller University whose research examines how the brain and body regulate appetite and weight and led to the discovery of the metabolic hormone leptin. Beyond the lab, we learn about Dr. Friedman’s historical reading habits, why Lionel Messi and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar know about his research, and how small victories push science forward.

This episode was hosted and recorded by Kayatu, Shimla, and Nastia.

Beyond the Lab is produced by RockEDU Science Outreach and was recorded during the 2025 Summer Science Research Program (SSRP). To learn more, visit rockefeller.edu/outreach.

Listen to Beyond the Lab on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! For audio with closed-captioning, please visit our YouTube page.

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Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Shimla: So we just have to go super close to mic, like this close basically.

Kayatu: So we’re ready to start?

Shimla: Yeah.

Hi everyone! I’m Shimla.

Kayatu: And I’m Kayatu.

Nastia: And I’m Nastia.

In unison: And this is Beyond the Lab!

Shimla: Welcome to Beyond the Lab, the podcast where we discuss all things not science with the world’s leading scientists.

Kayatu: Today we’re honored to speak to Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, head of the Friedman Lab at The Rockefeller University.

Dr. Friedman‘s research focuses on understanding how the brain and body regulate body weight, highlighted by his discovery of leptin, a hormone that controls appetite and energy balance. His contributions to the field have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Lasker Award and more recently the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Friedman.

Jeff: Pleasure.

Shimla: So first we have an icebreaker, and our question is: what is your favorite cuisine?

Jeff: Cuisine! I like Japanese food a lot, but I like all kinds of cuisines so I’d hate to have to pick only one.

Shimla: Do you have any specific favorites?

Jeff: Oh there’s so many wonderful Japanese restaurants in Manhattan it would also be hard to pick. I think the Japanese food in New York is probably as good as anywhere in the world outside of Japan.

Kayatu: My favorite cuisine is African. Both of my parents are from West Africa, so it’s something I grew up around.

Jeff: Which is the best African restaurant in New York?

Kayatu: Honestly it’s hard to say but there are a lot of solid ones on 120, 116. Yeah.

Shimla: And then my favorite is definitely South Asian cuisine, just ’cause I’ve grown up around it. Like you know when you go traveling and you start missing home food? I feel like that would be my favorite. So it’s hard to even say a restaurant just because no one can cook it as good as my mom.

So I guess we’d like to talk about your childhood, and our first question is: did you always want to be a scientist?

Jeff: No. (chuckles) I didn’t even know what it meant to be a scientist really. I think I only discovered you could make a living doing this when I was much much older. When I was a boy I just loved dogs and I always wanted to be a veterinarian, but it was sort of expected I’d become a doctor. My father was a doctor, my uncles were doctors, and that was sort of what was in the cards for me.

Shimla: Did you kind of want to be a doctor or was that like…you just did it because your family expected it?

Jeff: You know, I think it’s difficult for some children, certainly myself, to sort of project that far into the future and make a really informed decision about what you want to do. And I was good in school at biology and math and physics, so medicine seemed like as good a path as any. So I was sort of tracked in that direction.

Kayatu: Could you tell us a little bit more about your childhood? I know you gave us a brief overview, but were there any specific moments that you feel like shaped you as a person?

Jeff: I grew up in the suburbs of New York City in Nassau County, and it was a different era then than it is now. We just had a lot of freedom. I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of kids, and everyone had their bicycle and just rode their bike wherever they wanted to go. So I think for as long as I can remember, we would just be on our own doing what we wanted to do. Played a lot of sports–a lot of basketball, football, and later on I played more tennis and then ice hockey.

Shimla: Do you still play them or do you mainly watch them now?

Jeff: (laughs) Well, I don’t play them anymore and the reason is that I tore both of my Achilles tendons. I tore one playing tennis and one playing basketball, and I don’t ever want to do that again. So now I just go to the gym and the main sport I continue to do is to ski.

Shimla: Interesting!

Kayatu: What was your college experience like?

Jeff: I went to a six-year medical program. This one was at a school called RPI in upstate New York that was linked to Albany Medical College. And it’s structured a lot like, actually medical education in Europe, where you spend two years as an undergraduate and then go straight into medical school. So I spent two years in college and then started medical school. I had graduated high school early, so I finished medical school when I was 22.

Shimla: Wow, that’s early.

Jeff: Yeah, it was pretty early. And I don’t know, school came relatively easy to me, so I got to do other things I enjoy. That’s when I learned how to ski, I played a lot of ice hockey, and I had a reasonably good balance between work and play.

Shimla: I guess with such a straightforward path like that, did you have any odd jobs or was it, I guess, like laid out?

Jeff: Yeah (chuckles), I remember one job I had which I think to this day is the worst possible job, which is…you could make a lot of money working for UPS. You stand at a loading dock, and they back a truck in, and you stand on a concrete wharf, as it were. The truck backs up. So you go into the truck, take out a box, put it on the conveyor belt, repeat. And what was amazing about it was, first of all, how quickly you can actually unload a truck. Which wasn’t so good, because as soon as you finish that truck they back the next truck in. And I tried this for a couple of weeks like from 12 at night till late in the morning, and I didn’t last very long. It was the hardest work. And it sort of gave me a healthy respect for how a lot of people make their living, because at the next bays were grownups doing this every day and that was their job.

The other job I had was that my father was a radiologist, and I would spend my summers developing x-rays in a dark room. And what this fundamentally meant is that I spent my summers literally in the dark while all my friends were outside having fun.

Shimla: Did that push you away from becoming a radiologist?

Jeff: Well, I didn’t want to become a radiologist to begin with, but it certainly pushed me away from wanting to be an x-ray developer.

(chuckling)

Kayatu: For our next section, we’re gonna talk about…

In unison: (laughing) Dr. Friedman‘s favorite things!

Jeff: My favorite thing?

Kayatu: Your favorite things. So the first question we have for you: what are your favorite hobbies?

Jeff: Well, I would say it’s skiing and I like to read a lot. Read a lot of history. I like to, you know, work out, stay active. Living in New York is wonderful; there’s so many interesting things to do. So, like exploring new restaurants, not just in Manhattan, but all throughout the five boroughs. And also go to plays and movies, of course. And I like listening to jazz.

Kayatu: Yeah. If you could be placed in any time period in history, which one would you go to?

Jeff: I think I’d stick with the one I lived in! (laughing) For one thing, it worked out pretty well for me, and I know what it was like. And I’m not sure what the future holds for the planet, but I think up till this point, it’s been great for me. (laughing)

Shimla: Do you have a favorite era?

Jeff: Not really. But what I do is, if there’s a particular era that I get into–and it’s very random, which era I’ll pick–what I’ll often do is I’ll read books about a particular era in parallel or in series, but they give you different perspectives. I find that pretty interesting.

Shimla: Do you have a favorite book?

Jeff: A favorite book? That’s absolutely impossible to answer. (laughing)

Shimla: So now we’d like to talk more about your life as a scientist at Rockefeller. So the first question we have is: did you have any mentors that shaped where you are today and how?

Jeff: Yeah, I did my PhD work with a very prominent scientist named Jim Darnell. And Jim was one of the first molecular biologists. He was captivated by how RNA is made and how the genes regulate different RNAs and different tissues. And so I worked with Jim and I learned a lot about molecular biology from him, as well as how to run a lab and how to comport myself.

Shimla: Was there a moment when you knew you were meant to be a head of lab or was it more of like an impulsive decision you took and you just figured out along the way?

Jeff: No, it was sort of gradual. What happened was that I was quite young when I finished medical school, and I finished my training in internal medicine when I was 25. And up till that point I had never really thought about what it is I was actually going to do. I mean, you would think that I’d assumed I was going to be a doctor, but I didn’t even think about that very deeply other than I felt I wanted to go to an academic medical center. And usually after an internal medicine residency, [you] apply for a fellowship, but I had missed the deadline for the fellowship. So I had a gap year, and I had no idea what to do. And back then, you know, gap years were just not done–[it was] very different than today.

And one of my professors said, “well, I know someone at Rockfeller, why don’t you go try research for a year?” And I did. And I really liked it. And so in the course of that year, I decided that I wasn’t going to pursue the fellowship I had been planning to but instead entered the Rockefeller PhD program. I worked in the PhD program for about five years and it took me a long time before I stopped thinking [of] myself as a doctor and started thinking [of] myself as a scientist. But by the time I graduated, I kind of knew that I wanted to do science and I had an opportunity to start my own lab at that point, which I did and…here I am.

Shimla: How would you define science, like just for yourself?

Jeff: Well, I think it’s a journey into the unknown, you know? Asking questions you find interesting and then trying to answer them.

Kayatu: How has your role as head of lab helped you in making meaningful connections, and are there any that have particularly stood out?

Jeff: Well, some of my closest friends are colleagues at Rockefeller. We all started at the same time, and we’ve been here together for decades now. And that forges a certain type of bond that you don’t forge any other way. But I also have had an incredible roster of students and postdoctoral associates coming through the lab, and I’m very proud to see how well they’ve done and how they’ve moved on in their careers. It’s a very gratifying thing to see someone come to your place and then leave more confident and more capable than when they arrived.

Shimla: What is the best part of, I guess, being a head of lab? Like you mentioned how gratifying it is to see your students prosper, but [are] there any defining moments in your everyday life?

Jeff: Well, if you do science, it’s because you’re excited by new results, new findings, new ways of looking at things. Sometimes it’s incredibly exciting and exhilarating, but I think one of the lessons I would hope to impart is that you should take any small victory that comes your way. I still get a real thrill out of any new result that changes the way we think about something. Sometimes it’s because we had an idea and it turned out to be correct. Other times things are surprising and that maybe pushes you in even a newer direction you hadn’t anticipated.

Kayatu: What do you wish more people knew about your job and/or your research?

Jeff: Well, in terms of our research, I think what we and others in the field have shown clearly now is that body weight is regulated by genetic and biological factors and is not a defect and willpower, for example. So I’d like the world to understand that this is a biological problem and that, genetically speaking, it’s not that much different than height. And so I think this is important because obesity is often stigmatized. And the science tells us there’s no reason to stigmatize people because of their weight, be they thin or heavy.

Shimla: What kind of influenced you to look at obesity in this new lens? Was it your interest in [the] gym or was it something completely different?

Jeff: Well, I got interested in this area because I was interested in how behavior is regulated. That actually had to do with having had dogs. And you know you watch dogs, and they have particular personalities and behaviors. And it’s pretty clear a dog doesn’t have a conscious self dictating it–it’s wired into them, and I was just always interested in it.

And I came across this strange, genetically obese strain of mouse that’s massively overweight as a result of a defect in a single gene. And that single gene defect leads mice to eat three to four times as much per day as a normal mouse. And so if you’re interested in the regulation of behavior, then the finding that there’s a single gene that can dysregulate feeding behavior to that extent is a pretty amazing result. And so when I started my career, we set out to identify that defective gene.

Shimla: What advice would you give to high school or college students who are looking at research, but I guess don’t know how to join in?

Jeff: Science has become more broadly introduced into education than it once was. So I would be very receptive to laboratory experiences in high school, to doing the things you’re doing, which are joining programs that further expose you to science. And that would apply at the high school and the college level. And then there are pretty clear paths, if you want to become a scientist, past that point.

Kayatu: And then…

Jeff: No more unison?

(laughing)

I get very excited when you talk in unison.

Kayatu: Should we say this last question in unison?

Shimla: (laughing) Ok!

Jeff: Is it in the script?

Kayatu: It’s just for you, it’s not in the script.

Jeff: Oh wow!

Kayatu: We’ll do it just for you. A special moment.

Jeff: Oh, I appreciate that a lot.

Kayatu: Okay, three, two, one…

In unison: Is there anything you’d like to share with the audience before wrapping up that we didn’t get to today? (laughing)

Jeff: I’ll tell you a funny story that carries with it a request. So the work my lab is best known for is having identified this defective gene, which was called the ob gene, and the defective gene is a hormone we named leptin. And there was an iconic cover of the article that published that result, that’s on my wall there. It’s one obese mouse on a scale outweighing his two sibling littermates.

And we identified that gene in 1994, long before you were born. And it was the same year that the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup. And I’ve been a Ranger fan since I [was] a boy. That was a really exciting moment. And I was still playing hockey recreationally at the time when a reporter came in to interview me.

And she saw I had a hockey stick leaning against the wall in this office over in the corner there, and she said, “oh, you play hockey!” She’d come to talk about the ob gene. I said, “yeah!” And it turns out that her day job was to do the post-game announcements, you know, post-game interviews for the New York Rangers. So she interviewed me for PBS, but her day job was with MSG, the network that plays the Rangers.

And as she was leaving, she said, “can I have a copy of your paper?” [I said] “sure,” I gave it to her. And then a few weeks later, what arrived in the mail was a copy of the paper signed by Mark Messier, the captain of the Rangers. And it’s on the wall there. It says, “Mark Messier, 1994 Cup.”

So over the years, people have seen that, and I’ve told them the story. And different people have said, “well, I know so-and-so.” And I’ve had the paper now signed by some of the most famous sports figures in history. So among the people who’ve signed it are Lionel Messi and Wayne Gretzky and, well you wouldn’t have heard of Gordie Howe and Ken Dryden, and many many others…Karim Abdul-Jabbar, I’m looking at the wall now…Thierry Henry, and so on. So if anyone out there knows a sports figure that would be willing to autograph the paper, I’d be happy to give them a copy.

Shimla: We’ll try to see if we can get in contact with LeBron James maybe one day.

Jeff: Do you know LeBron? You hang out together?

(laughing)

Kayatu: We can…in the future, maybe. There’s always a possibility.

Jeff: I think he should be your next interview.

Kayatu: Okay, we’ll make it happen. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Friedman.

Jeff: Sure, it was fun to talk to you.

Kayatu and Shimla in unison: Thank you for listening to Beyond the Lab!

[OUTRO]

Shimla: That was really interesting!

Kayatu: Yeah!

(laughing)

Jeff: Okay. It was fun!

Kayatu: Thank you so much.