I was a little junior farmer, driving tractors, pitching manure, and milking cows. With cows, you are up at 5:00 A.M. And you do it again at 5:00 P.M. Get back in the house at about 9:00. And that's seven days a week. No holidays. Don't feel well, it doesn't matter.

But I think that set a really good example in my life about the kind of dedication that it really takes.

My full name is Samuel Lawrence Pfaff, and everyone calls me Sam because that's what I would prefer to be called. And my title is Salk Professor.

I grew up in a small town in Minnesota called Rochester, Minnesota. It happens to be the home of the Mayo Clinic, but it is a very small town. And I would say that the environment that I grew up in did have a major impact on my career choices, and led to some variety in the things that I was exposed to.

I had an interesting mix of sort of rural exposure and academic exposure in the sense that my grandparents were farmers and almost all of my relatives were farmers, dairy farmers, and my parents had grown up on farms, but my father worked at the Mayo Clinic.

And every weekend, every holiday, every summer break, I went to my grandparents farm. But the other part of my life was that all of my neighbors were either engineers or surgeons. I was not the all-star athlete in high school. But I did play things like football and basketball and track and field. And I wasn't very musically talented, nor was I very great at learning different languages.

I don't know whether it was because I was so interested in biology that I just didn't want to put energy into those things or whether I just had no talent for them to start with, but certainly I didn't get straight As. I can promise you that. Although, high school was pretty easy. College is where I did not get straight As despite wanting to.

When I went to college, it was like, okay, this is really, I'm going to commit now to an academic lifestyle. There was almost a single day where like, the lights went on, and that was in this embryology class, one of the lab activities was to fertilize frog eggs and then watch them develop and describe them. And I basically stayed up all night long watching that happen, thinking, there is so much that is happening, from the moment of fertilization to this thing being able to swim and respond to different, you know, environment light and dark and get away from prey and so on.

There are a million questions in biology that will keep me busy for the rest of my life. I went to Carleton College, which was a liberal arts school. And for somebody who is really focused on science, the liberal arts training actually put me a little bit in a uncomfortable zone at times, which was probably incredibly healthy.

Then I went to UC Berkeley. And this was a real opportunity for me because this was a time when molecular biology was a new science, people who were beginning to clone genes, characterize genes, think about how genes work. But where I knew the magic was going to happen is combining molecular biology and developmental biology. And this was an entirely new field, and this is something that I really wanted to do. Then I went to Columbia University and did a second post doctoral fellowship, where I worked on development of the nervous system, and that's where things came together, and that actually represents the sort origin story for the science in my own lab and that we work on development of the nervous system with a particular focus on the spinal cord and trying to understand how the circuitry within the spinal cord forms to regulate how we move. Often, the spinal cord has just thought it as a relay center for what the brain is telling the body to do. But in reality, a lot of the circuitry that regulates our movements is actually down at the level of the spinal cord.

People intuitively know this when we tell them you remember when you cut the head off of a chicken, this is back to the farm, I guess. Cut the head off of a chicken, it still flaps its wings, it's still capable of running, but that is an indication that a lot of the circuitry doesn't really require the head. A lot of the circuitry is actually in the spinal cord itself. And so this is one of the big focus areas for the research in my laboratory.

The other area that we work on is an extension of the genetics that I touched on in my interest in the genetics. And so there are a variety of genetic diseases in humans that are inherited. They are diseases such as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. And there's a new revolution taking place in medicine right now that relates to using viruses that are safe to deliver genes to replace the lost gene that has been mutated.

And so we do work to improve upon those genetic systems for treating genetic diseases. The Institute really encourages us. It has an environment that really wants us to make significant discoveries in science, to really transform our fields. And often those huge steps and accomplishments take place as a result of combining ideas and technologies and insights from multiple areas of biology. And that kind of environment is very healthy for exchanging ideas that might lead to something really innovative. And these are characteristics that are much more common at the Salk Institute in my opinion than in other places.