Profile of Vivian Siegel, Ph.D.

The Desire to Do Something Good

When I was in high school, I had the experience that pulls a lot of people into biomedical research. A friend died of a genetically based disease. My reaction was that if you want research to be done, you have to become a researcher. That drive to make something happen that I felt passionately needed to happen drove me into science and then drove me into what I'm doing today. Just following my own intellectual drives, I'd probably be a mathematician. I've been driven more by the desire to do something good than by the desire to follow my own intellectual path.

I am also driven by the desire to be intellectually challenged. In graduate school and during my postdocs, I always tended toward basic science. I was distracted by intellectual curiosity from what motivated me to do science.

As an undergraduate at Bowdoin in Maine, I did get involved in cystic fibrosis research. I was a biochemistry and mathematics double major. I went to graduate school at University of California San Francisco and was immediately entranced by all the interesting basic research going on there. I did basic cell biology, then developmental biology. That sort of research has clinical implications a step or two or three away. But for somebody who feels it behooves her to be part of disease curing, it's not close enough.

I looked at a number of faculty positions and was offered some. But for some reason, I was internally resistant to starting my own lab. Friends frustrated with me being on the fence sent me to a career counselor, who asked a very simple question: if you didn't have to think about what anybody thought of you, or how much money you earned, what would you do? That answer was easy: be a student for the rest of my life. I realized I got joy out of being a scientist through learning. I just wanted to know more today than I did yesterday. I didn't really feel much need to own the ideas, which is what heads of labs get to do.

The next day I saw an ad for an editor position and something clicked. It was at Cell. I had thought at one point in the distant past I might enjoy being an editor for one of these high-profile journals. I went to Cell. It was great fun and intellectually satisfying. But to go back to my need to do something good, I always questioned how much am I influencing the process in a positive way. There were certainly many papers we turned from good papers into outstanding papers. Choosing the right things to publish influences the way science is done. But when you're motivated by the desire to wake up in the morning and feel you're doing something good, there is still something missing.

The missing part became more clear when Cell Press was acquired, and I had entered a corporate environment where, in my opinion, the motivation was clearly not advancing science but how to extract profit from communicating science. The breaking point for me came over the issue of access to the literature. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) circulated its open letter requesting that publishers after 6 months open up access to the literature.

We knew in Cell Press that nobody would cancel a subscription if they had to wait 6 months to see our literature. The revenue you would lose would be small to none and easily made up by the good will we would generate in the scientific community and the ability to get papers that might otherwise go to Science or Nature because we were doing the right thing. It would increase the quality of what we were doing. The people above us refused to allow us to do this. The reason was that you could not apply a policy to one journal that you weren't going to apply to all the journals published by the company. This did actually make me recognize that I was in the wrong community. I had thought of myself as a scientist working in a publishing environment, influencing science in a positive way even though I wasn't at the bench. When I found myself with a policy I couldn't defend from the perspective of science, I recognized that my time at Cell Press and Elsevier really was limited.

Then I was approached by PLoS. The access issue is clearly solved. PLoS is a grass roots movement about scientists taking control of the literature, so I feel back in that community. It satisfies this need to be doing something I believe in that is useful directly in a very positive way. It satisfies my need to feel I'm doing something good every day. I completely believe in our mission. And it's enormous fun to start something new.