Title:
Biologist
Education: UCSD graduated in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in biology; graduated in 1980 from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a Ph.d. in genetics
Age:
45
Birthplace:
Buffalo, New York
Family:
Wife Connie, daughter Kelly, son Toby
Hobbies:
Running, bike riding, playing and coaching basketball
UCSD Geneticist Larry Goldstein Is Half Scientist, Half Athlete and Part of an Entrepreneurial Triangle
With his tall, athletic build, UCSD’s Lawrence “Larry” Goldstein defies the stereotype of the nerdy professor.
And yet, athletes and scientists are similar in many ways.
To succeed, they both need strength, perseverance, intellect and arguably a bit of an eccentric personality.
Goldstein, an accomplished geneticist who doesn’t shy away from controversy, embodies all. His views on highly charged issues, including embryonic stem cell research and cloning, are quoted frequently by the media.
But he’s quick to say he draws a line between his private and public life.
“If you are someone who believes that the use of a human embryo, or human blastocyst in stem cell research is the same as murder, that’s very uncomfortable for you and while I disagree with that point of view many of my neighbors may take a different view,” he says. “I try not to push the issue in the local community.”
He also fears his wife and children may unjustifiably feel repercussions from his actions. And he’s the first to admit that his not-so-laid back attitude and direct approach doesn’t sit well with most Californians.
“I like to joke that I left California in 1976, (for graduate school in Seattle) because I wasn’t mellow enough,” Goldstein says. “I am not very relaxed and I’m quite direct.”
Still he returned to his alma mater, UCSD, in 1993, in part because he was increasingly unhappy with the lack of interdisciplinary work at Harvard University that stifled his quest to try out new things.
“I always had a habit of just kind of doing what I thought was best,” he says after telling another tale of how he defied the recommendations of his graduate adviser. “I have always been a maverick in that sense.”
Gene Pool
His brother, Dan Goldstein, a prosecutor at the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, says it’s probably genetics.
“He comes from a family of extremely motivated, bordering-on-obsessed parents,” Goldstein says. “We were all taught by my dad and my mom to just work tremendously hard.”
The end product is two attorneys and one scientist.
The scientist says he was born in 1956 in Buffalo, N.Y., to a “baby-catching, small-town emergency and family physician,” referring to his father.
Goldstein was 4 years old when the family relocated to Torrance. As a child, Goldstein watched how his father reinvented himself several times after a tragic car accident that nearly left him with only one arm.
Fearful of not being able to continue his profession, Goldstein’s father got a law degree and surged to even greater heights, combining law with medicine.
His mother also “did a lot of different things,” he says, from raising three boys and running his father’s practice, to pursuing a career in nursing.
Goldstein says he had a difficult time figuring out what he wanted to do. He always enjoyed playing basketball and running, but the traditional high school education didn’t sit well with his restless intellect. So, he headed to the more challenging classes offered at community colleges early on. But, Goldstein also learned another important lesson about life.
“By that time I had enough crappy jobs that I knew I needed to do something I needed a profession that paid more than minimum wage,” Goldstein says.
In 1974, he earned enough college credits to transfer to UCSD where he declared biology as his major. It would have paved the way to medical school.
It wasn’t that he particularly enjoyed the sciences, rather, “It was sort of the obvious choice I could make a living at,” he says.
But then something interesting happened.
“During my first quarter, I had to take a required genetics course taught by Dan Lindsley, a classical drosophila geneticist of the old school. It was the hardest course I have taken in my life and I was totally unprepared for it , but I did well in it,” he recalls.
It was an awakening.
“The sort of intellectual freedom of doing genetics, doing actual experimental science was liberating in some unusual way for me,” he says, and after a moment of contemplation adds, “It changed my life.”
Lindsley, who is retired but still, as he describes it, “fiddles around” with fruit flies to “keep out of trouble,” guided Goldstein throughout his career.
Lindsley gave the undergraduate his first bench in the lab and later recommended him to his friend, geneticist Larry Sandler at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Goldstein became good friends with a fellow graduate student named Connie Holm. Neither heard wedding bells at the time.
After graduating with his Ph.D. in genetics in 1980, Goldstein was off to pursue his post-doctoral work at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
He joined the laboratory of a cell biologist, much to the dismay of his graduate adviser.
Goldstein explains that back then, the field of biology was separated into subdisciplines that worked totally independent of each other.
So when Goldstein, a trained geneticist, told his adviser he wanted to pursue cell biology, he was rejected.
Challenges and Rewards
But Goldstein wasn’t about to give in. He persevered and in 1983 was accepted to join Harvard’s prestigious faculty board as an assistant professor.
Goldstein however, negotiated to spend his first year at rival Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so he could learn a “new method for cloning genes.”
During that time, Goldstein also became reacquainted with his college friend Connie Holm, who at that time was doing her post-doctoral work at MIT.
They realized that their bond extended beyond science and were married in 1986. Holm had joined Goldstein as a Harvard faculty member in 1985.
After traveling extensively through Europe and pondering science together, the couple’s focus shifted following the birth of their daughter, Kelly, in 1990, and their son, Toby, in 1992.
In 1993, Goldstein decided it was time for a career move, too. He had become increasingly unhappy with Harvard’s lack of encouraging interdisciplinary work, though he doesn’t discount the institution’s brilliant scientists. He was eager to move on.
UCSD offered what he wanted: an opportunity to investigate how things move inside cells, in particular neurons in two species, the drosophila and mouse. UCSD was also one of the first to recognize the value of intertwining all types of disciplines.
Lindsley applauded the university for recruiting Goldstein by saying UCSD was “lucky to get him.”
He described Goldstein’s lab as being an active one and says he’s also quite active himself.
“He’s quite the jock,” Lindsley says, then tells the story of Goldstein’s idea of a family vacation up the California coast.
He rides his bike, while his wife and kids drive the car to meet in between.
Dan Goldstein also says he wouldn’t dare try to compete against his brother.
“He’s kind of like a goat , he’s got an exceptionally strong build,” Goldstein says.
The next major hurdle for Goldstein, however, requires more than that.
In 1998, Goldstein and fellow scientists from UC San Francisco and Stanford University founded Cytokinetics, a biotechnology start-up in South San Francisco that develops therapeutics targeting heart disease, cancer and other pathogens. Goldstein says he hopes the Food and Drug Administration will approve safety trials next year.
