What is the biological question you are trying to answer?

I've been a group leader here at the Max Perutz Labs since August 2023. In my lab, we study chromosome segregation. That is the process in which two copies of the genome are distributed to the resulting daughter cells during cell division. That might sound like a simple task, but there is an enormous molecular complexity to it. And I find it fascinating to think about the proteins and the protein-DNA interactions that ensure that it occurs correctly – all of the time. We have learned a great deal about this process in the last decade, but if you zoom in, there are still many details that we do not understand. For example, what are these proteins precisely? What do they do? We cannot quantify it. What do they do? Where do they do that? With whom do they do that? How do they do that? How quickly? And that's what we want to understand.

What is your approach?

In the lab, we take a biochemical reconstitution approach. That means we try to get all the relevant players, all the relevant biomolecules, from recombinant material, into a test tube, and investigate the properties of the system by adding components, mutating components, and titrating components, to obtain quantitative and mechanistic insights. It's a little bit like cooking, when you have to first get all the ingredients together – and that might actually be the hard part of the work – then we cook, and that's the fun part. We try to obtain the highest quality proteins and protein-DNA complexes, before mixing them together. For cooking, if you have really good ingredients, sometimes you don't even need to do so much to make a good dish – in other words, to make a meaningful discovery.

What is exciting about being a scientist?

The speed of discovery in the life sciences is really astonishing. I look back sometimes at papers from the 1990s. The amount of work that went into a paper at that time was probably the same, but the amount of information in a paper today is completely different. So, what took years then, took months a couple of years back. And now we can do it in days, or maybe even an hour. We can obtain so many new insights about the biomolecules in our body that it's really fascinating to think about what we can accomplish in the future. It's thrilling to think about that: how much we will learn in the next 10 or 20 years. And to be a part of that – that’s quite exciting.

When did you decide to become a scientist?

There's a story that, as a child, I wondered why I am right-handed, but left-footed. And it turns out that my brother and some of my aunts and uncles are also right-handed and left-footed. And I was really curious to figure out how that works. How can such traits be passed between generations? I might have been 10 years old or so. However, my dreams of becoming a neurobiologist then vanished for quite a few years. Only later, during my studies in molecular life sciences, did I again become passionate for science. It was maybe not at the bachelor level, but rather later, when I worked on my own research project, even if it was only for a few weeks or a few months, and tried to really accomplish something. I thought that it would be fun to do that for longer and so decided to go for a PhD and whatever came next – as it turned out, more and more research.

What was your plan B? Which job would you have in a different universe?

There are many things I could imagine doing. And I could imagine them being fun to do. Designing board games, making something out of wood. But if I had to pick one thing, it would be improving cycling infrastructure worldwide. Being Dutch, I see that as a huge deficiency everywhere. Cycling should be for people from eight to 80. And it should be a fun activity and a safe activity. Children should be able to chat with each other while they cycle to school. And I think our ambitions are just way too low to make that a reality in our cities.

What does it take to be a good scientist?

Well, that’s a tough question. There are probably many very different kinds of good scientists and paths that lead to success, and who am I to judge. But I can think of people who were inspirational to me. For example, Barbara McClintock was really thinking outside of the box and ahead of her time. From her biography, she seems like a dedicated and persistent person who made fantastic discoveries. I’m also thinking about a quote that I attribute – maybe rightly so, maybe not – to Kim Nasmyth, who talked about the weird mix that a scientist needs to have: the right mix of being both enthusiastic and self-critical. Even if it's just a faint band on a gel, or the slightest idea of a new hypothesis – you have to really be inspired and go for it. But at the same time, you have to be the most critical person of your own ideas. You don't want to go out and celebrate something before you have tried really hard to falsify it. In the sense of Karl Popper: trying to generate hypotheses that can be falsified in order to arrive at new scientific truths.