It would be difficult to do a bad interview with David Botstein (your recorder would have to break), but Jane Gitschier has a particularly good one over at PLoS Genetics. Much of it deals with his ongoing experiment in undergraduate education at Princeton, some of which we wrote about in our own piece on Botstein.

If you’re looking for some good lines, you won’t be disappointed:

What happens to students who come to college wanting to learn biochemistry? They find themselves first in a chemistry class with a hundred students with absolutely no interest in chemistry. All of those students drill a hole in the head of the instructors and each other to get the best possible grade because all they want is the grade. You teach these people later, and you realize that they are unteachable, to a first approximation. I have never failed as a teacher, except when trying to teach genetics to medical students.

Good thing Princeton doesn’t have a medical school.

And this, commenting on the revelation that ultimately led to the 1980 paper on generating linkage maps via RFLPs:

So finally I say something like, “Look there is nothing special about HLA. What’s good about HLA is that it has many alleles, and because it has many alleles, you can tell if you have linkage, and if you have many multiallelic markers all over the genome, you can map anything!” And as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I look at Davis, Davis looks at me, and we both understand that of course there are such markers, and we could make a map of the human genome tomorrow.

However:

What was really noticeable at the time was that the human geneticists didn’t get it. At all. At all, at all, at all. It took a really long time. Skolnick was beating the drum. In 1983, I went to the ASHG meeting, and I gave this long discussion of how it would all work, and I had to explain Southern blot and this and that. I went to NIH and tried to get money, and Ruth Kirschstein looked at me and said, “We don’t do things like that.”

But the rest of the interview delves into his personal history, much of which was unknown to me. Born in Switzerland in 1942, he came to the United States at the age of seven with his family. His mother, Anne Botstein (née Ania Wyszewianska), was Guido Fanconi’s chief resident (of Fanconi anemia fame). David Botstein himself has published on Fanconi anemia. He points out that Fanconi was also the discoverer of cystic fibrosis, and notes that his mother (a pediatrician) was the first to show that cystic fibrosis is inherited (a family study in Switzerland during the war). Add in his father Charles Botstein, a well-known physician and professor at Einstein who pioneered the use of radiotherapy in the treatment of uterine cancer, his brother Leon, a well-known college president and conductor, his sister Eva, a cardiologist, and you have quite a talented family.

In fact, there might be a pretty good book in all of this. Dr. Botstein: get thee a publisher.