Biotech Career Profiles

Ken Kreuzer, Ph.D.

Professor of Biochemistry
Department of Biochemistry
Duke University Medical Center
Durham, NC

I grew up in a working-class family, taking summer jobs in a restaurant, a laundry factory, and doing house painting while in high school. From these jobs, I quickly learned that I did not want to spend my life doing such repetitive labor. Throughout my early schooling, I always had a fascination with math and science, and so I was drawn towards a career in these fields. Being the first in the extended family to go off to college, I w

Dr. Kreuzer (left) works with a biochemistry
student.

as not very astute about what kinds of opportunities might exist in math or science. From my high school experiences, I was not very fond of biology--it seemed like just a lot of memorizing of kingdoms and phylogeny at one level, and organ and cell types at another level.

That all changed when I took a course in molecular genetics in college. This was during the 1970's, and I discovered that molecular genetics was a general approach that allowed one to ask detailed questions about how life works on the most fundamental level. I was amazed that you could deduce what was happening at the level of the DNA molecule from observations on the color of a bacterial colony or whether a virus could grow on a particular host. I went from taking a lab course in the subject to volunteering for independent research in the professor's lab, and I was soon serving as a teaching assistant in the lab course. I was able to publish a research paper in a very respected journal when I completed my undergraduate research, which was one of the biggest thrills of my life. The choice to go to graduate school for a Ph.D. in Genetics was very easy--doing research in the lab was the most rewarding experience that I had found in life. Likewise, I went on for postdoctoral research and then got a faculty position at a great institution.

At every step and to this day, I am motivated by the excitement of research, and I have seen amazing changes in our understanding of how life works in the 25 years since I published my first paper as an undergraduate. As time goes on, I find more and more satisfaction from teaching and training young scientists, and seeing them go on to successful careers. Sadly, I don't find time to work in the lab much anymore, but I still get great satisfaction from planning experiments with people in my lab and discussing the results that they obtain. I don't have any regrets about the career path that I took, even though I find that the young people in graduate school today have many more choices than I did back in the late 1970's.