Insider Info

Biochemist Penny Beuning's interest in science began at a very young age.

"I knew probably even in elementary school... that I really liked math and science, and that was solidified in high school," she says. "I had great science teachers and it got me really excited about science. There were lots of opportunities to do extra things and projects and labs, so I always liked it."

Beuning also had a friend whose mom was a biologist. This also helped move her toward a science career. When she went to college, she decided to major in chemistry.

"Like a lot of people I didn't know what the range of options was," says Beuning. "And I was pretty, I would say, naive. I just thought, 'I like this, I'm just going to keep doing what I like, and presumably something will work out.'"

In college, Beuning did chemistry research in a lab for a couple of years. She really got excited about the project. She also worked part time at a company, doing quality control and some research related to product testing.

"My research project wasn't very biochemical, it was more chemistry, but then it got me thinking about proteins and more biological questions," says Beuning. "So I went to grad school in a chemistry department, but had a biochemistry project. That was when I thought, 'OK, this is what I want to do -- I want to do biochemistry."

It was in grad school that Beuning decided to become a professor.

Biochemists are fortunate to have many career options, including those in industry and schools.

"I like teaching, I like working with students, I like working with undergraduate researchers, and so that was a big pull for me," says Beuning. "And I like curiosity-driven research, so I like to work on things I just find interesting. It's a lot easier to do that in academics."

Beuning estimates that she spends 60 to 70 percent of her time on research. Her research focuses on how cells respond to stresses that harm the genetic material within cells. These sources of stress are both environmental as well as internal to the cell.

"I think curiosity about the natural world is a good characteristic -- you want to understand how something works, or how to make it better," says Beuning. "That's a lot of what we do."

There's another quality biochemists should have: perseverance.

"If you're doing research, in particular," says Beuning. "Because experiments don't always work or they don't give you the result that you expect, and you have to be willing to do it again or rethink your hypothesis."

Curiosity and perseverance aren't just helpful in the work world. They also help you succeed at university. There are other skills that will help you at university.

"I guess [key] skills would be communication skills, both written and oral," says Robert Bertolo. He is deputy head of a department of biochemistry.

"And I think that probably the most successful students are the ones who can manage their time the best," Bertolo says.

"I think time management really separates the good marks from the bad marks. It's not intelligence, at that level."

Bertolo says many biochemistry students are hoping to become medical researchers or physicians.

"And I would say across the country that's pretty common, mostly because biochemistry is housed in a lot of medical schools now," says Bertolo.

"Not everybody gets into research or medicine, so I'd say the most common [alternative] fields would be pharmaceutical sales and research [and] the food industry," Bertolo adds. Bertolo himself is a nutrition researcher.

When choosing a biochemistry program, Bertolo says it depends what you're looking for.

"Some people would chase the reputation side of things, and things get a little bit more cutthroat when you're going into the bigger schools with the bigger reputations," says Bertolo.

"But there are a lot of people who emphasize smaller class sizes also. With smaller class sizes, you get a closer relationship with the researchers, and getting opportunities to work in labs is more likely at a smaller school."

Biochemist Jan Rainey's interest in biochemistry began in high school. "Prior to about Grade 12 or so I didn't really even know that this discipline by itself existed," says Rainey. "So then I had a teacher in Grade 12 who actually had a master's in biochemistry and was quite excited about it and gave us a lot of flavor for that side of things.

"Prior to that I thought chemistry itself, sort of the more pure chemistry side of things, was great, and I didn't even know about this field called biochemistry which combined my interest in how organisms work with my interest in atoms and molecules."

Rainey's research focuses on structural biology and the characteristics of proteins in cells.

"If you look at the human genome, for example, 30 percent of the proteins that you find encoded in the human genome are found on the surface of the cell, the so-called 'membrane proteins,'" says Rainey. "But if you look at our actual knowledge of protein structure at the atomic level, maybe one percent of the proteins that we know about are this class of membrane proteins.

"So despite the fact that it's a huge proportion of proteins in our body, we still are barely scratching the surface of understanding what those proteins look like and therefore how they work at the molecular, atomic level," Rainey adds.

"This is a really hot area at the moment because using traditional methods these proteins have been quite difficult to study, which is why we don't know a lot about them. So a lot of labs are now developing new methods, new ways of dealing with these tricky proteins and understanding what the surface of the cell really looks like."

Dealing with things that are so tiny, like cell proteins, means that biochemists benefit from having a good imagination.

"You're not going to be able to see it with the naked eye, so you have to be able to envision a complex system and sort of put the bits and pieces that you know together and really combine them in new and imaginative ways to understand what's going on," says Rainey.

It's imagination that leads to discovery. And the desire for discovery is what drives many biochemists to do such challenging work.

"I think you've got to have a desire to discover new things," says Rainey. "That to me is the amazing thing about biochemistry, or about any of the sciences -- is that what we're doing is really brand new. We wouldn't be doing what we're doing if somebody had done it before us, so we're always charting new ground and finding out new things about nature."