Julia Kornfield: ‘I’ve often followed an instinct about a person’

When I went off to undergrad, I liked physics, chemistry and maths, but I had hoped to be a novelist, so I went to major in literature. But it turned out I wasn’t very good at it. Luckily, I was at Caltech where, in the 1980s, even a literature major had to take a year of chemistry and two years each of physics and maths. That is how I discovered that I’m not half bad at doing science.

In my career I’ve often followed an instinct about a person who I thought was inspiring. For example, in chemistry, I was inspired by Peter Dervan – the way he talked and thought about science. He was designing synthetic molecules that could touch in the grooves of DNA, and recognise a sequence of, say, six nucleotides out of a whole genome. He was always focused on the heart of the matter, ‘the take-home lesson’.