by Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede
Jacqueline K. Barton is an exceptional biophysicist working at the elite California Institute of Technology. Among many prizes and honors, she received the National Medal of Science from President Obama in 2011 and the highest honor of the American Chemical Society, the Priestley Medal, in 2015. What are the secrets behind her amazing career? As will emerge from the text below, her recipe includes endless amounts of energy, strength, and curiosity. And, it helps that she has a winning personality.
Jacqueline “Jackie” K. Barton was born in 1952 to a judge father and a stay-at-home mother. She attended a gender-segregated school, and narrowly escaped being limited to arts and music through the intervention of a teacher who recognized her innate skill in mathematics. Although there was no precedent in Jackie's family for a female scientist, her teacher successfully persuaded her parents and school principal to let Jackie attend the boys' school to learn mathematics.
Barton entered Barnard College for women in 1970 expecting that she would major in math. However, at this point in her studies, she became passionate about chemistry “where you can combine math with little things that may make a difference in the world,” Barton explains. At Barnard, she had a female physical chemistry teacher who served as a strong example of a woman pursuing chemistry in an era when this was still fairly unusual.
After finishing at Barnard, she began graduate school at Columbia University with the idea of doing physical chemistry. Instead, she ended up working for Steven J. Lippard on the binding of inorganic complexes to DNA. After a postdoctoral year at Bell Laboratories, Barton planned to continue her career in industry. She returned to New York in 1980, however, and took a faculty position at Hunter College. After a few years at Hunter, she became frustrated over her teaching responsibilities limiting her time for research, which was her passion. Around the same time, Lippard left Columbia and Barton took his place on the Columbia faculty. She was the only woman faculty member in the chemistry department for many years and she became the first woman to get tenure at Columbia.
At Columbia, her research program took off and her group expanded. She started to work closely with the department chair, Nick Turro, who also acted as a caring mentor to her. Together they made the pioneering discovery in 1986 that DNA can act as a conducting wire, a finding which stirred much controversy in subsequent years. Although painful, the harsh critiques she received in the wake of this discovery prompted Jackie do more experiments which ultimately resulted in the recognition that she had been right all along. In 1989, Barton left New York for a position at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Although she is a true New Yorker, love made her accept the offer from Caltech; through conferences, she had gotten to know Peter Dervan, a professor at Caltech. They fell in love and, after her relocation, married.
Barton’s research is a mixture of inorganic chemistry, biophysics, and biochemistry. What matters most to her is asking important scientific questions and using the tools and approaches that are appropriate regardless of discipline. From her early work on metal complexes recognizing DNA sequence specifically to the role of DNA base stacking for electron transfer, her group now utilizes what they have learned for studies of real biological processes, such as how DNA-repair proteins find breaks in the DNA. It was only recently revealed that many DNA-binding proteins - involved in replication and transcription as well as repair - contain redox-active metal clusters. Thus, it is possible that the use of electron transfer to scan for DNA lesions is an ancient mechanism not yet appreciated. In addition to probe if cells use DNA-facilitated electron transfer as a basic means to monitor DNA integrity, current work in her group is directed towards cancer diagnostics and treatments. More broadly, the Barton Lab pursues fundamental knowledge of the mechanisms of life, as well as new strategies to cure diseases.
Talking to current and former students of Barton’s, it becomes clear that she is a wonderful mentor. She has had over 100 graduate and postdoc students in her lab over the years. Her group size has been around 20 for many years, but during the last few years it has decreased to 10-15 students, in part because she has been the chair of the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division since 2009. She takes time for her students and encourages them but, at the same time, she is tough and demands progress and thorough experiments. This combination of support and expectations helps the students excel in their projects. She believes that observing the development of students into independent scientists is the most rewarding aspect of her job.
Early on, Barton learned how to say “no” so that she would not be overloaded with committee work. She is the mother of two children. When the children were young, Barton and Dervan carefully scheduled their conference trips so that one of them was always at home. They were also able to hire a nanny, which helped a great deal. Barton has established a rule for herself that she will not bring work home, which helps her to focus on her family—and leisure time as well. When outside her office, she enjoys swimming in her pool, cooking, and golfing with her husband.
The most important advice Barton wants to give to young women scientists of today is to focus on their science first. This is also her recommendation to chairs and senior professors out there; let the young women focus on research and do not exhaust them with chores just because women should be represented on committees. The best thing she thinks she can do as a role model is to do good science. This is exactly what she is doing and will do for years to come - because it is clear that she loves what she is doing.