Hagan Bayley talks to Laura Howes about the constraints of defining science and what he's learnt from the business world.

Hagan Bayley is professor of chemical biology at the University of Oxford, UK. His research interests include the molecular engineering of membrane proteins for applications in basic science and biotechnology. Hagan is a Molecular BioSystems editorial board member.

 

Why did you decide to be a scientist? 

I think it was as simple as enjoying science and mathematics at school. Becoming a scientist just happened rather than being planned.

You did your undergraduate degree in Oxford. Has the course altered much since then? 

The subject matter is frighteningly unchanged. I think what Oxford is trying to do is turn out students who really know chemistry, which is different to the multidisciplinary approach at other universities. You can argue that the lack of change is good, that in the three years as an undergraduate you have to learn the basis for everything that comes later. But you can also argue that it's a little out of touch with what's going on, not in the chemical sciences but in science in general. 
  
After your degree you moved to the United States. Do you prefer it over there? 

I was in the US from 1974-2003 so my whole career was in the States before I came back to Oxford. I've never stayed in one place for more than about eight years and I've really enjoyed every place I've lived. I can't say I preferred the States. Oxford is hugely international; there's an enormous amount going on here and it's close to London without having to live in London. There's a lot going on in life. You have to find your top 10% and enjoy it.

How do you define chemical biology? 

I prefer not to define chemical biology. I think chemistry, biology and physics are words people have used to put boundaries around things that don't really exist. I think terms like chemical biology are probably useful for dealing with the administration in a university or raising money from a research council, but scientifically they can be quite constraining. We don't need people to tell us who we are or what to do. We need freedom to operate if we are going to do new science. 

Do you think collaborations are the way forward or do you prefer knowing exactly what goes on in your lab? 

I like local control but I believe in chaos too. The few new things that you do in your lifetime come from having the freedom to experiment. We're not a factory turning out a product; we bring good people together and see what emerges.

It's very useful to have all the components of a project in your own lab so you can easily have a chat and sort things out. I've tried to bring a lot of technologies into the lab and I wouldn't pretend to be an expert in any one of them but bringing them together is amazingly powerful. So in some ways, you're a bit more like an architect - you bring people with different skills together to come up with a beautiful and functional building. But obviously, to extend the analogy, to plan a city would require collaboration between groups. Some people like to collaborate and others like to bring people together and watch it unfold in front of their eyes, which is more my style.

You have a spinout company, Oxford NanoLabs. How is it going? 

Pretty well! We started with stochastic sensing, an area that had matured in the lab, and we set up a company to do it. As it happens, we are now focusing on single molecule DNA sequencing, which is a very exciting area, so it's frontline science as well.

As an academic, it has been really interesting being able to turn much more fire power onto a problem and see how quickly something can move forward in a business. Working with business people has been very interesting as well. I do think you need a certain amount of chaos to generate new ideas and discover new things in your lab but you need management as well, which I'm learning at a late stage from these guys.  

If you weren't a scientist what would you be? 

Architecture fascinates me. Nowadays, it's a mixture of engineering and the arts. I'm very interested in the design of objects for human use. Everything from tools and vehicles to buildings should both work and look beautiful, a challenge that is often unmet.