The NY Times has an interesting article this morning about the mathematician and biologist Eric Lander. Lander was an outstanding mathematician who decided to leave pure mathematics and ended up taking a path-breaking, leadership role in genetics and molecular biology---he is now the director of the Broad Institute shared by MIT and Harvard. The article mentioned that Lander had no training in biology before plunging into genetics research; he teaches introductory biology at MIT but he has never had biology. This impressed me, because I have seen (or listened to) some of his introductory biology lectures (which are available on the MIT website), and they were lucid and fascinating, as were the lectures of his co-instructor, Robert Weinberg. Prof. Weinberg introduced the course by telling the students that perhaps they've had a biology course in high school, where they learned about animal behavior and so forth, but the MIT course would not be like that---it would focus on what life is about at the molecular level, from an engineering perspective. I recall the introductory lecture on genetics by Prof. Lander, where he explained who Georg Mendel was: Mendel was a talented student who was given the opportunity to work at what amounted to a scientific institution devoted to solving one of the premier scientific problems of the day: to understand how to reliably breed farm animals or crops.
Learning about Lander and his path from mathematics to biology was inspiration for me, as I began my efforts several years ago to leave mathematics and become involved in collaborative, interdisciplinary work. Largely by luck, I have become involved in a project to study infant feeding and to develop an infant feeding monitor. Lander has of course accomplished vastly more in his path away from pure math than I have (at 54, he's only two years older than I). But the infant feeding monitor project might some day help infants and their families, and I am very, very grateful to be involved in this project.