science careers

An Interview with Ed Himelblau, Scientist and Promega Cartoonist

Posted on by Sara Klink
Self portrait by Ed Himelblau

Many visitors to the Promega Web site enjoy the Cartoon Lab, the repository of the creative illustrations of Ed Himelblau updated several times a year. Recently, I had a chance to gain some insight about the man behind the cartoons.

Sara Klink: Could you give some background information about yourself?
Ed Himelblau: I was born in Chicago but grew up in San Diego. I went to UCSD [University of California at San Diego] and majored in biology and minored in art. I liked molecular biology and working in labs so I decided to go to grad school. I went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to get a Ph.D. in the Cell and Molecular Biology program. My first academic job was teaching biology at Southampton College in New York. After several years on Long Island, I moved to my current job teaching and doing research in the Biological Sciences Department at Cal Poly [California Polytechnic State University] in San Luis Obispo, CA.

S.K.: Why did you decide to become a scientist?
E.H.: Playing in tidepools as a kid had something to do with it. As an undergraduate I thought working in a lab sounded cool. When I started working in a lab, I thought the work was interesting and the people were a lot of fun to be around. Then I started to appreciate what it really meant to do experiments and learn about how plants grow and develop.

Continue reading “An Interview with Ed Himelblau, Scientist and Promega Cartoonist”

Following the Unexpected Path: Pipettes, Printers and Beyond

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

The unexpected path.....
The unexpected path.....

Someone once asked me how I decided to become an editor. My answer was: I didn’t. Sometimes careers just sort of evolve. I graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in genetics and moved to San Diego, the city of sun, sea air and biotech. My plan was simple; I was going to get a job doing lab work, and maybe someday I’d take a year off and write my book (Doesn’t everyone have a book they are going to write “someday”?). I loved research; I once wondered aloud how people who sat at desks all day could stay busy. What did they do all day? Were there really that many papers in the world that need shuffling about? In the lab I got to do something different every day: cloning, plasmid preps, cell culture, transfections, RNA preps, Northerns. It was like following a treasure map and not knowing what was under the big “X”. Continue reading “Following the Unexpected Path: Pipettes, Printers and Beyond”