In situ with Sarah O’Connor

Sarah O’Connor directs the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany. She also has an honorary chemistry professorship at the Friedrich Schiller University, an affiliated public university in Germany. In 2023, O’Connor won the Leibniz Prize for her fundamental discoveries relating to natural product biosynthesis in plants.

I grew up in Staten Island, New York, and I went to Stuyvesant High School in the lower East Side of Manhattan, which specialises in science, technology and math. It was a very long commute, two hours each way. I took a train to a ferry, rode the ferry across and then took the subway. But to me it was worth it to see the world beyond Staten Island.

For university, I really wanted to experience something different. The University of Chicago was attractive because it was in a big city and had what they called a ‘common core’ curriculum, which required all students to take courses in literature and history regardless of their major.

Chemistry was always up high on my list of careers. My father was a chemist. He taught high school chemistry for a very long time. And then, for reasons that are still unclear to me, he decided in his 40s to go back to school part-time to earn a PhD in physical organic chemistry.

By the time I was a freshman in college, my father was writing up his thesis and preparing to defend it. We were essentially learning chemistry alongside each other at that point. Watching him do this and having the chemistry models and textbooks around the house very much lowered the barrier and made chemistry familiar.

After doing a postdoc my dad went back to teaching high school for a few years. Later, he got a job as an organic chemistry lecturer at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He did that for a very long time and only recently retired.

My independent career began in 2003, and it was very tough going. At the time, a lot of the tools weren’t really in place. It was very difficult and expensive to do sequencing. The lack of sequence data for plants was a big issue.

I decided to move to a plant-focused research centre in the UK in 2010. The John Innes Centre in Norwich was looking for a group leader. A call from a friend led me in 2019 to my current job at Max Planck. My predecessor had retired, and they needed somebody to take over.

It is vital for scientists to have freedom to pursue what they think are the most interesting, impactful and productive research avenues

If you had told me at the age of 25 that I would be living in Germany in my fifties, I would have laughed.

I always loved literature and writing. As an academic scientist and a chemist, I probably do more writing than I would have if I had become an English professor or something similar.

I’ve come to appreciate living in Europe. Right now, we live pretty close to cities like Berlin and Leipzig, Salzburg, Vienna, and it’s been fun exploring those places.

When I’m not working, I like to go hiking. This is a beautiful part of the world, relatively mountainous, so I try to get out and hike on the weekends.

I do my best thinking when outdoors and walking, but if I have to get writing done then I am most productive on trains. I especially like sitting by a window on a train, and sometimes on a plane – it gets the ideas going.

My first car was a sporty, very old silver Nissan. It eventually broke but did get me through college. One winter the alternator went. It was clear I shouldn’t drive this very unreliable car to California where I then spent four years for graduate school.

Science is one of the best things for the economy, the next generation, and health as well as overall quality of life. The US has played a really leading and pivotal role in science over the last 50 years or longer, and I truly hope they maintain it.

One of the biggest threats to research right now is funding. You need money to do science – to cover people’s salaries and pay for supplies and services, like sequencing and equipment.

Science works best bottom up. It is vital for scientists to have freedom to pursue what they think are the most interesting, impactful and productive research avenues, rather than being told what research areas to pursue or not. They must be allowed to go about their work without being influenced by the desire for a politically correct result.

Science is really hard. My advice to chemistry graduate students and postgraduates is that you’re going to hit a wall at some point during your PhD thesis or your postdoctoral work but just know that everybody does and you’ll get through it.

There’s is nothing that matches that thrill of discovery. It’s incredible when you figure something out, or now in my case when one of my students or postdocs walks into my office and shows me a chromatogram that means that we’ve discovered an enzyme with new activity or something like that.