(upbeat music) - I grew up living near New York city.

There were a lot of distractions, music, and theater and so forth.

I went to college with the idea of giving it a year.

If I didn't like college, I was gonna go to culinary school.

I was gonna become a chef.

I was very interested in plants.

It was through a combination of learning about biology and chemistry with the help of some wonderful teachers who really thought integratively.

I ended up getting interested in biological chemistry.

Plants are really the master chemists of the world.

It's very interesting that my lab ended up working in what we call natural products, biochemistry.

So many of the flavors of food come from the metabolism that we're interested in.

The beautiful smells and tastes of mint, a hoppy beer.

The flavors come from specialized metabolites.

What fascinates me most is seeing the fingerprint of evolution in plant metabolism.

For example, by comparing the metabolism of the cultivated tomato from those that are wild, we can see how humans have cooperated with evolution to take the traits that are helpful to protect the plant from stress, from insects, from pathogenic microbes, and brought in the good flavors of tomato fruit, and bread out the things that don't taste so good to human beings.

There are a number of things that keep me excited about being at Michigan State.

One is the broad range of people interested in biology and chemistry.

- This is all my protein that I harvested from yesterday.

- Oh, okay.

Wow.

This place has trained an enormous cross section of the people who are influential in plant biology.

Hey Jay, what you're doing today?

- I am setting new crystal screens to see if we can get this protein to crystallize.

- My teaching philosophy is primarily learning by doing, that is what experimental science is all about.

- So I have to optimize certain conditions to try to get the crystals to be a little bit bigger, and that should facilitate to fractional a little bit more.

- Watching undergraduates decide what they love and pursuing those directions.

Those really are the things that one remembers and, kind of gets you a little misty thinking about it.

And that's just phenomenal.

Biology is amazing.

It is endlessly fascinating.

(upbeat music)