Valerie Mizrahi: ‘There’s no control to the experiment of life’

I was about 14 years old when I fell in love with chemistry. We were doing acid-base titration and when I saw the colour of the indicator change it just looked like magic, there was just something incredibly beautiful about it. I studied chemistry at university, raced through a PhD and was ready to remain in the field, but it was my PhD supervisor who encouraged me to think about the world of biology. Today I stand up and speak to students and I’m a biologist, but at my core, I’m still a chemist – I see chemical structures and get excited.

One of my thesis examiners was Steve Benkovic. I wrote to him and asked if he had any positions available and he said, ‘Well, you’re a physical organic chemist, we can teach you some biochemistry’. I bought myself a textbook to read on the arduous journey from Cape Town to Penn State University. I was hopelessly underqualified – all my peers were from Ivy League universities, and there was me, this kid from Zimbabwe.

I have had a charmed existence; I get paid to do what I love. I put it down to my education in the mathematical sciences and the natural sciences. We talk today about training; you ‘train’ as a postdoc, you ‘train’ as a PhD student. I was not trained, I was educated. This is such a big difference.