Education
Dr. Milo Auckerman (Biochemistry / Plant Biology)Recorded Saturday October 27th, 2018. Music by The VenturesWhat we talk about: 1982: The album “Milo goes to College” is released and 19 year old Milo actually starts college at UC San Diego (graduated high school in 1981). The Descendents were still based in LA at that point, Milo was commuting from SD to LA for shows. “Are you a Scientist or are you a Musician?”The vision to go to college for science came from a high school book report on DNA. The enigma of DNA continues to this day. Science in the 80s: Pre-internet and the pre-genomic revolution. Recombinant technology had not really taken off yet. The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2016Milo the botanist? Not quite…plants were more of just a model system to study developmental biology. No undergrad project, but Milo did work for a biotech for a time practicing his molecular cloning techniques. The Descendents really start to tour in 1985 (the first national tour during Milo’s summer). 1986, Milo graduates and then the band really tours hard from 1986 to 1987. But Milo wanted the PhD…applied while touring to various schools, but ended up going right back to his undergraduate Alma Mater to UCSD to pursue his doctorate. Milo wanted to work on development with a molecular biology standpoint, but the model organism didn’t matter; however, ended up in the lab of Robert Schmidt. Started to study transposons and zein regulation in Maize. Milo’s graduate project: Studying one of the first transcription factorsevery identified in plants. Milo started to characterize this protein structurally and functional. Discovered that a mutant allele that resulted in a single conservative replacement completely abolished DNA binding activity (made a splash ;) 1987-1995… The reign of ALL. Milo is a scientist. Descendents are on hiatus. 1992: Milo graduates with his PhD in biochemistry from UCSD, but also becomes involved with a lady that would later become his wife. She went to U. Wisconsin for a graduate program, Milo followed her in 1992. The postdoc: scientific purgatory. Milo’s postdoc: went to working on Arabidopsis with Richard M. Amasino at the department of Biochemistry at U. Wisconsin studying flowering time in angiosperms. The mysterious search for “Florigen.”Postdocs can be very frustrating and can result in a lot of false starts and a lot of scientific aggravation. About three years in, Milo is starting to feel like…”Everything Sucks.”1995: Milo had not produced publishable work in his three years at UW. Milo had some songs written as a way vent some of this scientific frustration. ALL was on a break, Milo takes a postdoc “sabbatical,” and and followers of the “all-o-gistics” are treated to “Everything Sucks” “This place sucks” is about UW. “I haven’t found a single thing to call my own” is about the frustration of wanting and needed an independent, exclusive, scientific research program. Postdoc is a trial by fire. After 7 years, Milo got a single paper on the gene that he came to study at UW. Why not go back to the band? From 1996-1997 Descendents tour extensively on a commercially successful record while Milo takes a break from his postdoc…but the reality is that his salary is just about the same. Milo’s wife goes U. Delaware after finishing her doctorate to become a professor of philosophy there. Milo follows and ends doing a postdoc for a year at U. Penn. Starts knocking on the door of Dupont….ends up in industry chasing flowering time again. Works and creates “GMOs” Genetic engineering: a quicker way to bring about selection. A new technology that has benefits and also down sides (such a monsanto and the terminator technology).