Mentors, influences and role models

The responsibility of research supervisors to act as mentors is a common theme today. But mentoring takes many forms and should not be separated from acting as role models for those around us. The importance of this influence recently became more apparent to me, when Jack Gorski—my first postdoctoral supervisor—died.I wrote to Jack in 1972, to ask if I could work in his laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. He replied that he thought my CV was fine, but was concerned that I did not know him or what it would be like to work in his laboratory. This was in the days when transatlantic flights were a major expense for a young biologist, so Jack gave me a list of his former postdoctoral researchers and suggested that I contact them to ask about their experiences; their glowing reports convinced me to join his group.Jack did not mentor in a formal sense, he was simply himself: decent, caring, driven by science rather than by ego, and taking care of those in his laboratory at all …