The price of having too much too soon can be high. When Brent Reynolds isolated and cultured mouse brain cells during his PhD at the University of Calgary in Canada, his career was on the fast track. He eschewed a postdoc to start his own company with adviser Sam Weiss, a neuroscience professor at the university. But after Ciba-Geigy invested in the company, a merger and subsequent divestiture effectively sidelined Reynolds and Weiss's technology. Reynolds went from having his research featured on the cover of a major scientific journal to wondering if he wanted to stay in science at all. See CV
He decided to take a career break. It lasted six years. "I needed some perspective," Reynolds says. "I had become somewhat disillusioned with science, and in particular with science and business." Returning to an earlier interest in Eastern medicine and philosophy, Reynolds devoted himself to studying Chinese medicine, acupuncture and yoga. He established a yoga studio in Thailand, then moved to Salt Spring Island off the coast of Vancouver, where there were "no bridges, no highways, no traffic lights, no parking garages and, importantly, no parking meters".
But his move away actually brought Reynolds back into the scientific fold. At a yoga training course, he met an instructor who called Australia "the coolest place in the world". A few weeks later, former colleague Rod Rietze invited Reynolds to join him at the new Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, and his science career took off again.
After a few years in Australia, Reynolds decided to return to North America and join those attempting to translate stem-cell technology into clinical treatments. Dennis Steindler, director of the McKnight Brain Institute in Florida, had admired the neural stem-cell work Reynolds conducted as a graduate student. "His insights are incredible in terms of how to grow them and how to get them to behave," Steindler says. He believes Reynolds's work will help McKnight researchers use stem cells in new brain-cancer therapies. Reynolds expects that his familiarity with the holistic approach of Eastern traditions may help improve the often too-reductionist approach to stem-cell research.
Eastern philosophy also validated his decisions to take a break from science and to return to it. The Taoist concept of wu wei, practically applied, advocates following instincts or hunches, Reynolds notes. Steindler hopes these instincts will lead the institute closer to stem-cell therapies.
CV
2004–08: Visiting scientist, then senior research fellow, Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
1992–98: Director, then vice-president and director of research, NeuroSpheres, Calgary, Canada
