Factors outside individual researchers’ immediate control can have a significant impact on the direction their careers take. One of the things that nudged former director of the Stony Brook Center for Biotechnology Glenn Prestwich in the direction that ultimately turned him into a “biotech guy” was a change in federal funding policy in the 1980s. The part of the National Science Foundation that had been funding his work on insect chemical defense and insect steroid metabolism, the Division of Applied Biology, was eliminated. “That meant that two-third of my grants went from a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to zero. That meant that my research group of almost 30 became a research group of eight. I had to refocus.” And that resulted in a very different research trajectory.
