Screams of joy and... what did you just say? UW biochemist recalls getting the Nobel Prize call

It's not every day a Seattle kid gets a Nobel Prize. University of Washington biochemist David Baker isn't exactly a kid anymore, but a curious spirit, sharp mind, and ground-breaking scientific discoveries got him that nod last week.

KUOW’s Kim Malcolm interviewed Baker last May, when he made a Time Magazine list of 100 people around the globe advancing progress in health and medicine. She caught up with him this week, between classes, lab, and travel plans to Stockholm.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: Nobel laureates always talk about that early morning phone call. How was yours?

David Baker: Well, it was eventful. They first called my son. They didn't have my number and woke him up. He told them to call me instead. I answered the phone, and we saw it was from Sweden, and my wife started screaming, and so I didn't actually hear the first part very clearly, but then the point got across.

There were some complicated instructions after that that I had a little hard time keeping straight, given that it was two in the morning.

What else did they have you do that night?

So, there was a press conference where they announced the prizes. And it's actually a little hazy in my mind right now. And then it was basically time to come into work, and there was a UW press conference, and then some more reporter things, and then we had a big party in the lab, and that was on basically no sleep.

But a day you won't forget.

It was quite a day, yeah.

You didn't really get into biology until your senior year in college. What advice do you have for students who have a lot of different interests but just aren't sure what they should be doing or focusing on as they head into the future?

I was very much in that situation. Most of my friends were very sure about what they wanted to do and what they wanted to study, and I really didn't know. I would not try to overly plan for the future, because what you end up doing and are interested in can change. My suggestion would be, at least while you're in school, to pursue whatever you're most interested in, and that can sometimes take you places that you don't really expect.

I think people see it as a very high stakes decision, and they're worried that they're going to get things wrong. What would you say to them if that's a thought in the back of their mind?

Well, I guess it is high stakes, but I'd say it's just very, very hard to predict the future and what you're going to enjoy doing and what you're going to be good at. So, I think if you try to pre-guess it too far in advance, you may not end up making the right decision. I think having some flexibility and the ability to explore things I think is really good.

You received the Nobel Prize for your research in using amino acids to create new proteins. What’s a potential application that they should know about?

There are quite a number of really interesting applications. The proteins in living things, like in humans, solve all the problems that basically were faced during natural evolution. But now we face all kinds of new problems. We know from biology that proteins can do amazing things. So, some of the problems we're working on are better targeted cancer therapies, and better therapies for autoimmune disease, and combating viruses in the next pandemic.

Outside of biology, problems like breaking down pollutants and plastic in the environment, and fixing greenhouse gasses, taking them out of the atmosphere, and improving photosynthesis so plants can more efficiently harvest sunlight, solar energy, and then new ways of measuring things, like sort of coupling biology with electronics, which could lead to many new types of technologies. There's really a wide range of applications of protein design.

I'm curious what changes now for you, for your team, for the University of Washington, now that this prize has been given to you.

I'm not sure yet. The prize was given out on Wednesday, and on Thursday, I woke up and thought, well, I'm going to just do everything that I always do, and I'm not going to let this change anything. I'm teaching now, so I taught my class. I spend all day talking to students in the lab, and I did that, and that was on top of getting about 5,000 emails from people I've known all my life.

I discovered it's really hard to keep doing exactly what I was doing before. So, for right now, things are changed a little bit, but I'm hoping that things can get back pretty much to the way they were before. I really enjoy my job here at the UW. I like being here every day, and talking to people here, so I think in the long run, not too much is going to change for me.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.