Early in her career, Patricia Hoben had no doubt that she wanted to be a scientist, but she also wanted to make her work broadly useful. Except for brief stints teaching in a college and a high school, her early trajectory pointed toward a traditional (and distinguished) academic position: a BA in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado followed by a PhD in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale and postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco. "In the early and middle 70s," says Dr. Hoben, "academe was the only respectable track for a PhD biologist. But when I was at San Francisco, one of my friends heard that scientists could get fellowships to do some exciting work in Washington. This was brand new to me; no one at the institution mentioned any opportunities outside the laboratory." She not only went to Washington; she flourished there. Delighted to find that her analytic skills and scientific knowledge were valued in the public-policy arena, she worked at the US Congress's Office of Technology Assessment and for the assistant secretary of health, providing scientific advice that helped decision-makers to draft regulations, write legislation, and make other decisions about biotechnology and health issues. "In both these positions I needed the analytical skills I learned from my PhD work, but I also needed a variety of people skills I didn't learn in school. In policy work, I bring in experts who know all the details, but often they don't know how to present themselves to the nontechnical people who will make the political decisions. There's just a tremendous need for people who can bridge these two cultures. "My PhD was absolutely necessary to my career. There's no other way to get that intensity of training, and no one would take me seriously if I didn't have one. But I equally needed the people skills and patience. In the 'real' world, outside academe, you may be working with people who don't know as much as you do, but they have something to contribute that is needed by the project, and you have to value them for their contribution. You can't be arrogant and expect to bring about change." The hectic pace of work ("seven days and seven nights a week") and the arrival of children eventually led to a change. After several years of pursuing a long-held interest in public science education as a grant-program director at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Dr. Hoben and her family moved to Minneapolis, where she now holds two half-time positions. In one, funded partly by Hughes, she is working with the National Research Council's RISE (Regional Initiatives in Science Education) project to stimulate reform in science education. In the other, she directs a research program for the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to investigate claims by farmers that electromagnetic radiation affects the milk production and health of dairy cows. "Public-policy work isn't for everyone, and it isn't easy to find. A more important question for students is, 'Are you preparing to make yourself useful?' For example, on the dairy-cow project, I have a physicist, an electrical engineer, an epidemiologist, an animal physiologist, and a veterinarian all looking at the possibility that electricity affects dairy cows. This is the kind of thing students could be doing to explore career options and serve their community—find an interesting problem, team up with students from other disciplines that bear on the problem, and go out and solve it. We're moving into a time when scientists need to be more collaborative and responsive to public interests. I can tell you that the people on this dairy team have never had more fun in their lives than working together and studying this problem."