More than almost any other scientist in the field of obesity and metabolism research, the work of Bruce Spiegelman (Figure 1), from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, has informed potential targets for drug discovery that could burn fat and even turn fat into muscle. He was the first to suggest that inflammation underscores insulin resistance, and also the first to find the key regulator of adipogenesis, PPAR-γ. The full interview, with more stories and his tips for working with journal editors, can be seen on the JCI website at http://www. jci. org/kiosk/cgm. JCI: Can you start by telling us about your upbringing?

Spiegelman: I was brought up outside New York on Long Island in a town called Massapequa, famous as the home of Jerry Seinfeld and the Baldwin brothers. My parents didn’t go to college, but they felt it was important for my brother and me to go to college. When I was a kid growing up, I always loved the outdoors—fish, bugs, birds, anything having to do with nature and living systems. I was a pretty good student when I was growing up, but it was when I went to college that I applied myself for the first time and really got interested in science. I began to focus more and more academically; and I found, amazingly enough, that the more I put into it, the more I got out of it. The harder I studied, the more interesting it seemed. That had never occurred to me before. I was a biology major, and like a lot of biology majors, I really dreaded taking chemistry. Certainly from taking high school chemistry, I had demonstrated absolutely no particular aptitude. But then again, I’d never actually done any work. When I was in organic chemistry I was very intimidated at first, but I found I really enjoyed it and I was good at it! JCI: You actually authored a scientific paper while you were in college. Spiegelman: I had a first author paper when I was an undergraduate but I don’t think it was a particularly significant paper. Again, it was more about building confidence. But I think it illustrated some degree of raw talent—at least that I could get very invested in a scientific problem. At William & Mary, the pressure was not on the professors to publish and the professor I worked with hadn’t published anything in quite a few years. The fact that my work