In this interview with DMM, Dr Griekspoor discusses his experience combining software design and basic science.
How did you discover your talent for computer programming?
It’s still a bit of a miracle that I ended up as a PhD student in cell biology. From a young age, I had a strong interest in technology, excelled in physics in high school, and everything suggested an emphasis in technical study at university. Yet, for a variety of reasons, I choose to study biology at the Free University in Amsterdam. Looking back, I am still perplexed as to why I suddenly changed my mind in those last months at high school. Even during my biology studies, I continued to design and build websites, create multimedia presentations, and take on other technical endeavors in my free time to earn money. Upon introspection, evidence of my split personality has been present for a long time. My technical hobbies did make me wonder whether I was going in the right direction by devoting myself to biology, but I never stopped long enough to deliberate on this point when I was offered a position to study for a PhD in immune system cell biology. The intellectual and supportive environment of the group in which I worked for almost a year as an undergraduate student, made it a logical choice for me to continue this work at the time. Of course, the presence of my colleague and good friend Tom Groothuis, as a PhD student in the lab, added another level of comfort.
At that time, Tom and I were the only two students in the group who used a Macintosh computer (after I had convinced Tom to buy one like mine), and soon our professor started calling us ‘Mac’ and ‘Tosj’ or ‘Mek en Tosj’ as one would say in Dutch. The name stuck because we were good friends and usually if you saw one of us the other wasn’t far away, and because the technical Mac skills we developed outside of work turned out to be pretty handy to our research efforts as well. Then Apple moved to its new Mac OS X operating system. This opened the door for people like me, without a computer science background, to pick up programming and build personalized software, thereby providing a porthole to realize one of my long-time interests. My earlier programming attempts had failed from the complex nature of a task that was now simplified. I bought a ‘how-to’ book, read it on the bus to work and it changed my career.
The programs we made in the beginning were simple, but always driven by an idea to solve a real problem we encountered in the lab. For example: a digital egg timer to prevent us from forgetting long incubations, a restriction enzyme compendium to avoid having to go through all those catalogs from different manufacturers, and a DNA sequence file viewer simply because the manufacturer refused to make one for Mac OS X. The argument was that the Mac would be obsolete within a year or two anyway – right. The real fun started when we launched our own website. We called it mekentosj.com, and started distributing our applications for free. Within no time hundreds, and soon after thousands, of researchers around the globe were using our programs. This gave us tremendous inspiration to do more and more, and soon things grew out of hand.
At this point, I had spent a productive 4-5 years as a PhD student in cell biology. I was quite good at it actually, but my research didn’t give me the same excitement that I saw in my boss for example. I struggled to find something that would stimulate my enthusiasm as a postdoc, an area where I could generate the ideas that would eventually create a foundation for my own group. However, the moment I would go home from the lab, my brain was consumed with all the cool things I wanted to add to our programs, and with possibilities for new programs that would be even greater and more revolutionary than our previous accomplishments. It took a while to realize that programming was my true passion, and more importantly, that this is what I should focus on for the future.
The short postdoc at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) that followed, quickly taught me that a kind of forced hybrid between software development and biology was not the solution. But even more important, it gave me the time and confidence to take the giant leap to leave my academic career and start my very own software company. That’s where I am today, still based in Cambridge UK, doing what I love every day: creating novel and innovative software for scientists, changing the way we do research.
Did Tom Groothuis join you in following a path into software development?
Despite our shared programming adventures during our PhD work, Tom decided to continue in academia with a postdoc position at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. I was always the more technology driven person of us and did most of the actual programming. Tom enjoys rolling up his sleeves to get his hands on benchwork. Interestingly, he did move to a more technical postdoc than his PhD work in cell biology, and I feel certain that he profits from what we did as Mek and Tosj every day.
Do you find that your scientific background is particularly useful to the software development that you do now?
I believe that our scientific backgrounds are the key to the success of our programs. Living the life of a PhD student for six years has given me insight into the way we do science now and what the areas are that need improvement. The philosophy behind our applications is to create what we would like to have ourselves, and then we find out that ours are not solitary needs. This will always be the way we approach software development, and that is only possible with extensive scientific experience.
What are some of your accomplishments that give you the most pride?
Obviously, it was a big honor to win three Apple design awards over the past few years, and it has been great to see our user base grow from a few colleagues in the lab to thousands around the world. This career path has been an exciting roller coaster ride thus far with many highlights, to which many people contributed and there are many to thank. Personally, what I’m most proud of is making the choice to follow my real passion. I can make a bigger impact on science using my programming skills than by continuing to be one of the many PhD students who dreams of his/her once-in-a-lifetime article in a high impact journal. I hope this is only the beginning.
