Peter Friedl: Painting a picture of cancer immunology

A s a child, Peter Friedl never envisioned becoming a scientist. But curiosity and an aptitude for careful observation eventually led him to medical school and then the laboratory , where his work and career are continually evolving. Friedl completed his MD at Bochum in Germany, then decided to indulge his burgeoning interest in immunology by joining the laboratory of Dr. Kurt Zänker at the University of Witten in Germany. Zänker sent Friedl to collaborate with Peter Noble at McGill University in Canada. There, Friedl studied T cell and cancer cell migration, fell in love with live-cell microscopy, and earned his PhD (1, 2). Since then, Friedl has leveraged the ever-advancing power of microscopy techniques to further his migration studies (3–6) and gain important insights into the different mechanisms of cellular locomotion, and the development of metastasis. Friedl's work is the product of a creative impulse that fi nds its expression in long, dark hours behind a microscope. When he is not in one of his laboratories— either the Nijmegen Center for Molecular Life Sciences, Netherlands or the Rudolf Virchow Center in Würzburg, Germany— his creative impulse fi nds another form: oil painting. We talked with him about his career, the parallels between art and science, and his works in progress. TRANSGRESSION I understand that you're a trained physician in addition to having a PhD? Yes, but I wouldn't say I planned to have things turn out this way from the start. When I was seven or eight, I remember writing in a school essay that I wanted to be a bank manager, like my father. But actually, I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. In fact, I was something of a troublemaker. After fi nishing high school, I took a year off and basically did nothing. That was a very important time for me, because it helped me pull myself together, to fi gure out what I wanted to do. I realized that I wanted to deal with people and do something meaningful. I did a civil service year in the oncology unit in Nuremberg, and decided to go to medical school there. So you completed your medical studies fi rst. What made you decide to pursue a PhD afterwards? While I was in medical school, I would become very caught up in questions that went beyond what we had to memorize for our classes. My …