Elias Spiliotis: Septins set it up

When a student anarchist movement shook Greece in the early 1990s, a teenage Elias Spiliotis was marching the streets, protesting alongside his peers. Looking back, he says his antiestablishment sentiment was partly a reaction against the dearth of creative outlets offered by a public school system obsessed with preparing students for stringent national exams. At that time, the biological sciences didn't particularly inspire him; his passions were music, poetry, and art cinema. It wasn't until late in his undergraduate studies that Spiliotis discovered how research could provide the kind of intellectual stimulation and creative pursuits he'd always craved. Spiliotis found what would become his true research passion while preparing to start his postdoc with James Nelson at Stan-ford University. That was when he first encountered septins. At the time, little was known about septins beyond the fact that they bound to GTP and were somehow involved in cytokinesis. But by now, Spili-otis and his group have demonstrated that septins are important not only in cell division (1), but also in membrane compartmental-ization (2), epithelial polarity (3), and the organization of the cell's microtubule (4) and actin (5) cytoskeletons. Septins also have less obvious but no less important regulatory roles in cells, he told us when we called him recently at his lab at Philadelphia's Drexel University. So you didn't have an early affinity for research? I wasn't like a lot of scientists, who can tell you they loved nature or chemistry or whatever right from the start. I studied biology as a kind of default because I had to choose something to focus on for the national exams , but at that time it was mostly just an abstract interest. I didn't do very well in the national exams, so my family and I decided that I should come to the US for college. That turned out to be a great choice. I first proposed to study philosophy in college, but my father said to forget about it; no way was he going to pay for that. [Laughs] So again I turned to biology, but up until the summer before my senior year at Boston College, I still had doubts about what I wanted to do. The undergraduate labs had not inspired my confidence in my ability to do science, but that summer I worked in a biochemistry lab and was given an actual independent project—not just washing dishes—and I …