Greg E. Lemke grew up in Delphos, a small town in Ohio. He was the oldest of three children; their father was a railroad lineman and their mother a housewife. Lemke was always curious, always liked science. Though his parents were not college graduates, his paternal aunts were, and they encouraged Lemke with books and magazines.

Lemke entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he majored in biology and minored in music. He was a teaching assistant in Annamaria Torriani-Gorini’s microbiology class; he liked short experiments with fast results. He worked on glycoproteins in the labs of Phillips Robbins and Ellen Henderson. Lemke chose California Institute of Technology for graduate school because it was strong in molecular biology and neurobiology. In Jeremy Brockes’s lab he worked on Schwann cells, which are easy to grow and manipulate. He found his life’s interest in Schwann cells, which are homologues of the cells in the central nervous system; these cells form myelin around central nervous system axons; he was funded by the Kroc Foundation and a National Institutes of Health (NIH) training grant. For his postdoctoral work, Lemke he took his project to a postdoc in Richard Axel’s lab and began to clone. There he was funded by the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation.

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies offered him a job at just the right time; he was eager to return to California, and he wanted the independence of his own lab. He took his project with him; half of his lab continues the myelin work, attempting to understand signal transduction in the development of cells and studying differentiation in Schwann cells. The lab is also working on protein-tyrosine kinase. He has an adjunct position with the University of California, San Diego, but few administrative duties. He is writing a few chapters of a textbook on molecular neurobiology as well. All of this allows him less time in the lab than he would like.

Lemke talks about the importance of the Pew award and the contacts he has as a result of the award. He thinks the present system of science works pretty well, and that there is a great deal of interesting science going on. He discusses patents and ethical considerations, as well as the competition he faces from other labs. He hopes one day to understand how cell fate is specified during development; that is, how complex organisms develop (with a particular interest in the nervous system). How exactly are genes turned on? Although he works on basic science his findings may someday yield clinical implications. There is Schwann cell involvement in multiple sclerosis and neurofibromatosis. He believes that knowledge is a general benefit for mankind. He is now thinking about spending less time in his lab so that he might have a family.