7/14/2023 0 Comments Milo aukerman![]() ![]() During his time at DuPont, Aukerman and his colleagues have made several important discoveries, including uncovering that microRNAs are involved in controlling flowering time. "In fact, the first few years were an amazing time for me,” he says. Here we go, into corporate research.” However, Aukerman discovered that the research environment at DuPont is very much like the one he was used to in academia “but in a corporate setting, without all the headaches of grant writing and teaching and all that kind of stuff." He accepted a job at DuPont as a principal investigator and admits thinking, “Oh, great. Milo Aukerman is part of the DuPont Crop Genetics group. But friends who were already working at DuPont suggested that he consider applying there. By the time he followed his wife, Robin Andreason, to Delaware, where she was about to take up a faculty position at the university’s department of philosophy, “I was really on the academic track,” he says. After going along the traditional scientific academic path, including two postdoctoral fellowships, Aukerman had his heart set on a faculty position at an academic institution. “Then maybe a couple of months later, the science takes the driver’s seat, and that ends up being where my creative energies go.”Īukerman’s scientific career has challenged his own ideas about stereotypes within the research enterprise. “Sometimes when the science is getting (to be) a little more of a drudge, that’s when I just turn to music and figure, well, now I’m going to take my creative energy and focus on music for a while,” he says. The two lifestyles might seem to be conflicting, but Aukerman sees them as complementary. As Aukerman, who earned his bachelor’s degree in biology in 1986, puts it, “Punk provided me that avenue to be different.”įor the next several years, Aukerman bounced between touring and recording with the band and working at UCSD to get his Ph.D. Inspired by his actual departure from the band to study biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, the album cover featured a caricature of Aukerman, complete with a white button-down shirt, black tie, thick-rimmed glasses and buzz cut, cementing the band’s iconic nerd image. Torn between his dual loves of music and science, Aukerman crafted the perfect compromise, now immortalized in the title of the band’s debut album, “ Milo Goes to College,” which was released in 1982. ![]() “It was a pretty amazing time just to be involved in that (scene) and play on the same shows as some of these bands.” One of the band's album covers. “In the late ’70s and early ’80s, LA punk rock was just blossoming,” he says, listing Black Flag, the Germs, X and the Minutemen as his musical inspirations back then. Growing up in Los Angeles, Aukerman had punk rock right on his doorstep. However, “I needed a place to get my ya-ya’s out and actually be different.” “My parents definitely had an expectation that I would be an academic-type person,” recalls Aukerman. AukermanĪs a high-school student fascinated by the discovery of the structure of DNA and the recombinant DNA experiments of Stanley Cohen, Paul Berg and Herbert Boyer, Aukerman defied the science-geek stereotype by joining up with Tony Lombardo, Frank Navetta and Bill Stevenson in Descendents in 1980 to make a splash in the punk-rock scene. Both a scientist and a musician, Aukerman blurs the lines between conventional definitions of these two professions. ![]() As both the lead singer of the seminal Los Angeles pop-punk band Descendents and a plant molecular biologist at DuPont, Aukerman has followed a decidedly nontraditional career path, one that allows him to embrace the most dynamic qualities of his two passions. ![]() Since first singing those lyrics, Milo Aukerman has spent the past three decades doing everything not to live up to them. ![]()
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