The scientist in the corner office

Shirley Tilghman walked briskly through the doors of One Nassau Hall, a few minutes late for our appointment.

"Would you believe I was just teaching science?" she said, a bit harried as she made her way around her secretary's desk and into the president's office.

It was July 18, only weeks into Tilghman's job as the 19th president of the University, and she had just returned from lecturing at a conference for high school biology teachers.

With her cropped, grayish-brown hair slightly windswept, Tilghman casually sat down across from me at a conference table, her eyes wide and focused, and explained that despite her busy schedule, she had attended the conference out of an obligation to others as well as to herself.

When the announcement was made that Shirley M. Tilghman would be Princeton's next president, many people — friends, colleagues, students — were shocked. Tilghman was a world-renowned molecular biologist who, when she was younger, had worked into the wee hours of the night, analyzing mammalian genes while her children slept at home.

In her lab, she had inspired students to pursue their own discoveries. She was an architect for the human genome project and had helped write the National Institutes of Health guidelines for stem cell research.

The woman who had tirelessly climbed the ranks of scientific achievement had suddenly assumed a new role.

And while it surprised many that Tilghman would end her career in biology to become the chief administrator of a top university, her background had set the stage for more than just science.

When it came time for Tilghman to declare a major on her college application (as required by Canadian universities) she was torn between chemistry and English. Raised in a family of avid readers, she developed a love for literature — particularly Russian literature. But Tilghman chose science, and pages of data and formulaic puzzles soon replaced the cryptic prose of Dosteovsky, allowing only scattered moments for Tilghman to indulge in fiction.

Every 10 years, Tilghman returns to her favorite novel, 'Vanity Fair.' She admires its language as well as the protagonist, Becky Sharp, a vivid character who is independent and determined, as well as saccharine and manipulative.

And though often buried with other science majors in problem sets, in college, Tilghman had a group of friends in a varierty of disciplines.

"Shirley had two sets [of friends]," said Nick Darby, who befriended Tilghman 37 years ago, when her last name was Caldwell and the students were organized alphabetically in their classes.

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"I think that [her artsy friends] provided the humanities outlook that isn't emphasized in the sciences," Darby said.

It was some of those same friends with whom Tilghman made a pact to retire early.

But being president of Princeton University is hardly a retirement package.

"For me, I think it goes back to what you give up when you're a scientist and when you're a scholar," Tilghman said.

"You give up peripheral interests," she added. "Most waking hours are spent doing science or thinking about it . . . I always felt some sense of regret, jettisoning [other interests] so you could do that one thing really well."

But that one thing — the study of science — had become not only her life's work, but since her third year in college, her life's passion.

"I was reading in a journal what turned out to be one of the greatest papers in molecular biology, on how DNA replicates," Tilghman said, her eyes lighting up. "I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen."

Tilghman went on to make discoveries of her own, and from there, provided her students with an enthusiasm to do the same.

She has been known to jump out of her chair to draw diagrams on the blackboard, and she gives her students high fives when they secure good data.

After spending months doing research for a senior thesis, Harrison Gable '01 presented Tilghman with what he thought was a breakthrough.

"You're a scientist," Gable recalls Tilghman telling him. "Once you've tasted what it's like to have a big scientific discovery, that's it."

But now Tilghman the biologist must direct her energies elsewhere. While, at one point, she served on nearly 20 scientific committees, she has now reduced her membership to just one. And she works at her lab, whose floors she treads like a second home, only on Fridays.

Though Tilghman realizes the necessity of detaching herself from scientific work, her friends stress the impact of that separation.

"She has absolutely changed her life," said Darby, who noted he imagines that Tilghman's selection was as much a surprise to her as it was to him.

"The only reason she would make that change is because she can do something good for Princeton," Darby added.

Though Tilghman is breaking off from most of her scientific work, it is only by staying partially tied to the field that she can best accomplish her goals as president.

Tilghman's reading list has changed — one of her most recent selections was a biography of a past Cornell University president — but she will still pick up the odd intriguing issue of the journal, 'Science.' And like former President Shapiro, she hopes to involve herself in an activity that merges science with education.

"I think that if I don't do that, I'll be less fulfilled and it could be that I wouldn't do this job as well," Tilghman said.

Despite Tilghman's less frequent presence, her lab shows no indication that she has left. The lab will close once all of Tilghman's students have completed their work, several years from now. Until then, however, rather than move all of her personal paraphenelia to Nassau Hall, photos and letters still adorn the biologist's desk and walls.

Turning only momentarily away from her computer, where she was doing lab work one Friday, Tilghman confided, "I don't want to be disconnected."