Chapter 01: A Stimulating International Education with a Focus on Science
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Description
In this Chapter, Dr. Bogler describes the unusual international focus of his early education. He was born in Germany (and continues to hold German citizenship). He first describes the International School in Frankfurt, Germany, where he received a “U.S.-style” education focused on creativity and individuality. He notes that he is himself a creative person and exercises this characteristic in administration and the sciences, as well as through such hobbies as painting and photography.
Dr. Bogler next talks about attending a boy’s public school [Oundele School] in Northamptonshire, England at the age of twelve. He describes the difficulties of adjusting to the new, more rigid school culture after the freedom of an American style education and also discusses his parents’ (Helmut and Helga) reasons for sending him abroad for his education.
Dr. Bogler states that, at age 12, he knew he wanted to be a biologist as he was fascinated by the DNA replication and other cellular mechanisms he was learning about from excellent teachers. He talks about one influential teacher.
He then notes that he majored in biochemistry in college and also talks about his habits of visual thinking. The “inner pictures” that came into his mind as a young person studying molecular mechanisms inspired him.
Identifier
BoglerO_01_20141110_C01
Publication Date
11-17-2014
Publisher
The Historical Resources Center, Research Medical Library, The University of Texas Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Oliver Bogler, PhD, Oral History Interview, November 10, 2014
Keywords
Educational Path; Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Discovery, Creativity and Innovation; Cultural/Social Influences
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational Path; Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Discovery, Creativity and Innovation; Cultural/Social Influences
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And we are rolling. I’m Tacey Ann Rosolowski interviewing Dr. Oliver Bogler for the Making Cancer History Voices Oral History Project run by the Historical Resources Center at the Research Medical Library at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Bogler came to MD Anderson in 2005. He joined the faculty in the Department of Neurosurgery and served as Director of Basic Research in that department. He also served as Director of Research at the Brain Tumor Center. More recently, Dr. Bogler has served as Vice President of Global Academic Programs since 2010 and occupied the role of Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs since 2011. This interview is being conducted in Dr. Bogler’s office in Academic Affairs in the Mid-Main Building, and this is the first of two planned interview sessions. Today is November 10th, 2014, and the time is 2:59. And I just wanted to specify that in addition to background, the conversations that we’re going to have are going to be a little more focused than usual. We’re going to focus on Dr. Bogler’s work in Global Academic Programs and his experience as a patient here at MD Anderson, though, of course, that doesn’t prevent us from traveling in all sorts of other areas should they be appropriate.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Okay. Sounds good.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So thank you very much for agreeing to participate.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Thank you. It’s a great opportunity.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It is, yeah. I’m excited about this. And I wanted to say that you’ve also been part of the Historical Resources Center Steering Committee for the project, so you have another perspective on the purpose of this project.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
00:01:4[0-9] I wasn’t involved in selecting who gets to be interviewed. [laughs]
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No, no, no, no, you were not. That’s an important thing to mention, yes. [laughs] Chapter 01 Well, I wanted to start in the traditional way, which is to ask you where you were born and when, and tell me a little bit about where you grew up.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Sure. So I was born in a small town in Germany called Bühl, which is B-ü-h-l, actually with two dots over the u, which is in the Black Forest. It was in July of 1966. And I’m German. I’m still a German citizen today. I have a permanent residency card. I’ve been in the States now for over twenty years. I grew up in Germany, went to the Frankfurt International School, which is an international baccalaureate school on the American model, and many of the teachers were from the United States, also from the U.K., and the kids were from Germany, England, and all kinds of different areas, because Frankfurt’s a very international city, you know, big banking center.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why did you go to that school?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
So the reason I went to that school is my parents wanted my brother and me to be bilingual. My father had grown up in New York during the war. He and his mother were political refugees during the Nazi times. So he grew up as a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and very Americanophilic, and so they sent us to this school so that we would essentially learn English as a native language. So from kindergarten on, I spoke English. In fact, even younger when I was two, we had lived in Michigan for a year. I don’t have much memory of that, but my father worked for Dow Chemical, so we lived in Midland for a year. He was in the personnel department with Dow, and so that was part of their career structure for him. So apparently my first words were actually English at that age, but—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Your parents must have been delighted.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Yes. So then, yes, I went to this school, and it was actually a great school. It certainly engendered the joy of learning in the U.S. style.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How would you characterize the U.S. style in comparison with the German model of education?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Just much more open and flexible and more focused on making learning enjoyable, and creativity and fostering the individual child. So I’ve never been in the German system, but, of course, I had friends who were, and my parents, of course, talked to their friends and colleagues, and so the German system was certainly at the time a bit more about fitting in.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Do you consider yourself a creative person?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Yes, I do.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How so?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
How so? (laughs)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How does your creativity express itself?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Wow. Okay. Let’s cut straight to the chase. (laughs) I don’t know. I mean, I’ve always had a creative side to me. I’ve never been a pure scientist, a pure analytical person. I do the usual kinds of creative or common types of creative activities. I do photography and things like that. More recently, I’ve been doing some artwork related to my patient experience. I can tell you about that later, but that’s getting very personal very quickly. (laughs)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
All right. Well, that’s certainly fair enough. (laughs)
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
But I’ve always sort of enjoyed art and creativity and so on. It’s always been part of my, I guess, my passions.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
But let me ask you another question. Because when I asked about creativity, you immediately kind of drew a boundary between that and your scientific activity. Is there a way in which your scientific and administrative activity also draw on your creative capacities?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Sure, absolutely, and, yeah, and you make an interesting point. No, absolutely. Obviously science is also a creative activity, and I feel like the work that I did had creative aspects to it. I was trying to think of new ways of doing things, and I wasn’t profoundly creative in the sense that some people invent whole new technologies and things like that, but I felt like I was trying to make creative contributions. And certainly in my administrative role also I feel the analytical is combined with some different ways of looking at things and just moving things into new areas, particularly trying to bring actually some scientific thinking into some of my administrative roles—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, that’s interesting.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
—and some data-driven approaches and things like that. So that’s definitely been something that’s kept me interested and engaged, because, you know, some of what you do in an administrative role, some of it is fairly transactional. So I think for me to be happy, I need to blend some of those things.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting. Is there anything about those experiences in the International School when you were young that kind of helped track you into that way of thinking about bringing fields together, you know, crossing methods over boundaries?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
I think so. I mean, it’s hard to know, I was still very young there, but I guess what I really took from that school largely was just the pleasure in lifelong learning. So I think that was very much something that was fostered there, and it just made it very enjoyable. Now, when I turned twelve, my parents sent my brother and me to England to go to school, so I went to what the English call a public school, which is a private boarding school, and that was quite a culture change.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Tell me about that.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
FIS, the Frankfurt International School, was a multicultural, you know, both-gender school and people from all different walks of life, and then the school I went to in England was, first of all, only a boys’ school at the time. Since then it also takes girls now, but it didn’t then. And it was a very sort of monocultural school. It was a really good school. The academics were outstanding. It was a middle-class school, actually. It was built by the grocers of London for the sons and daughters of the professional class. Well, daughters now, sons at the time.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was the name of the school?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
It’s called Oundle, O-u-n-d-l-e. It’s in a small town in Northamptonshire, about 100 miles north of London.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why did they want to send you to boarding school, and why that school in particular?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
So that was interesting. I think my father got the idea from his colleagues. By this time, he was no longer working for a big company. He had changed tracks a little bit. He was a management consultant and he worked for a European partnership. So he had partners all over Europe and some of them in the U.K. They were exchanging notes, and so a lot of his partners in the U.K. were beginning to send their kids to these schools. My father, himself, had boarded when he was in New York during the war and was sort of amenable to that. My parents tell me when they were very young and dating, my mother was in England learning English there, and my father went over to visit her, and they took this trip and they went to Cambridge. So they told me, they had this amazing afternoon there, and they said, “One day, one of our children will go here.” So the school that they selected was the school that regularly sent kids to Oxford and Cambridge, and I actually ended up going to Cambridge. My brother went to Oxford. So this is all part of their ideal of getting their kids a good education. The way we selected it was when I was about ten, I think, we had a summer vacation in England, and as part of the summer vacation driving around—of course, you can drive there from Germany—we stopped off at four or five different schools and interviewed them and they interviewed us, and we sort of took a look. The one my parents ended up selecting was the one that I went to. So it was a good fit for us because some of the schools, some of these sort of schools are very sort of class-conscious. Eaton and Harrow is really schools for the upper-class, frankly, and we were solid middle-class kinds of people. So I think they correctly assessed that was a good fit for us, plus the education there was first-rate, the science in particular was outstanding, which gave me great pleasure and a good start.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, you said your parents really made the decision. Where was your voice in all of that?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Yeah, we were there. (laughter) I don’t remember being asked that much. I mean, my brother and I were there on the trip, of course, and we were just—I don’t think we—certainly I—my brother’s a year older than me. I’m not sure I completely realized what was going on. I mean, I realized obviously it wasn’t a secret. They were telling me, “We’re looking at these schools and we’re thinking of sending you to one of these schools,” but I don’t think what it really meant sunk in. We did feel most at home in Oundle. Some of the other schools that we visited were—it’s just a feeling sort of thing. Then there was, by coincidence, one of the people we interviewed, the school’s divided into houses and the kids go into the houses, and the wife of one of the housemasters was German. So we all felt that this might be potentially a strength. At least she would understand the cultural—you know, [unclear] we spoke perfect English with American accents, notably something that changed pretty quickly once we got there. (laughter)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I imagine.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Nonetheless, my parents felt this was a value, and that was helpful. I mean, there times when we had to—it took us a while to adjust, so we had to—you know, so that was good. But, yeah, so that was—and then I stayed there through my high school years and then stayed through my PhD, in fact, in the U.K.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Let me ask you a couple questions. I neglected to ask your parents’ names.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Oh. So my father’s name is Helmut. They’re very German names. And my mother’s name is Helga. So, yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. And the other question I wanted to ask is when—and your brother’s name?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Daniel.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Daniel. The other question I wanted to ask is when did you know that you were going to end up tracking into the sciences?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Pretty much when I was twelve, I have to tell you. I knew I wanted to be a biologist because biology was just always the thing that interested me the most. It fascinated me. I found the mechanisms that I was learning really interesting. I have to say Oundle was a fantastic place for biology, and the other sciences too. I mean, I was much more drawn to that. I remember the physics also being excellent. Chemistry I always struggled with a bit. But the teachers were so passionate and they were just so—and actually, they were excellent teachers. I remember one of my biology teachers in the summer months when there were no kids around, he would do bird projects, birdwatching projects, and he would publish letters to Nature for a summer project. So these were some pretty smart people, and there were lots of resources, and just the way they taught it was just very interesting. So that, to me, was the most interesting thing because there were these mechanisms that you could learn about the biochemistry. I went to Oundle in ’78, so this the early eighties, pretty much, late seventies, so it’s not like it is today. I was just looking at my son. My son is twelve at the moment. I was looking at his homework yesterday and they’re doing evolution. And I was just amazed, there was this two-page worksheet he was doing, and it had everything in there from punctuated equilibrium to gradualism, I mean, you know, amazing stuff. And it just gave me sort of this culture shock to think, wow, when I was his age, we didn’t even know what—punctuated equilibrium hadn’t been put forward as a theory yet. So, science moves so quickly. But I remember at the time just my imagination was fired up because you could learn a concept and it would give you insight into your environment, and that came to me most naturally in biology, physics as well, but I think physics then becomes very quickly very mathematical, and I had adequate mathematics for my research work, but I’m by no means a mathematician. I know my limits. So biology was really my calling, and I just wanted to do biology.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, when you say “mechanisms,” are you speaking about kind of macro mechanisms of evolution, or were you kind of—
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
I was always more—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—more looking into the body at that point?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Actually, I was really mostly interested in the cell level, so sort of translation, DNA. I thought DNA replication was just amazing, the structure, you know, the connection between the DNA structure and its function. I remember there was a book published around this time, actually—I think it must have been around ’78 or something—by a scientific journalist called Jeremy Cherfas, C-h-e-r-f-a-s, and I think he still writes now, and I think it was called something like Genetic Engineering. This was the first, the very first experiments were being done with restriction enzymes and people were cutting genes out of plasmids and putting in [unclear] plasmids. This stuff just really—I thought this was so interesting because I just loved the way the enzymes recognized a specific sequence and cut in a particular place, and then you could move pieces of DNA around. I thought translation and all these things—it was just fascinating. So I was really always kind of focused at the molecular level. I don’t think we talked really about molecular biology yet at that time, and, in fact, in my undergrads, I ended up specializing in biochemistry, which is where all the molecular biologists were, but no one called them—there was no department in molecular biology. That was still—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Being created.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
It was basically disrupting biochemistry and taking over biochemistry. (laughs) But, yes, so it was really at that level. I mean, organismal-level stuff is cool, too, and I like evolution as a theory as well, but it was really the sort of little molecular machines that I find really interesting.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I often ask interview subjects this question. Do you see these mechanisms in your mind visually?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Sure. Yeah, yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. So you’re a visual thinker.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Very visual, yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Some people don’t know what that means, you know. (laughs) So they’re probably not. But you know exactly what that means. And that helps you?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Yeah, yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I mean, it’s essential? I mean, you could turn things around in your mind and kind of see them all coming together and working?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s exactly what I mean. It was those inner pictures that really made me want to do that stuff. Yeah, I mean, I’m not a great graphic artist, I’m not a graphic artist at all, but I wish I was because the things in my mind, I can see them there.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, I’m sure that also enables you to gain insight into the mechanisms that you’re investigating and may be a source of creativity as well.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Right, right. When I was doing the science, I would—in fact, often when I wrote reviews or even sometimes primary research papers, I would draw the cartoons and the figures with Illustrator or something like that. That’s not exactly art, but I have a very visual—yeah, very visual imagination.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Mm-hmm. It’s a tool that you use, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Me, too, so I get that. (laughs)
Recommended Citation
Rosolowksi, Tacey A. PhD and Bogler, Oliver PhD, "Chapter 01: A Stimulating International Education with a Focus on Science" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1554.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1554
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