Nice to have you here in Bauernsberg, John. And the first question I have is,

how do you come to the interest in chemistry of bacteria? So, when I was much younger, I was always interested in biology, even as a small boy playing in the woods. When I went to school, chemistry just seemed much more interesting. But I always somehow wanted to get back and connect it to biology.

And in 2002, when I had a chance to move from a chemistry department to a medical school, to a biological chemistry department, where there was much more interest in biology, that's when I really began to make the move. And bacteria seemed very interesting to me

because they were so genetically accessible and interesting chemically that I gave up my earlier interest in bugs and focused on bacteria. If you think on young people now wanting or designing their own career in chemistry, what skills are needed, do you think, to be successful in the modern area of this cross area

between chemistry and biology? So I think it's important as very young students that they learn the basics. That is, if I were to talk to an undergraduate student, I would say that the thermodynamics that I learned, the carbonyl chemistry that I learned, that I use that almost every day, and that's never going to change.

Biology sort of can come and go. I took a course in oncogenes, but by the time I actually became interested in oncogenes, everything had changed. So to young students, I would say, focus on the basics. The students who are beginning to think about getting a PhD

or to go for a postdoc, I would emphasize that they really think about the lab, not just the professor they'll be working with, because you learn a lot from the environment around you. You learn from the other students, and you learn from whatever university or institute that you're in.

So I would say that's very important. And do you advise, for example, master students to take courses in genetics or manipulating of bacteria or microbiology? I do, because there are then certain lab skills that you need. So if you don't know how to work with bacteria and grow bacteria, you're not going to be very successful

if you try to combine bacteria in your work. But again, those are sort of fundamental skills. So you need chemistry and, of course, biology? You need both. So now if you look for these young researchers, what are your real advices? You mentioned that already, but maybe you have also advices

to young researchers starting on their own projects. So how do you choose a project which is good? So I think the most success with projects is to choose something just slightly different than what you've been trained to do. You don't want to do exactly what you've been trained to do because that'll just be imitating whoever you learned it from.

But if you try to do something completely different, you're almost certainly going to fail because you don't have the skills that you really need to do that. So for very beginning independent researchers, I would say try to figure out what you're good at and then what's slightly different from that,

that you can begin to move in a new direction. Maybe another topic. So also, at least in Germany, we have a lot of discussion about how you can rate scientific success. And there are, of course, different views depending on funding agencies and universities and your own. So if you look at these three categories,

how is it, how do you feel how scientific success is rated and how is it in your country as well? Right. So I rate success differently depending on who I have to rate. So if I had to rate my colleagues or people in my field,

I rate it completely by my opinion of their papers, my opinion of their talks, my opinion of their students. Do they do interesting things? Are they telling me things that I really want to know? But sometimes I have to rate, say, students for prizes or be on an award committee for all kinds of people.

And then I don't look so much at the number of papers that they've published or where they've published them. But again, sort of I try to read. Usually you have to write a short research description. And I try to see are they answering or even asking interesting questions.

I mean, do they have a fundamental question that they're trying to answer or are they sort of dabbling in various things? So the question is a key issue, so to speak. To me, the question is the key issue because if you're not asking interesting questions, you're not likely to get to interesting results.

And how are you rated? So, for example, from funding agencies, do they look on the paper you published or do they look on the third-party money you get in or do they look on the number of PhD or postdocs you produce? I think different places rate me differently. I think the dean at my school probably rates me

by the amount of money that I bring in. I think my colleagues rate me on the kind of research that I'm doing. And occasionally I'm sure there are people who rate me that don't know very much about what I do or me

that try to count the number of papers or something like that. I think different people bring different eyes to the problem. All these scientists, we publish more and more. Every year it's more journals appearing, more papers published. And obviously somebody has to read these papers. How do you personally, do you read scientific papers often or rarely

or do you only read the headlines or the abstracts? And do you see this as a problem? First of all, I would say my own practices have changed considerably and I think it's a problem.

When I was a student, I subscribed to journals and I would try to read all or most of the articles, for example, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. As life went on, I subscribed to more journals but I read less and less of them but I still tended to read full papers. Now I subscribe to almost no journals that I get in hard copy.

I get the table of contents by email whenever they come out and I look at that and so there are many journals that I really only look at the titles of what they're publishing. But what is true is it's now seamless. That is, when I see a title that's interesting, I can click on it

and for me, within a couple of clicks, I can have a PDF of the article and so every day I take home several PDFs of articles and I read those at night. This brings me also to the next question. There are of course different approaches to scientific publishing discussed now very, very often.

So some approaches, everything should be published so everything can read it and have its own decision or its own opinion on that. And the other is we have these peer-reviewed journals so only peer-reviewed material is going to be released. What do you think is a better approach?

So ideally I would like some combination of both so that there's both a review so that there's still quality publications. And that you can believe more or less what you're reading. But I also would like to see everything open access because it's very annoying to me when there's a paper

that I can read the title or the abstract of but I can't actually then get the paper. For my own life, I would say a lot of it is governed by the co-workers. Some co-workers only want to publish in some journals. Others are willing to do whatever.

But I'm a big fan of open access publishing and I'm working to improve that in chemistry. And what about peer-reviewing? Do you think it's necessary or not? No, I think it's essential. I think if papers aren't peer-reviewed,

they're almost not worth reading because you can get so many misleading things published. I know papers that I've turned in that I thought were quite good. The reviewers found things that I had missed that I hadn't thought of. So no, I really believe only in peer-reviewed papers.

John, thank you very much for your visit to Braunschweig. It was nice talking to you and I hope you enjoyed your stay here. I enjoyed my stay here very much. Thank you for inviting me.