Dr. William Newsome is sitting at his PC computer grumbling. "Do you know what IBM stands for?" Newsome asks in a slight Southern drawl. "It stands for 'I'm Building a Mac'," he quips, displaying quick-witted charm and ardent loyalty to the Macintosh operating system. Dr. Newsome, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, is known for being clever. Respected in the scientific community as a risk-taker and shrewd thinker, he has built his career on elegant experiments that have helped explain the neural basis of behavior.

Newsome grew up in a small town in Suwanee County, Florida, harboring a keen interest in science as a young boy after looking at protozoan under the microscope for the first time. He later pursued his interest in science at Stetson University, a small liberal arts school in north Florida. Newsome spent his first undergraduate years studying physics, but never forgot his boyhood fascination with biology and switched the focus of his studies his junior year. "It seemed to me that the three most interesting questions…at the time were: how does the brain work, how do genes work, and what is the origin of life?" Newsome recalls. He decided to apply for biology graduate school during his last year at Stetson, and worked hard to prepare. "I took quite a few chemistry and biology courses during my last year and a half ," laughs Newsome. One biology professor took Newsome under his wing and gave him a yearlong biology tutorial. Newsome's efforts proved fruitful when later that year he gained acceptance to California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California where he completed a Ph.D.in biology in 1979.

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Page 1: Summary
Page 2: Early Primate Research
Page 3: Looking Into the Future
Transcript: Question and Answer
Transcript Page 2: Question and Answer
Transcript Page 3: Question and Answer