Profile of Rafael Palacios
- Kaspar Mossman, Science Writer
Shortly after his arrival at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow in 1970, Rafael Palacios was pedaling his bicycle toward the medical center. While weaving around a group of well-dressed men who unexpectedly stopped on the path, he could not avoid one, crashing straight into Joshua Lederberg, winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Palacios has always sought to meet the greatest scientists, if usually under more dignified circumstances. He believes it is essential to share ideas and techniques. “If we're isolated, everyone doing different work,” he says, “it is very difficult to do interesting things.”
Currently, Palacios directs the Genome Dynamics Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He helped found the Center for Genomic Sciences at UNAM and is largely responsible for developing a definition for the field of “genomic sciences” in Mexico, working tirelessly to integrate various interdisciplinary sciences into the discipline. Best known for his discoveries in the dynamics of bacterial genomes and the field of nitrogen fixation, Palacios was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in May 2006.
Palacios was born in Mexico City in 1944 and traveled to the United States at an early age with his parents. His father, an M.D., trained at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, NY, before moving his practice to Mexico City in 1948. “At home, I heard a lot about medical problems and things like that,” Palacios recalls, and he decided to pursue medical school.
But after four years in the program at UNAM, he began to falter in his commitment. “I liked the very basic things. I liked biochemistry, physiology, general pathology, but I didn't like the clinical work,” he says. So, in his fifth year, he started a parallel Ph.D. in biochemistry.
To speed things up, he …
