Dr. Priya Sharma

My Life in One Page

Abstract

Born in Pune in 1958 to a railway engineer and a mathematics teacher who never once told me science was for boys — an omission I have spent a lifetime grateful for. PhD at twenty-six, Bethesda at twenty-eight, NIH for thirty-four years, the last nineteen running a lab of twenty-three people studying how the immune system decides what belongs. I never married, a decision I made cheerfully and have answered for at every wedding since 1987. I trained forty-one scientists, published much that was wrong in interesting ways, survived the lymphoma I had spent a career adjacent to, and retired to a small house with a large garden and a cello I play badly on purpose. Conclusions: see final section. Like all good conclusions, they are shorter than the methods.

Life Chapters

Pune to Bethesda

"The work was the country I'd actually emigrated to."

I arrived in America with two suitcases, a postdoc offer, and my mother's instruction to keep my degree certificates in my hand luggage, as though customs might dispute my mind. The first year was cold in every sense available. What saved me was the great secret of laboratories: pipettes don't have an accent. At the bench I was exactly as good as my last experiment, a meritocracy so pure it took me a decade to notice the meetings upstairs weren't one. I stayed anyway. The work was the country I'd actually emigrated to.

The year on the other side

In 2017 a biopsy report arrived with my own name where the subject ID should be. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma — a disease whose cellular machinery I could draw freehand. People assumed the knowledge was a comfort. Let me correct the record: knowing exactly what the dragon is does not make the dragon smaller. It makes the waiting rooms stranger, because you can read the posters. I was treated by a former student, which I recommend to every mentor as the final exam you didn't know you were setting. I passed. She passed better.

Wisdom

Illness & health · Faith & doubt

On becoming the patient

I spent thirty-four years on the knowledge side of the microscope, and then one biopsy moved me to the other side, and I will report the finding honestly: nothing I knew about lymphoma prepared me for having it, and everything I knew about uncertainty did. Science had trained me to live without final answers — to act well on incomplete data. It turns out that is the entire skill of being seriously ill. The scans come back ambiguous, the odds are ranges, and you must live anyway, Tuesday after Tuesday. If you can hold 'I don't know yet' without letting it become 'I fear the worst,' you have the only equipment that helps.

To someone younger: Learn to act well on incomplete data. Everything serious requires it.

Work & calling · Failure & setbacks

On negative results

Most of my career failed, and I mean that technically. Hypotheses dead by Friday, year-long assays that proved nothing but their own elegance, two grant cycles on a receptor that turned out to be a rumor. A negative result is still a result — it is the universe telling you, at considerable expense, where not to dig. The people who flame out of science, and of marriages, and of most things, are not the ones who fail; they are the ones who cannot file a failure correctly and reopen the notebook Monday. Write it down. Date it. What didn't work is the most expensive thing you own.

To someone younger: What didn't work is the most expensive thing you own. Keep the records.

Education & learning · Aging

On staying a beginner

At sixty I took up the cello, an instrument that does not care about your h-index. I am, after eight years, magnificently mediocre. This is on purpose. Expertise is a comfortable country and the passport is expensive, so people retire into the three things they're already good at and call it identity. The brain that runs on rails rusts on rails. Be terrible at one new thing at all times — terrible in public, ideally. The teenagers at the community orchestra correct my bowing. It is the best hour of my week and I can prove it.

To someone younger: Be terrible at one new thing at all times. Terrible in public, ideally.

Faith & doubt · Joy & gratitude

On a godless life, examined

At hospital bedsides, kind people would sometimes hand me their faith the way you'd offer a coat — sure I must be cold without one. I never was, and I want this written down by an actual unbeliever rather than argued about over our heads. I have not needed God to be astonished. I have seen a B cell rearrange its own genome to meet a pathogen it has never encountered, and if that doesn't put you on the floor, the failure isn't in the universe. A secular life is not an unexamined one. Mine was one long act of paying attention. I am told that is also a definition of prayer. Fine. We can share the word.

Leadership & mentoring · Friendship & community

On running a lab

A lab is a family you choose every funding cycle, which concentrates the mind wonderfully. I hired for curiosity over polish, fed people at every defeat, and enforced exactly one commandment: bad news travels fastest. The postdoc who tells you the experiment died on Tuesday is worth three who manage your mood until Friday. That rule, I am told by alumni who now run companies and households, ports everywhere. Make it cheap to bring you the truth and you will be rich in the only currency management actually runs on.

To someone younger: Make it cheap to bring you bad news. Everything else is decor.

Love & dating · Joy & gratitude

On the question

Since 1987, at every wedding, someone's aunt has asked me — gently, as one inquires after a limp — whether I never wanted to marry. Here is the answer at full length, recorded so I can finally stop giving it: I wanted my life. I got it. Whole decades of mornings that belonged entirely to me, work I loved past reason, forty-one students who are my descendants in the way that counts for me, and friendships forty years deep that nobody ever asked me to rank. A life can be full in more shapes than the one on the greeting cards. Mine was one of the other shapes. It held.

To someone younger: A full life comes in more shapes than the cards print. Pick yours on purpose.

Ethical Will

To my students, who are my estate

"When you are certain, write down what would change your mind."

I leave no descendants the census would count, so this is addressed to the forty-one of you, and you know your names. Keep the commandment: bad news travels fastest — in labs, in marriages, in bodies; early truth is the only kind that's useful. Cite the people below you as scrupulously as the journals above you. When you are certain, write down what evidence would change your mind, and keep the paper. And someday, take the call from the strange old woman who trained you, even mid-experiment. I took that call in 1986 from my own advisor. It is the whole reason any of you exist.

Photos & Artifacts

Notebook 1, Pune, 1972

A school exercise book, ruled, water-stained, in which a fourteen-year-old recorded the daily behavior of the crows outside her window for one entire monsoon. Columns. Dates. A hypothesis about the neighbor's dog, marked WRONG in a satisfied hand. My mother kept it without telling me for fifty years. Every notebook since — and there are two hundred and eleven — is this one, continued.

Closing Blessing

Conclusions

The data are in. Attention turned out to be the whole instrument: pay it to cells, to students, to crows in a monsoon, and the universe pays it back at compound interest. I was asked all my life what I believed in and the honest answer fits in a lab notebook margin: look closer, write it down, tell the truth fast, and share the authorship. If you want to remember me, notice something carefully today — and show somebody younger how you did it.

"Attention turned out to be the whole instrument."