TEACHER FEATURE: Professor Weinberg

Ayesha Jannat and Zoe Shim ’26

This interview has been cut down and synthesized for clarity purposes. The first half is about Professor Weinberg's early life and career and the second half is made up of fun questions his students wanted answered.

You might’ve seen a new desk in room 308 scattered with papers on MicroRNA, neurological development, and primary and secondary transport–but what specifically caught your attention were the two snake heads facing each other, encased with several layers of resin. In this interview, you’ll meet the owner of this desk: Peter Weinberg, BHSEC’s newest edition to the science department. After coming in on such short notice, he’s here to impart his passion for biological concepts and systems as a whole.

So tell us, how did you get into Biology, or rather how did you get into teaching?

Biology was something that I’ve always been curious about, you know, even as a little young person I guess. I’ve often thought about the time I went to a preschool, which was basically what you would call now a Forest School.

Oh, what is that? We’ve never heard of it.

A forest school is basically where you would spend all day outside, preferably in a forest. They existed for a while, even before the COVID era where it was popular for parents with little kids. Since I grew up in western Massachusetts, we had a big forest, track, weapons and all that. Sometimes we would visit an Audubon bird sanctuary, near a place called Arcadia, and we would just spend the whole day out in the woods. We would do things such as going on long hikes, mountains, and wade upstream and find bugs, things like that. It was sort of instructional too; we would learn about bird migration and just the natural world in general, and I think that this was a big source of interest for me. There’s this sort of feeling where you’re in the woods, and you’re just surrounded by green things, just being in a totally different energy and space. I loved experiencing that – and I still have that sort of euphoric feeling when I see something other than human life. You know, I was curious about how things work, how it extends to history, to technology, that sort of thing, so I settled for medicine when I first started out. However, when I went to undergrad with other pre-med students, I was, er, rather disappointed with the environment as a whole. I think it’s possible to be an intelligent and fantastic doctor, but I just feel like people get into medicine for the wrong reasons. To me, they seemed to be very point A to point B oriented people, and I was afraid if that was what I was going to be like in the future. I don’t think medicine is a sour topic for me, and I would’ve loved doing it because I like to take care of the people I love, but I felt as though learning things beyond the scope of the human body and what things made it break satisfied my curiosity better. What you learned about science in your elementary school becomes your set-point later down in life.

We’ve heard you’ve done several research papers, namely, three prominent ones focusing on genetic regulation. Tell us more about that, starting with your published paper in Elife.

This one is a little bit of a sore spot because my past postdoctoral sub-advisor – you know, she’s wonderful and I don't bear any ill-will to her – went on to finish her postdoc by starting her own lab. Often when a postdoc fellow leaves to start their own lab, there are all sorts of agreements on what sort of research they can take with them. I worked with her on the first section for my thesis lab, and then published it in my second year of grad school. Afterwards, I discussed with my advisor, you know, asking what the next step was, which was to use the same neuron, map it out, and identify the genetic regulation of it. I did close to a year of research on it, but then my advisor, he came to me and I said that he messed up. It was actually my sub advisor that was supposed to get this research, saying that I’d have to give my data to her and she’d take it from here. So, because of that, there was a drift in my lab for a few months, actually for a while there was a drift so that was kind of annoying. All is well though, because I’m still on the paper, but I wasn't allowed to directly work in that specific lab anymore. I think it is this thing where publications are so precious because research topics, believe or not, can be so narrowly focused that if someone publishes very similar work to what you’re researching, you can get scooped. Basically, you aren’t going to be able to publish that, or at least not in a high-impact journal because of this tension.

Ah, we’re sorry about that. Hopefully, you had more control in your other papers.

I did actually, with my other two papers, I was able to stay in control, and you know, actually not get kicked out this time. In one of the major papers published in Current Biology, I analyzed a Caenorhabditis elegans, which is a serotonergic neuron and it’s involved in the control of egg-lane. In hindsight, the general overview of my research has always been about gene regulation and neural development, I guess. C. elegans was always a model organism in my research – basically an organism that everyone has agreed on to use in the laboratory. Obviously, there isn’t a cartel on who decides what organisms to use in the data, but usually we use the most promising one that works in our field of work and then a community grows around it. So when you use an organism like C. elegans, fruit flies, or mice, all of this basic stuff is already done and you can just start working on it.

Actually, after my postdoc, I wanted to research parasites that do some form of mind-control. Specifically, parasitic wasps that prey on cockroaches that physically do neurosurgery on them and then control the way that they move. But this isn’t really a model organism, and it wouldn’t have really ended up as a good move on my part. I had a friend who really wanted to study octopi and cuttlefish, very cool and interesting stuff, but you have to consider how your future will look in regards to the whole scientific community. If you want to do fundamental research, it’s better to use something that’s already mapped out than to do something that has never been done or researched before. You don’t want to end up with a dead-end – or actually, maybe you do – maybe you’re extremely passionate about what you’re doing so you ignore the practicality of it. Depends on how tolerance you have for adversity. I think a relatively unknown branch of science can be extremely inviting, but also extremely frightening for someone who’s just starting out.

If your ambition is to find something wholly new, and in some cases you're better off exploring a brand new place that hasn’t been touched before. However, in every era of science, people have always felt like the big stuff has always been discovered, basically saying that there’s no chance of anything major or upsetting occurring. The oedipus of scientific knowledge is like the tiniest crust of evidence over the complete unknown to scratch the surface. You can discover a ton of revelation, stuff you thought that worked ends up not working at all, and then tug on threads that lead to new discoveries. In the 1950s, nobody believed in plate tectonics, and people that did were considered to be clueless. There was a woman at the Lamont observatory at Columbia who was doing ocean bed-mapping and kept looking at the maps, thinking they fit pretty well together. She told her colleagues about it and they were all like “you’re crazy.. that’s ridiculous!” Yet, through her mapping activities, she was eventually able to prove them wrong.

Are you ready for our most asked questions?

Sure.

Who are your favorite problematic artists?

There are a ton of problematic artists I still have some respect for. There's a metal band called Brzum and it's just one guy basically who is a total… shitbag. He's a murderer, he's a nazi. He is a Western chauvinist. He's a Norwegian guy. All these Scandinavian metal guys kinda went real crazy in the 80s and 90s. All the stuff we know about satanic panic and the dangers of metal music. Here in this country the metal heads were long haired guys that liked to hang out in parking lots, drink beer and play d&d. In Norway they became hard-line antichristians burning churches. And this guy, the front man of Brzum got in a fight with one of the other founding members of that metal movement in Norway. He ended up stabbing the guy in the head with a screwdriver and now you know, he's on twitter talking to J.K. Rowling. Yeah, he's just genuinely a nazi even though he would deny being a nazi. But like if you look at the things he says and compare Nazi ideology it's similar. So I have no interest in him as a person, I have no sense of respect for him as a person, but I do like his album. He recorded it in a studio by himself playing all the instruments in some cases simultaneously with a microphone duck taped to his head. The album is called Filosefem and it just whips.

Well I feel like this goes into another question the people want to know; did you have an emo phase in high school?

I mean I guess. Well, when I was in high school I dressed in a lot of black and liked to listen to hard music. The current conception of emo is different from what it was when I was in high school. Emo had the sense of being sad but it was not as screamy and angry — more heart-achy, mall punk music. There was a band called the GetUp Kids that really exemplified that era of emo as we understood it.

This is the 90s? The 80s?

It was the late 90s — wait, you think I went to high school in the 80s?

No, I don’t know…I’m not trying to be problematic I swear!

I graduated high school in 2002.

Okay I’m just doing my math wrong I’m sorry.

It's not the first time I have been accused of being emo. We didn't call it emo. I just wore a lot of black and was mad about stuff.

So you wouldn’t label yourself?

No yeah. I never really belonged to a social movement.

Okay, again I’m not saying you went to high school in the 80s.

I mean you could but it would be wrong and I would sue you for defamation.

How long would you survive in the zombie apocalypse?

Well how well am I set up to start with? Am I at work?

Yeah, it starts right now.

Does Val get on the radio and say to everyone's attention, that there's a zombie in the building? I mean in this school we are probably really set up cause we have lock down drills and we would block the doors and everyone would know to hide in the safe corner. You know if I had a chance to prepare - you know not going to lie I do often think about being prepared for the zombie apocalypse. Not in a serious way but the types of exercise I do, the general sense of doing things myself and not relying on other people to do important things for me is guided by that same instinct.

Do you watch a lot of zombie shows like The Walking Dead? Is that why?

I did when I was younger. I watched The Walking Dead and read the comics. I’m not currently on the new Walking Dead stuff. I read the comics past the point where the show was and I sort of knew what was coming in the show. Some people don't like seeing things deviate. I think it's great when things get adapted to a different storytelling medium in a way that is helpful to the story. So you're not a part of crazy die-hard fandoms? No, I'm not a purist in that regard. If someone takes it and calls it the same thing but shreds the material and makes it terrible, I’m not a fan. Like Game of Thrones – I read the books AND watched the show. I think all the decisions they made in the first few seasons to deviate from the books were rational and made sense. Like Geroge R. R. Martin tends to include a lot of unnecessary information and so you know the early seasons were tight.

Did you like the ending of Game of Thrones?

No, those last seasons were terrible. I think that the content, story wise, I don't have any disagreement with. It's not totally out of the realm of possibility for that to happen but the way it was paced dramatically it was just unearned. It wasn't a shock. It was just a shock by making things turn suddenly.

Do you believe in aliens?

In what sense? Like there are lights in the sky that are driven by intelligent creatures that visit our planet and abduct cows? Like have you been following the UAP stuff in congress? Well I’m open to the idea. Like there's a good explanation for some of the things people have seen. You will not see me rule the possibility of aliens out. The universe is enormous. We are in a tiny little meaningless speck at one sort of backwater end of the universe. Like we don’t even know what else is in this galaxy. The galaxy is huge! There are millions of galaxies in the universe as we know it. It seems unlikely that this is the only place any kind of life has arisen. It also seems unlikely that we are unique and special creatures that can have conversations. I would be very surprised if it was ultimately determined there is no intelligent life in the universe but obviously we don't have very good evidence to support that hypothesis currently. But the idea that there is any life in the universe is certain from where I stand. If we could confirm that [as in confirming intelligent life does not exist] it would change perspectives on science and the origins of the universe. It would be a weird data point in favor of potentially religious views on life. If we are truly unique in the universe, but I don't buy it.

If you could choose any fictional character to rule the world, who would it be? It could be the world or just this country actually?

I don’t know - Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. Or Tom Bombadil. He's not in the movies, he's like a key character that you know is there for 20 pages in the book The Fellowship of the Ring. He's like an ancient kind hearted presence that is immune to the temptations of evil and corruption of power. But I don't know. The problem is I don't think anyone is perfect.

Did you read a lot when you were younger?

Yeah. I once insulted my friend by saying reading is my oldest friend. I didn't mean to, I was just saying how important reading was to me, especially as a kid. I barely have any time to read now. What types of books did you read? A lot of science fiction, somewhat less fantasy. I really enjoyed Michael Crichton's books when I was a kid. He wrote Jurassic Park, Sphere, he wrote The Andromeda Strain. He had this perfect mix of kinda blockbuster novel pacing and plot and mixed in a lot of extra science knowledge. My favorite authors when I was a teenager were Ed Burrows, I got into The Beats. I read a lot of existential philosophy. I was really into Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. I had a big cyberpunk phase. I got really into reading about cryptography and math. I read a lot of popular math books. I used to go through phases where I would get into an author and read every book of theirs. It was more so like in the world of limitless choice. I still get sad and adrift when I finish a book. This part of my life was structured - I knew what I would do when I had free time I would sit and read my book. I feel the same way any time I finish a big project. That feeling of finishing a book was my first real exposure to it. But so then it made it easier cause I would just read the other books by this person. I did that with Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, H. P. Lovecraft. Later it was like Camus.

Alright, let's end it on a wholesome note. Who's your closest friend here?

I mean, I pretty much only talk to Professor Dorebek during the day. I don't really have time to talk to anyone else. She has been extremely welcoming and helpful and has made this process of teaching in the middle of the semester with anxious kids who needed to be brought back up to speed so much easier. And she’s cool and interested in the same things I am. Actually, I guess I technically know Agredo. I have known him for 15 years. He is a close friend of a very close friend of mine. We haven't had a direct straight-line friendship but we would often see each other around. I've known him for a while, very nice guy and super caring.

Very wholesome. Yay, great! Thank you so much!

Of course.

END