A Brassy Move

The sound of a trumpet no longer echoes through Harvard’s Center for Systems Biology.

After nearly three decades of work in science, the center’s executive director left Harvard to become a professional musician.

Her former colleagues say they remember hearing Laura J. Garwin ’77 practicing the trumpet in the office late at night. Garwin, a former Rhodes scholar who earned a degree in Geology from Oxford and a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from Cambridge, says she has played the trumpet since she was eight years old. But her music always took second place to her career.

Then, in 2004, Garwin says she had an epiphany.

After the death of a close friend, she says, “It became clear to me, as it should have been clear all along, that life was finite.”

“If there was something I wanted to do with my life, I should probably get on and do it,” Garwin says.

She ended her job at Harvard in August, sold her car, and moved to London to study at the Royal College of Music.

A LITTLE BRASSY

At Thanksgiving last year, Garwin sat her parents down and told them she had something important to share with them.

When she explained her plans to quit science for music, “they were relieved that it wasn’t some terrible news,” Garwin says. “My dad asked me some questions about how I was going to support myself.”

“You just really have to put it in a perspective with how much time she spent playing the trumpet,” says her mother, Lois E. Garwin. “Her life was divided between what she did during the day and she played the trumpet at night.”

Her daughter’s choice was a reasonable one, Lois Garwin says. “She wasn’t whistling Dixie.”

But Garwin says she worried that her fellow scientists would think that her choice to pursue music was frivolous or even irresponsible.

“I was brought up to, you know, get a college degree, get a job, make something of my life, and that path always was in one direction,” Garwin says.

“To get off the escalator might be seen as, I don’t know, maybe wasting the training I’d had.”

To her surprise, her colleagues were enthusiastic about her decision.

“They thought it was fantastic,” Garwin says, “and more than one of them said, ‘Oh, I wish I could do something like that.’”

Michael T. Laub, now an assistant professor of biology at MIT, says Garwin’s colleagues admired her choice to follow through on a life-long dream.

“Making a career change that late in life is something that not everyone has the courage to do,” says Laub. The two worked together when Laub was a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Systems Biology, then called the Bauer Center for Genomics Research.

A DIFFERENT DRUM

A student again, Garwin, 49, now takes classes with musicians in their early twenties. Since the only money she earns is from the occasional freelance trumpet job, she has to live on a strict budget.

“I don’t own a car here, partly because I’m a student,” Garwin says. “I don’t have any income, and I’m trying to save money.”

Instead of driving, she gets to school via the London Underground, sometimes lugging as many as four trumpets along with her.

But the rewards of her new life far outweigh the sacrifices, Garwin says. Practicing her trumpet used to be squeezed into morning or evening hours. Now, she says, she can concentrate her full energy on perfecting her art.

“It’s not just playing,” she says, “it’s being surrounded by music, it’s going to a library and listening to music, it’s going to concerts.”

At first, she says, it was hard to adjust to this new reality.

“In the first few weeks, there were times I would be sitting in the college library, listing to a music CD, and I would think, ‘Surely there’s some work I should be doing’. I hadn’t got used to the idea that sitting and listening to a CD was part of my work now.”

AN OVERTURE, AGAIN

Garwin says she will spend the next two years studying at the Royal College of Music and living off of her savings. After that, she plans to forge a career as a professional musician, first through freelance work and then, hopefully, with an orchestra job.

Her Boston trumpet teacher, Jeffrey W. Work, who now plays first trumpet for the Oregon Symphony, says he has faith in her.

According to Work, the qualities that helped Garwin succeed in science also make her a good musician.

“She’s the type of person who likes to know why something works well and how to make it happen in a repeatable way,” he says.

Garwin says she may supplement her freelance music career with teaching or science journalism. Before coming to Harvard in 2001, she served as the North American editor of Nature magazine.

‘I STILL DON’T KNOW’

During her time as a student at Harvard, Garwin says, “I felt I was surrounded by a lot of kids who just knew what they wanted to do.”

Now, she says, she realizes the importance of serendipity.

“I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” she says.

What she does know, she says, is that “it is important at every stage of your life to ask yourself what you’re doing what you’re doing and what makes you happy.”

At Harvard, Garwin spent most of her day in the office, emerging occasionally to teach a freshman seminar on “The Genome and Society.”

Now, her trumpet gigs take her across a new city.

She plays at weddings and dances, and on one recent job she found herself at the birthday party of a prominent Londoner. She and the rest of the band serenaded guests from the terrace, and after dinner, the sky lit up with fireworks.

Garwin was afraid that she would get cold feet about her decision once she was actually in London, but she says that hasn’t been the case.

Sitting in an orchestra, Garwin says, “I think yes, this is what I want to do, this is what gives me the most pleasure.”

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.