The Center’s Bruce Jenkins: Born to Be Wild

Bruce Jenkins is a pioneer in the field of pharmacological MRI. He has published widely on the relationship between pharmacological agents and functional connectivity in the brain, for example, and was one of the first to work out the principles of dopamine-mediated neurovascular coupling.

He is also a riotously funny guy.

Play a round of golf with him sometime. It’s less a morning of lining up shots and reading the breeze and more a sidesplitting roaming bout of riffing on an extraordinarily broad range of topics.

So it’s no surprise to learn he did a bit of standup back in the nineties. He started with open mics at the Catch a Rising Star comedy club in Harvard Square and eventually made enough of a name for himself that he was receiving regular, assigned slots at the club, working alongside the likes of Louis C.K. and David Cross.

Hearing him tell stories of the early days of the Martinos Center—he joined the group in about 1987—you can imagine where he got at least some of his material.

Just as importantly, you get the sense that Martinos researchers have always fallen on the quirky side. That their offbeat nature has been baked into the culture of the Center from the very beginning.

To wit: he tells of a night many years ago when a group of Center researchers found themselves at a chic Karaoke bar in San Francisco. After an aperitif or two, Center director Tom Brady decided that he, Jenkins and Jack Belliveau should climb on stage and sing the counterculture anthem “Born to Be Wild.”

There was just one problem: “Jack was a drummer, not a singer,” Jenkins says, diplomatically. “Tom Brady,” he adds, maybe slightly less diplomatically, “was tone deaf.”

Moving on to a different topic, he reveals the fun-loving origins of the Center’s now-state-ofthe-art IT infrastructure.

Sometime in the mid-nineties, Anders Dale and a group of others decided that everyone in the Center should have a UNIX workstation, enabling networking for a range of scientific and—not incidentally—less-scientific applications.

We got all these Silicon Graphics machines,” Jenkins says, “and at about 6pm we would all get together to play [iconic single- and multiplayer computer game] Doom, with the sounds of explosions reverberating throughout the building.”

So, to summarize: Work hard, play hard. Belt out your favorite tunes like there’s no one listening. And don’t worry too much about the lie of the ball. Words to live by. Indeed, if you think about it, this might just be a Martinos Center creed.