Twelve Questions: Heather Hendrickson

Dr Heather Hendrickson rejected Mormon teaching and became a scientist. Picture / Dean Purcell

Heather Hendrickson was born into a Mormon family who did not believe in evolution. She is now an expert in the evolution of bacteria and a scientist at Massey University in Auckland.

1. Bacteria: friend or foe?
Both, but they've had terrible PR. The only time we think about them is when they're making us sick. If you look across all bacteria, most of them are friends and only a small number bother infecting people or organisms that we care about. Actually, we are 90 per cent bacteria. Only 10 per cent of cells in the body are human cells. The reason we don't look like a giant bacterium is that the human cells are hugely much bigger. Crazy, huh?

2. Did you like bugs as a kid?
If by bugs you mean bacteria then definitely not. I was obsessed with birds and bugs from a really young age. As an undergraduate I was really serious about birds and took an amazing ornithology class, but when they put us out in a field to watch a flock of Canada geese for 24 hours I was pretty turned off.

3. Describe your childhood.
I grew up in California where my family moved to [from Utah], in a conservative Mormon household. Mormons have strict rules so no drinking alcohol, coffee or tea, no popular music and no one smokes. Girls had to wear skirts to church and we were trained as a kid to be a homemaker.

4. How did you feel, as a kid, about evolution?
I was totally fascinated. I was a really serious little scripture reader and things like the Ark and Genesis in the scriptures really bothered me. I asked a lot of questions and decided that evolution explained a lot. So, I believed for a while there had been a God who started it and then it ran its course. My dad was opposed, and he told me I could fail any test that required that I say evolution had happened.

5. What are your religious beliefs now?
I'm an atheist now. My family's mostly okay with that. Dad and my stepmum are really active in the Mormon Church in leadership. My mum has left, but she's now anti-vaccination and we argue about science all the time. My wider family doesn't understand [my beliefs]. I was at the University of Utah working on a project using E. coli to show Darwin had been right. That was translated back to the family as "Heather's working on Ebola and showing that Darwin was wrong".

6. When did you start to question your family faith?
Really late in the game. When I left home and went to university, my family made sure I was in Utah but I was not interested in being active. I went through a few phases of being active again, but by the time I was working in a microbiology lab at the University of Utah it just didn't have any explanatory power for me at all. When I went to graduate school in Pittsburgh I broke off all ties with the church. I think it happened because of my natural curiosity. I'm naturally someone who asks questions and wants good answers. Also finding a new community really helped. It wasn't a matter of just leaving Mormonism and being alone.

7. Do you still feel Mormon?
I have remnants of culturally having grown up Mormon. Mormons are trusting and expect wonderful things all the time. But once you take away the motivation that there's this God who's watching and judging you - well, the only person I now have to feel responsible to is me. I'm not conflicted [about atheism] but you are turning your back on generations of your family and I think for my extended family I'm still going to hell.

8. What's the point of studying evolution in bacteria?
Microbes are great to study because they have incredibly short life spans. They divide really quickly and in six months you can see thousands of generations. That's an incredible opportunity to figure out what are the genes responsible for making things better or not in the evolutionary process. If you talk about bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, that's an evolutionary process. And one of the amazing things about bacteria is they inherit chunks of genes from completely different species. And they've been doing that for four billion years.

9. If bacteria can evolve by inheriting genes from other species so quickly, why don't they run the world?
They do. They make almost all of the oxygen, the nitrogen that plants need, all of the biochemical processes that take place are mostly being done by bacteria. They can live everywhere, are resistant to radiation, do most of the photosynthesis. We've just found they're in the soil, and when you come into contact with them they can raise your serotonin levels. Why do people garden? Because it really does make you happy.

10. Where will it all lead?
At the moment my group is studying bacteriophages, which are like the ninjas of the bacteria world. In Russia before World War I, bacteriophages were used instead of antibiotics to kill specific bacteria. We're now at peak antibiotics - we haven't discovered a significant new one for 15 years - but we may again be able to use these bacteriophages to treat infections. It's a pretty hopeful thing to study.

11. Do you use antibiotics?
I do, but as sparingly as possible. They're a precious resource at the moment.

12. How do your parents feel about your career?
They are all really proud. My dad and my stepmum are super-proud and they tell people about what I am doing wherever they go. My dad has really come around when it comes to evolution and today I think he basically buys it. My mum is not a fan of vaccination or governments, so I think she sort of thinks of me as part of the "scientist and government conspiracy". You can't win them all.