You can't have all your eggs in one basket. I'd have two at least, so if one didn't make it, the other one did. Often was the time that I would have two grant proposals, and I'd think one was really great and the other was just research that I had to do anyway, but I wouldn't get the first, I'd get the second. You have to be flexible. He has also found that life in the lab is anything but predictable.
Serendipity is a big part of research.
You never know where you're going to go. Another primary ingredient in his funding success, he said, is the men and women who have joined his lab over the years. People come here who have talents and expertise that I don't have, and they start to show things that I would never have shown. The common thread throughout Dr. Brooks' research is estrogen. He has particularly been interested in the hormone's relationship to breast cancer.