One Family’s Scientific Revolution: Six Siblings, Six Professors of Science

They cut a dashing profile on the glossy pages of People and Newsweek.

And they look pretty good in Discover and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience too.

There’s Paul, posing comfortably beneath a looming Tyrannosaurus rex skull. There’s Marty, explaining his ideas about the origin of language and looking like a Renaissance saint, his thick black hair framing a narrow, intelligent face. And then there’s Anne, discussing express saccades and smooth pursuit eye movement function in schizophrenic vs. normal subjects.

It’s like a scientific version of the Partridge family. Only instead of taking their musical talents on the road in a psychedelic school bus, the six Sereno siblings pursue knowledge at academic institutions around the globe.

“It is somewhat of an oddity,” Marty allows, “to have had all the kids go into the same thing.”

Well, not exactly the same thing. Marty, 41, and Anne, 35, are neuroscientists, he at UC San Diego, she at Rutgers in New Jersey. Sara, 34, and Margaret, 37, are psychologists. Joan, 38, is a psycholinguist.

And Paul, 39, is the real oddball. He’s a paleontologist.

“I was the rascal of the family,” he explains.

Except for Paul, the Serenos all explore aspects of how the brain works, either in relation to vision, language, memory or other cognitive processes. But accuse any Sereno of doing the same thing as any other, and you’ve got a fight on your hands.

“Paulie would say, ‘You all do psycholinguistics or something,’ ” says Sara, who’s the youngest. “But that’s not true.”

She’s in the psychology department at Scotland’s Glasgow University, where she studies how people understand words during reading--and enjoys the occasional deep-fried Mars bar.

Paul is the Indiana Jones of the crew, the boyhood troublemaker and former academic underachiever who travels the globe in search of dinosaur fossils. A professor of paleontology at the University of Chicago, he’s led expeditions to Argentina, Morocco and Niger and has discovered several new dinosaur species.

His glamorous work has made him the most famous Sereno. He appeared on Newsweek’s list of people to watch for in the next millennium, and in People’s 50 Most Beautiful People of 1997 issue. In that one, he’s on page 143, between Gillian Anderson of “X-Files” fame and model Jacinda Barrett of MTV’s “Real World.”

The Sereno saga began in Naperville, Ill., where the kids were reared by Rena, an artist and art teacher, and Charles, a civil engineer and then a mail carrier.

The two, who divorced after all six of their children were grown, both agree that what happened at home had everything to do with their kids’ career choices.

“Everybody painted, everybody had to do art. Everybody had to use their hands and their eyes. That’s how you make scientists,” Rena says.

Charles agrees, saying that it’s vital to start developing kids’ minds as early as possible.

All six kids went to the same public high school, where it didn’t take teachers long to figure out that the name Sereno was synonymous with good grades and serious scholarship.

Except for Paul. Academically, he was a late bloomer who finally hit the books after discovering on a trip to New York’s American Museum of Natural History that paleontology could be his ticket to adventure and excitement.

After graduating from Naperville High School, the Serenos gave an encore performance at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb.

“I was in a class at Northern,” recalls Joan, who’s the third of the six and a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “The professor walks in on the first day and goes, ‘Where’s Sereno?’ They really should have named a dorm after us.”

All six Serenos graduated from Northern and got PhDs; now, every last one is a professor.

“It is a slightly bizarre thing,” Marty says.

Even more bizarre are the California cousins. The Serenos’ mother, Rena, has a twin sister who married their father’s brother. That means that the Sereno kids have a crew of first cousins almost as closely related to them as they are to one another.

So are they scientists?

Nope. But the California Serenos are no slackers, either. There’s a priest, a businessman, a teacher, a horticulturalist and a graduate student in philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A sixth died of cancer at 19.

“You should have seen those 12 kids together. I defy anyone to split them up and put them with the right parents,” Rena says.

Anne recalls that it was almost creepy meeting her California cousins when they visited Illinois for the first time about 25 years ago.

“It was very weird,” she says. “Linda had Marty’s hair and Dan had Sara’s hands.”

The fact that the California clan ended up in predominantly nonscientific pursuits suggests that nurture, rather than nature, accounted for the Illinois Serenos’ career path.

“We were given an extremely nurturing environment,” Joan says. “There were always fun projects to work on.”

Take the kite that pulled so hard on whoever was holding it that it had to be staked into the ground. Or the basement chemistry lab. Or the go-cart they built, which seems to be a somewhat sticky subject.

“Marty and Paul, they took it out one day when they weren’t supposed to. Let’s put it that way,” Joan says.

Every Sereno child played an instrument too--though, it must be admitted, with varying success. Marty plays excellent jazz guitar, and Sara is an accomplished pianist. Paul plays the saxophone, Joan the oboe and Anne the clarinet. Margaret, now a professor at the University of Oregon, plays flute.

One Christmas, they even recorded a concert of classical favorites, titled “Christmas Music and Other Atrocities.”

Holidays at the Sereno home also provide the opportunity for scientific exchanges. In the past, the family has arranged “Serenosiums,” miniscientific meetings with brief talks and discussions of their latest work. But the event has fallen by the wayside in recent years for a lack of civil scientific discourse.

“Sometimes it breaks down and people start throwing things at the speaker or complaining about the slides,” Anne says. “When you come home, other things become important. Like who gets the largest piece of cake.”