How I became a biochemist

In 1973, having completed my first year of physics at the University of Gdansk, I went to spend some of my holidays in Warsaw with my uncle, Jan Zylicz, a Professor of nuclear physics, to ask him what direction my future studies should take. I had stopped being an active athlete by then and thought I would have a lot of spare time. Visiting various laboratories at Warsaw University, I met Magdalena Fikus (today, a Professor), who had just defended her dissertation in biophysics under the supervision of Prof. David Shugar. She made me become fascinated with biology, a field about which I knew very little at that time. At secondary school, I had focused on studying physics and mathematics. On my way back to Gdansk, I read Schrodinger’s What Is Life, and I was hooked. I began intensively catching up on my biology knowledge, as I was at a stage where I confused amino acids with nucleotides. A few months later, I got a call from Karol Taylor (then an assistant professor and head of the Biochemistry Department at the University of Gdansk), who had heard from Magda Fikus that some would be physicist had developed an interest in biology. He came to see me, breaking all the accepted rules, and described what he was working on: the genetics of bacteriophage lambda. Karol Taylor had just returned from a research visit with Prof. Waclaw Szybalski in Madison, Wisconsin, and he had managed to prove that both DNA strands can be read during transcription. Encouraged by Karol Taylor, I started a course in biology parallel to my physics studies, and with the exception of boring taxonomy, I completed practically the whole course. My master’s thesis was in biophysics, and I studied the electron excitation energy transfer between dyes intercalating to DNA. I discovered that, in such a system, the energy between the donor and acceptor migrates much more efficiently than when the dyes are in the solution (without intercalation to DNA). Papers published a few years later indicated that the migration of electron excitation energy along the DNA chain is rather like the migration of an exciton in crystals. Having obtained my MSc in experimental physics, I could not find employment at any faculty of the University of Gdansk due to my political activity that was directed against the communist regime in Poland. Karol Taylor came up with the idea that I should sit exams for a PhD course at the Medical University of Gdansk (AMG), as this school was accountable to a different ministry and they had not heard about my political activity yet. The only professor at the AMG who knew about this ‘‘plot’’ was biochemistry professor Stefan Angielski. During the exam, he was unsure what a physicist could possibly know about biochemistry, but he really wanted to help. I ultimately passed the exam and was enrolled in a PhD course at the AMG. That was when the security services found out what had happened; I was not expelled—that was 1977—a time of slight liberalization, but I was banned from contacts with students. Other junior lecturer PhD students had to run time-consuming classes in biochemistry for biology and medicine students, while I had more time for scientific Address correspondence to: Dr. Maciej Zylicz, International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw, 4 Ks. Trojdena Street, 02109 Warsaw, Poland. Tel: 148-22-59-70-740. Fax: 148-22-59-70-743. E-mail: zylicz@iimcb.gov. pl Received 5 September 2007; accepted 13 September 2007