Practicing Biochemistry without a License

I grew up in a New Jersey suburb twenty miles east of Manhattan. My passion for science began early in grade school, prompted in part bymy father’s training in chemical engineering and his work at Union Carbide Corporation during the development of the plastics industry. My first chemistry set and home laboratory were followed by a series of summer jobs in industrial laboratories. My fondest memory was making a ball-and-stick model of the most complicated organic molecule I could find in my chemistry textbook and showing it to my father. He instantly identified it as sulfanilamide. From thatmoment on, I knew Iwas learning a new language and joining my father in a serious undertaking. I was sure I would become an organic chemist. Myhigh school chemistry and physics teacherwas concerned that I had opted out of our biology course. He recommended a program for high school students at the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory in BarHarbor,Maine, then and now the world’s premier facility for the study ofmouse genetics. That summer changed my career path, giving me my first exposure to first-class scientists, including two future Nobel laureates. George Snell introduced us to the genetics of histocompatibility. Howard Temin was one of the college students in our group and later a co-discoverer of reverse transcriptase. I went to Harvard College that fall with the hubris that my summer at the Jackson Laboratory obviated the need to take the introductory biology course. Instead, in my freshman year, I enrolled in Carroll William’s physiology course and in a course on evolution led by Alfred Romer. These charismatic teachers failed to dissuade me from majoring in chemistry but left me with a nagging interest in biology and an inkling to go to medical school. My most memorable chemistry professors were Leonard Nash, Paul Doty, and George Kistiakowsky. “Kisty” was President Eisenhower’s science advisor. In mid-fall, he said to us, “Sorry, fellows [we had two women in a class of about fifty], I can’t lecture to you on Monday. I have to go to Washington to stop a third world war! ” After getting an M.D. degree in 1961 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, I completed a three-year medical residency at New York Hospital, Cornell Medical Center. While there, I was the primary caregiver during the last two years in the life of a very gallant young teenager with Cooley’s anemia or -thalassemia major, an inherited defect in the synthesis of -globin subunits. Alfred and his illness impelled me to go into hematology. From 1964 through 1967, I had the good fortune to complete a research fellowship at the ThorndikeMemorial Laboratory and HarvardMedical Unit of the Boston City Hospital under the mentorship of James (Jim) Jandl, arguably the leading experimental hematologist of that era. Jim’s research focused on the red blood cell and disorders thereof. No other cell in the body can match the erythrocyte in physiologic importance, simplicity of design (it loses its nucleus before entering the bloodstream), and ease of access. Thus, it was a logical target for the ever-burgeoning discipline of biochemistry. THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY VOL. 288, NO. 7, pp. 5062–5071, February 15, 2013 © 2013 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc. Published in the U.S.A.