A career perspective on the discipline of neurochemistry.

I am honored to have this issue of Neurochemical Researchdedicated to my career.There have been monumental changes in the disciplineof neurochemistry from the time that I began my training inneurochemistry (1969) to the present time. Rather thanrecounting a chronology of my career in this chapter, I preferto relate how the perception and practice of neurochemistryhas evolved over the course of my career.I am an ‘‘accidental neurochemist’’ never havingintended to be involved in any discipline other than bio-chemistry, the ﬁeld in which I obtained my degree from theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago in 1969. My graduateadvisor (Dr. Stephen Binkley) supported part of my grad-uate training under the auspices of a new neurosciencetraining program directed by Dr. Klaus Unna in the Phar-macology Department. Neuroscience was a relatively newterm at that time, and having received a BS in Zoologyfrom Wheaton College (Illinois), I gladly accepted thechallenge of learning more about the nervous system. I wasquite sure this experience would be a temporary excursionfrom my clear goal of a career in biochemistry. Aftertaking a few required neuroscience courses in the program,to my surprise, I became intrigued with the nervous system.I recognized that detailed biochemical studies of the ner-vous system were in their infancy. Indeed, the ﬂagshipjournal which detailed such studies (Journal ofNeurochemistry) was less than 10 years old at the timeI began my graduate studies. My graduate research wasquite removed from the nervous system and involved theisolation and puriﬁcation of an enzyme from Clostridiumperfringins (N-acetyl neuraminic acid aldolase) and sub-sequent characterization of its mechanism of action [1, 2].At the time, I had no idea that this puriﬁed enzyme wouldbe my ticket to a career in neurochemistry.As I approached the end of my graduate studies, I decidedto focus my postdoctoral studies in neurochemistry. I wasparticularly interested in understanding the molecular basisof learning and memory. At that time (1969), there were anumber of investigators doing foundational studies in thatﬁeld. I was fortunate to obtain a postdoctoral position withSam Barondes who at the time was in the Department ofPsychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Samwas interested in the turnover of sialic acid at the synapseand how this might relate to memory and learning. To carryout these studies, he needed large quantities of radio-actively labeled sialic acid. Labeled sialic acid could not bepurchased at that time, but the enzyme that I had puriﬁedcould be used to combine N-Acetyl mannoseamine withradioactive pyruvate (which was commercially available)to generate highly labeled sialic acid. I left Chicago and thebitter cold winters to head back to the east coast whereI had grown up in Northern New Jersey (Fair Lawn), asmall town to which my great grandfather had migratedfrom the Netherlands. After 9 years in the Midwest, I wasquite conﬁdent I would never be back there again (I waswrong on that score as well!). With the aldolase enzyme inhand, I began my studies with Sam in the summer of 1969.Despite the skeptics and naysayers, we were able to showthat radioactive sialic acid could be used as a tracer in vivoand that this tracer was stably incorporated into glycopro-teins and glycolipids [3]. Sam’s lab was an exciting and