I had wanted to be an architect…or maybe an archeologist…or a musician. As I started college in 1979 I told people I was pre-med and then began to imagine an MD-PhD trajectory. Truth be told, I think I gravitated toward that dual degree target mostly to impress other people during those early college years. I probably had the grades and the standardized test skills. I had a medical history so there was the needed curiosity. On the other hand, I had never asked myself whether I had the needed commitment to service and empathy, or to teamwork, or to joining the healthcare machine. By 1982 I knew my undergraduate BS honors degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison would be in molecular biology. It was time to decide if medicine or science or both were really in the cards for me.
The answer came through several scientists who served as role models. None was more important than Bill Dove. Bill was a remarkable scientist at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at Madison. With his wife, Alexandra, he led a genetics research lab with interests spanning bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria), Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold that shape-shifts), and the developmental genetics and cancer genetics of mice. Bill's example taught me that it was possible for scientific curiosity to take a research laboratory in multiple directions simultaneously. Bill's career taught me that physical chemical thinking could connect to genetics and to developmental biology and to cancer biology, and that a single scientist could make those connections. Bill's career also taught me that the history of molecular biology was amazingly brief, and that in the 1980's individual scientists could be connected with all of the founders of the discipline.
And Bill taught me about Caltech.
Actually, it wasn't Bill that taught me directly, it was the books on Bill's office shelves. Early in my internship with Bill at McArdle, I had a mix of labwork and office tasks. In those pre-computer days, the clerical work included filing of reprints and organizing books and papers. Bill's narrow office included a rudimentary bookshelf assembled from bricks and wood. On it was a treasure trove of textbooks and notebooks. Some were dusty, some were in frequent use. As my organizational assignments often took me to these shelves, I began to be familiar with the titles there. One red 3-volume hard-cover set of books often caught my eye. It was a collection called Lectures on Physics. The books embodied an unprecedented freshman physics curriculum developed at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at about the time I was born. The curriculum was the entirely unconventional product of the mind of the incomparable Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, shortly after the textbook collection had been written.
Feynman was a character.
Besides being willing to teach freshman physics and develop his own original 3-volume curriculum, he was an avid traveler, a frank speaker, a dabbler in hallucinogenic drugs, a man fascinated by languages, and a bongo player. I had heard of Feynman, but paging through these textbooks piqued my curiosity in new ways. What was Caltech like? Why were these books on Bill's shelf?
Bill Dove had done his PhD in the physical chemistry of DNA with Norman Davidson, a Caltech physicist who had been part of the Manhattan Project. Dove's PhD was granted in 1962, when Feynman was finishing his Lectures on Physics for Caltech undergraduates studying a few buildings away. Bill Dove had been part of the interdisciplinary academic and intellectual life at Caltech. I found myself daydreaming of that mystique. It occupied a place in the background of my thoughts.
It was in the Dove lab that I realized that the entrepreneurial independence of the career of a PhD scientist fit my personality. Though not a lover of risk, those that know me will affirm that I thrive when I'm in charge. I didn't want to be at the beck and call of a pager, or told what my patient schedule was going to be. I didn't want a boss. My experience in the Dove lab sealed my fate–I wanted to be a scientist like Bill Dove, or at least a weak impression of him.
After my transformation in the Dove laboratory, these aspirations led me to a PhD in molecular biology and a thesis project in the human oncology lab of Bruce Dolnick at the interface of chemistry and biology. In 1988, after considering postdoctoral opportunities in Cambridge England, Amsterdam, Montpellier France, and Boulder Colorado, I was drawn irresistibly to creative molecular biology and chemistry work being done independently by Peter Dervan and Barbara Wold at…Caltech.
In a sense, my professional dream came true when I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship there in 1988. It changed my life. The mystique was still present. Richard Feynman died just after Laura and I chose our apartment in Pasadena. His name was still spoken quietly and with reverence when I began my work in those hallowed halls that summer.
Now, 28 years later, I'm 55 and a professional molecular biologist. I will never attain the impact of Bill Dove, but I keep trying. At a retirement celebration for him a year ago we spoke about legacies and threads that link people and careers. As Bill planned the contraction of his office in retirement, he kindly asked me if there were any particular items that held special meaning for me. It was a profoundly generous question. I thought for just a moment and then replied.
A year later, Bill's office transformation in Madison is complete. How do I know? It is because of what I received in a heavy, lovingly packed cardboard box today.
There are only a few possessions in my life that I would truly describe as "cherished." That list just got a little longer.
9.1.2016
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