A Fork Taken
It was 1961. I was about to graduate from Brooklyn College. After four years of sloth, I had firmly fashioned an undistinguished record. My grades bordered on the wrong side of terrible. I had majored in Biology, but that didn’t prevent me from earning mostly C’s and D’s in my Biology courses. In particular, I had gotten a D in both Genetics and Biochemistry, and those grades were gifts from kind instructors. Brooklyn College was a fine institution with first rate teachers. Neither the college nor the professors were at fault. It was all on me.
I blamed my lack of success in school on the pursuit of girls, but I did as poorly in that arena as I did in my courses. Or worse. What I was good at was watching baseball on television and day dreaming. My friends used to say that I walked around in a fog. In school, I didn’t take notes, missed classes, seldom handed in assignments, and didn’t study. I had little ambition and less energy. Within months of graduation, my prospects for a job, for a career, for a future, seemed dim.
I blamed my lack of success in school on the pursuit of girls, but I did as poorly in that arena as I did in my courses. Or worse. What I was good at was watching baseball on television and day dreaming. My friends used to say that I walked around in a fog. In school, I didn’t take notes, missed classes, seldom handed in assignments, and didn’t study. I had little ambition and less energy. Within months of graduation, my prospects for a job, for a career, for a future, seemed dim.
My mother was plainly perturbed. “What do you plan on doing after you graduate?” she inquired.
I hadn’t thought much about it. “Maybe I’ll go to California and find myself,” I answered.
That wasn’t an acceptable answer. In fact, she wasn’t going to stand for it at all. She suggested an alternative. “How about graduate school. You could study Biology? You like Biology don’t you?”
“There’s no chance I could get into graduate school,” I responded weakly. “My grades aren’t good enough”.
“How do you know if you don’t try?” She wasn’t to be put off. “You did very well in the graduate record exam didn’t you?”
I did. In a brief fit of uncharacteristic energy, I had taken the GRE. I was always good at exams where all you had to to was to fill in one of five little circles with a number two pencil. It didn’t require much effort or thought, and I was good at guessing. I had done well indeed, ranking in the top 5% of those who had taken the exam in English and Math, and in the top 1% in Biology. According to the exam, some things had apparently penetrated into my cortex over the years, although it was not reflected in my grades.
To avoid further nagging, I trundled over to the local library and found five graduate school programs in Biology, all with less than stellar reputations, all in warm locations, and wrote away for applications.
“Here,” I said at few weeks later, showing her the application materials that had arrived in the mail. “I told you it was hopeless. They all require a B average or better. It’s useless to apply.”
My mother was undeterred by the school’s alleged requirements or by my lack of enthusiasm. She filled in the applications and sent them off. The applicant pools must have been very slim that year. Of the five schools that she had applied to, I got three acceptances. One of them, the University of Miami in Coral Gables Florida, to my utter and complete astonishment, offered a full scholarship. However, there was a catch. The acceptance and the fellowship were contingent on my grades in my final semester, which I hadn’t yet completed. In fact, my grades turned out to be as bad as they had been throughout the preceding three and a half years. The fellowship was retracted, but Miami did accept me provisionally, dependent on how well I did in a series of courses that they would specify after I arrived.
In late August, I took the first plane ride of my life. Awaiting me at the Miami airport was my friend Steve whom I had known since the second grade. He too had been accepted into the graduate program to which I had applied, and, like me, was preparing to begin his first semester as a graduate student. Steve, who was a far better student than me, could have gotten into a much better school. But he had another reason for attending U of M – he was engaged to Barbara, who lived in Miami with her widowed father, Henry.
Barbara and Henry had arranged for Steve and me to room together in an apartment off of Flagler Street in the north central section of Miami. It wasn’t luxurious but it was cheap and a short bus ride from Coral Gables. We soon worked out the living arrangements. I was to cook three days a week for the four of us. Steve would clean up. Barbara was responsible for preparing meals for the remainder of the week. On Friday nights, we would eat over at Barbara’s aunt’s house, a beautiful place on a small lake in Coral Gables. Barbara’s aunt was very kind and made me feel part of the family.
Of course, I didn’t know how to cook, but it seemed a more attractive job than doing the dishes. As you might imagine, there were several culinary disasters awaiting. One night, while broiling lamb chops in the oven, the fat caught on fire and we were lucky that the whole place didn’t burn down. On another occasion, I cooked a beef kidney, purchased because it seemed inexpensive and exotic. I neglected to soak it in water, and it came out inedible, reeking of urine. But, while there were more failures than successes, Henry, Barbara, and Steve were quite tolerant of my efforts. And I did, after a fashion, learn to cook.
I was more successful academically. I’m not certain why it happened, but when I stepped off the plane in Miami I was immediately struck by the light, the clarity of the air, the sparkle of the surroundings. Everything seemed to glisten, to smell clean and fresh. The world had gone from black and white to technicolor. The fog that had followed me throughout my college life seemed to lift. I found that I was retaining what I read, and understanding it. I suddenly became an “A” student, first in all of my classes.
One factor that might have helped me do well was the absence of a television set. Steve and I would spend our late nights instead listening to the radio. Larry King, another Brooklynite, was just starting out. He hosted a show from Miami Beach in which he would interview celebrities from the nearby hotels. Often, when times were slow and famous people were hard to come by, he would lasso an anonymous passerby. He was a genius at eliciting interesting anecdotes from strangers. Steve and I always felt that these were his best shows.
An even more life changing event occurred sometime in the midst of my second semester. Up till then, graduate school had consisted of undergraduate courses that the graduate school required in Biology and Chemistry that I hadn’t taken at Brooklyn College. The material that I was learning had to be read and committed to memory. Numerous technical words had to be learned, and processes understood, and all spit back to my instructors at exam time. I was doing well at these tasks, but if I were to go on, I was told that I had to choose a laboratory in which to do research. But what research consisted of, how it was done, and who did it, was foreign to me. If pressed, I would have said that the enterprise was carried out by a solitary older man dressed in a white lab coat, gaining inspiration by holding a test tube up to a window. How wrong I was.
Dr. Iverson’s laboratory was located in an ordinary looking house on Anastasia Avenue in Coral Gables. Four professors shared the space, two on each of the two floors. Iverson was a young man, just a few years out of graduate school in California and a postdoctoral stint in Sweden. He was working with amoeba, tiny one celled creatures that he would manipulate under a microscope. Using a very complex apparatus, a micromanipulator, he would push the nucleus from one amoeba into another, for what purpose, I had no idea.
Barbara had him as an instructor in one of her classes, and told me that he was both smart and kind. That was enough for me. I approached him and asked whether I could join his laboratory. He agreed. I was given a desk next to Iverson’s other student, Darrel, a tall, thin, married man with kids, who spoke with a southern accent, and was a year ahead of me. In a short time, I found that my lack of good hand/eye coordination made me incapable of pushing nuclei anywhere, let alone from one creature into another, and didn’t see the point of doing so anyway. Darrel was working on another project and he soon took me under his wing.
Research upset my view of education and science. To my surprise, Biology as practiced in the laboratory was quite different from what I had been exposed to in school. In classes we learned what was known. But the scientists that I worked with weren’t particularly interested in memorizing what had already been found out. They wanted to discover what wasn’t. The only reason that they seemed to know so much (and indeed they did) was because they didn’t want to repeat something someone else had done. I found myself a member of a tight knit research group, part of the larger scientific community, who were asking questions, solving puzzles, and devising new techniques. I didn’t know such people existed. I was immediately sold. It was exhilarating and fun, intellectually exciting, a task worthy of carrying on for a lifetime. When I entered the University of Miami, my ambitions, such as they were, had been to obtain a Masters degree and teach Biology in a small college in a quaint New England town with white church steeples and leaves that turned red in the fall. I had pictured myself in a tweed sports coat with patches at the elbow, with a pipe in my mouth, passing on profundities to young undergraduates who would sit at my feet, enthralled at the depths of my intellect. Suddenly, everything had changed. New possibilities arose. There was a chance that I could become a research scientist, make exciting discoveries, and contribute to the scientific enterprise.
Research was stimulating but demanding. As advertised, Iverson was smart and supportive, but his philosophy of teaching his students was to let them work out problems for themselves. That didn’t work terribly well for me since this whole research thing was a new experience. Darell had some suggestions, but mostly I floundered, not making much progress. However, in my fifth year I hit upon an experiment that was relatively simple to carry out, was repeatable, and yielded interesting results. In a short time, Iverson and I wrote it up, and, in a fit of hubris, submitted it to the most influential journal in America, “Science” magazine.
Dr. Iverson’s laboratory was located in an ordinary looking house on Anastasia Avenue in Coral Gables. Four professors shared the space, two on each of the two floors. Iverson was a young man, just a few years out of graduate school in California and a postdoctoral stint in Sweden. He was working with amoeba, tiny one celled creatures that he would manipulate under a microscope. Using a very complex apparatus, a micromanipulator, he would push the nucleus from one amoeba into another, for what purpose, I had no idea.
Barbara had him as an instructor in one of her classes, and told me that he was both smart and kind. That was enough for me. I approached him and asked whether I could join his laboratory. He agreed. I was given a desk next to Iverson’s other student, Darrel, a tall, thin, married man with kids, who spoke with a southern accent, and was a year ahead of me. In a short time, I found that my lack of good hand/eye coordination made me incapable of pushing nuclei anywhere, let alone from one creature into another, and didn’t see the point of doing so anyway. Darrel was working on another project and he soon took me under his wing.
Research upset my view of education and science. To my surprise, Biology as practiced in the laboratory was quite different from what I had been exposed to in school. In classes we learned what was known. But the scientists that I worked with weren’t particularly interested in memorizing what had already been found out. They wanted to discover what wasn’t. The only reason that they seemed to know so much (and indeed they did) was because they didn’t want to repeat something someone else had done. I found myself a member of a tight knit research group, part of the larger scientific community, who were asking questions, solving puzzles, and devising new techniques. I didn’t know such people existed. I was immediately sold. It was exhilarating and fun, intellectually exciting, a task worthy of carrying on for a lifetime. When I entered the University of Miami, my ambitions, such as they were, had been to obtain a Masters degree and teach Biology in a small college in a quaint New England town with white church steeples and leaves that turned red in the fall. I had pictured myself in a tweed sports coat with patches at the elbow, with a pipe in my mouth, passing on profundities to young undergraduates who would sit at my feet, enthralled at the depths of my intellect. Suddenly, everything had changed. New possibilities arose. There was a chance that I could become a research scientist, make exciting discoveries, and contribute to the scientific enterprise.
Research was stimulating but demanding. As advertised, Iverson was smart and supportive, but his philosophy of teaching his students was to let them work out problems for themselves. That didn’t work terribly well for me since this whole research thing was a new experience. Darell had some suggestions, but mostly I floundered, not making much progress. However, in my fifth year I hit upon an experiment that was relatively simple to carry out, was repeatable, and yielded interesting results. In a short time, Iverson and I wrote it up, and, in a fit of hubris, submitted it to the most influential journal in America, “Science” magazine.
“Science” along with its British counterpart,”Nature”, are very selective journals of high repute, that accept very few of the manuscripts submitted to them for publication. Among the scores of scientists at the University of Miami, both at the Medical School and the Coral Gables campus, only a few had ever, in the entire career, had an article published there. Despite these odds, our paper got accepted. Iverson was amazed. I didn’t know enough to be surprised.But there was a catch. In the same issue, several pages away, was another article dealing with the same subject. Written by a prominent scientist, many decades my senior, it described the same experiment that I done and come to the opposite conclusion. It appeared that my first publication had created a controversy. Adding to the imbroglio was a letter to the editor of Science. Its author averred that he had done the same experiment on which the two conflicting papers had reported and gotten both results. Sometime it came out one way; other times the opposite.
A few months later Iverson informed me that the issue was resolved. He had attended a scientific meeting in California and had spoken to the author of the other Science article who admitted that he had erred. We were right. Iverson thanked me. I was relieved.
It was a critical event. It meant that I would have an easy time getting my Ph.D degree since my research had essentially been vetted by the reviewers at Science. Moreover, I would now have a good shot at getting a position as a postdoctoral fellow at a top rated university, the next step in a research career. In a relative flash I had gone from a flailing C minus student to a biologist with a doctoral degree and real prospects. It was a stunning turn around. The moral of the story: Listen to your mother. And let her fill out your applications.