Joys and Surprises of a Career Studying Eukaryotic Gene Expression

Abstract

In this Reflections, I review a few early and very lucky events that gave me a running start for the rest of a long and wonderfully enjoyable career. For the main part, a discussion is provided of what I recall as the main illuminating results that my many dozens of students and postdoctoral fellows (approximately 140 in all) provided to our biochemical/molecular biological world.A n invitation to write "Reflections" for the Journal of Biological Chemistry makes one thing certain: I have been around in the "science biz" for quite some time, in fact since the 1950s. If ruminations of senior citizens are to be of any use, the recollections must be interesting enough to the knowledgeable middle-agers (say up to 60, or is it now 70?) and then to provide an illuminating story or two about getting started and then changing focus (maybe more than once), especially to the postdoctoral fellows who are ready to take the plunge. Graduate students these days have to swim in a sea virtually turgid with the daily avalanche of new information and may be momentarily too overwhelmed to listen to the aging, but perhaps they also may need to, or at least wish to, listen to the reflections of the older set. I firmly believe how we learned what we know can provide useful guidance for how and what a newcomer will learn. Getting StartedTales of success or failure in life often include reference to the fact that an individual is "not responsible for choosing her/his parents." The inference being that luck, good or bad, is determinative. There is a parallel here with curious, aspiring young scientists and their mentors: their "scientific parents." My luck in this regard was truly extraordinary.Medical school in 1951 was my ticket out of the racist South, Columbus, Mississippi, to be exact, where I grew up. I narrowly avoided (courtesy of a last minute $900 loan from a bank president's widow) accepting a $5000 four-year state-sponsored scholarship, the price of which was the obligation of five years of general practice in rural Mississippi. Instead, I landed at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where my mother's oldest sister lived and which at the time had two major league baseball teams, a great attraction. The medical school was one of the earliest of what were coming to be called "science-based" medical schools, second only to Johns Hopkins in having a "full-time" (salaried) academic faculty, both preclinical and clinical.In our second year, the redoubtable Arthur Kornberg had been appointed but had not yet arrived to assume the chairmanship of the Department of Microbiology. We were therefore farmed out for our laboratory course to any willing faculty member who had some familiarity with microbiology. Robert J. Glaser, an assistant professor of medicine who studied streptococcal disease, took me in. I learned bacteriological techniques and how to infect mice and not myself