The autumn
season is always a nice reminder of my school and college years. I can honestly
say that I looked forward to going back to school each year, even though I
always enjoyed having the summers off. Autumn is the start of a new school season,
with all the hype, expectations and focus that a new start entails. That
feeling of starting a new school year has never left me, even though I am far
removed from my school days; I always have a bit of it when I go back to work
after a long summer vacation. But now that I do consulting work for the
university, I feel that sense of ‘new school year’ excitement when I walk past groups
of students gathered nervously together on campus—that sense of anticipation about
new courses, new books, new teachers, new social experiences, and a lot of
studying. I’m glad I’m finished with all that, but it’s interesting to be back
on campus as an adult doing an adult job. I enjoy seeing the students and
remembering back to my own college days at Fordham University. Those years were
something special, and I knew that already at college age. I knew that such an
opportunity to be able to focus and to study uninterruptedly for four years
would never come again. And it’s true, it never did. But those four years were
a wonderful immersion in biology, literature, Spanish, organic chemistry and
history, on a lovely campus in the middle of the Bronx.
I went to
work full-time right after college, halfway through my master’s degree in cell
biology that I ended up finishing at night. I was offered the chance to do a
PhD by professor Loren Day, my biophysicist boss at my first job, but I turned
down the offer so that I could work for some years while I figured out in what field
I wanted to do doctoral work. I knew it would not be biophysics (my first
working lab experience—isolating and purifying bacteriophage DNA in order to
study its helical structure). Although the technology we used at that time was
fascinating, I was more fascinated by the use of computers in the lab—the early
computers that let us feed DNA sequences into crude programs in order to get
back protein sequences, for example. The computers that were programmed to tell
us “Cool your jets, I’m adding up the sites” while we waited for the output.
They were being funny with us, of course programmed to be so by the offbeat
programmers who had offbeat senses of humor. I became friends with Roy, our
resident computer programmer, who showed me how computer circuit boards were designed,
and who was patient enough to explain the chemistry involved in their
manufacture. He taught me the rudiments of the programming language UNIX, and
got me interested in the first small personal computers. My interest in
computers led to my taking a course in FORTRAN and in machine language at New
York University, courses that I have never regretted taking. I hit the wall countless
times, but I managed to pass both courses and I learned some really cool things
in the process, like how to move 0’s and 1’s around in the data and address registers
that make up the CPU. This binary language is the language needed to talk to
the guts of the computer; the executable programs that are written in higher
level languages like FORTRAN in the early days and in C++ nowadays are
translated to executable machine (binary) code by a compiler and linker. So I waded
carefully into the programming waters, but I was not clever enough to continue
in this field even though it interested me tremendously. I don’t regret this
decision, because biology was and still is the field of study that interests me
the most, with literature a close second. The exposure to computers and to
complex instrumentation in my first job laid the groundwork for my next job,
which was to be the daily leader of a flow cytometry core facility at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center. Laser flow cytometers/sorters were used to analyze different
cellular parameters and to physically sort different cell types from each
other; most of them were coupled to computers that were programmed to run these
instruments and to perform the complex analyses involved. When I look back to
that time, the 1980s, I remember it as a phenomenal time in terms of learning.
The use of flow cytometry in biological and cancer research was just taking
off, and it was fun to be a part of it, attending courses in Boston (sponsored
by Ortho Diagnostic Systems) to learn how to run these complicated instruments,
as well as a course in Los Alamos, New Mexico at the government lab there to learn
how high-speed flow sorters were being used to sort chromosomes and to make
chromosome libraries, among other important things. We learned how to do some
pretty novel stuff at that course, and got a chance to see a lot of New Mexico
in the process. I joined the Society for Analytical Cytology (SAC) that later became
the International Society for Analytical Cytometry (ISAC); I have attended countless
conferences in different countries since 1985, but the conference that stands
out is the one at Cambridge University in England in August 1987. It was here that I met Trond, the Norwegian man who became my husband. It was also my
first trip to Europe alone; my lodging was a student dormitory room not far
from the building where the conference was held. All conference attendees lived
in this way for the week we were there. I loved the feeling of living in the
dorm; it was a monastic room, simple, small, with very little furniture save
the bed and a desk. But it gave me a real feeling of what it must have been
like to study at Cambridge, and the city itself was attractive with its many
bookstores and music stores. All I know is that one day I hope to really study
there—to take a literature course of some sort during the summer months. It’s
on my bucket list.
Maybe it’s
not so strange that I ended up in academia. I don’t teach, even though I have
achieved the level of professor competence. I prefer to mentor students on a one-to-one
basis or in small groups, and I still like being in the lab from time to time.
I don’t like bureaucracy, power politics, or the ‘publish or perish’ mentality
of academia. What I do like is the ability and privilege that we have to
immerse ourselves in lifelong learning if we want to, and I try to take
advantage of this as much as possible. Because life is short, but also because
society is changing at a rapid rate, and has changed immensely within the last
thirty years. Being able to keep up with the rapid change is important, and the
only way we can do that is to remain open to learning for the rest of our lives.
