Reflections on careers--my husband's and my own

I remember the first time I traveled abroad; it was in August 1987. I attended a flow cytometry conference in Cambridge, England, and had planned my trip such that I had a few days to myself in London before I made my way north to Cambridge by train. I've written about this trip before, so I won't retell the story. Suffice it to say that I met some really wonderful people who made me feel right at home in England, and I'll never forget them. 

The Society for Analytical Cytology (SAC)--that was the organization responsible for the conference. It is now known as the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC), even though it was always an international conference from day one. When I started working in the Investigative Cytology lab at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1982, I had the privilege of working with some of the founding fathers of flow cytometry/flow cytometric techniques--Myron Melamed, Zbigniew Darzynkiewicz, Frank Traganos, and Don Evenson. I knew already then that I was in the presence of scientific visionaries; men who were ambitious and generous with their expertise and time. Their lab was a dynamic place; inspiring and progressive. There was room to grow, and I did, under their tutelage. Their generosity extended to allowing all lab members to travel to relevant conferences, and that's how I ended up in Cambridge, England. 

After I arrived in Cambridge and settled in (a simple dorm room with a bed, desk, closet and chair), I found my way to the conference hall for the introductory lecture and presentation of the conference schedule. I sat alone in the auditorium, but after some time a woman entered and went to the podium area to check on the microphones. I have never forgotten her because she had dark hair with a large gray streak; her name was Donna Arndt-Jovin. From what I heard at a later time point, she was an American who had married a German scientist, Tom Jovin, and they lived in Germany. When I heard more about her life, I thought it was so interesting that she had married a fellow scientist and that they shared a passion for flow cytometry. This was before I met my husband, so I had no idea of what was to transpire in the coming years. The only thing I knew was that I liked the fact that they were professional equals. It appealed to me, to be able to share your work life with your spouse. 

My husband retired yesterday, and his department (Radiation Biology) gave him a very nice sendoff--an afternoon gathering with cakes, coffee, and speeches about his 44-year long career and what he has meant to his department. He is one of a rare breed of employees that remained at the same workplace for his entire career, of course in different positions. He started as a Master student, got his PhD in biophysics, did a postdoc, and then was hired as a full-time cancer researcher. He eventually became a research group leader but also leader of the flow cytometry core facility. I met him in 1987 in Cambridge, when he came over to and sat down at our table in one of the pubs my lab colleagues and I frequented. I believe it was the pub where Watson and Crick (of DNA helix structure fame) met and discussed their findings. He and I hit it off, and the rest as they say is history. 

I reflected on all of this yesterday when I listened to the talks and saw the slides that rotated continually throughout the afternoon. Some of them were of him and me, together at conferences. We looked so young in some of them; so strange to think that we are now at retirement age. We attended nearly every flow cytometry conference that SAC and ISAC arranged, which meant that we got to travel to some interesting places, among them: Hilton Head Island, SC; Cambridge, England; Breckenridge, CO; Asheville, NC; Bergen, Norway; Colorado Springs, CO; Lake Placid, NY; Montpellier, France (twice); Budapest, Hungary; Leipzig, Germany. The Norwegian Cancer Society was always generous enough to pay for these conferences; the professional and social (networking) gains were worth the money. Even though I moved to Norway after I met my husband, I kept in touch with my former colleagues via these meetings, and of course via Christmas cards and eventually emails. It always felt like a small world--this network of cytometrists. We all knew each other, and it was always enjoyable to meet again at conferences. 

I retired in August 2021, and now my husband is retired. We were both cancer researchers (my PhD is in tumor cell biology) and flow cytometrists. I realized yesterday that my first thought at my first conference in Cambridge--that it would be nice to have a spouse who shared my work interests--in fact became a reality. I hadn't really reflected fully on that until yesterday when I saw the photos of us together. During the past thirty years, we've collaborated on a number of research projects, and I must say that those times were fun times; not only enjoyable in terms of both our research teams working together and getting to know each other, but also the professional enjoyment connected to a job well-done (published papers and presentations at meetings). I'm thankful for the past thirty years, that we made that happen. We chose that path, despite the occasional difficulties and differences of opinion. It was worth it. 

When I retired, I was happy to leave my workplace behind. I had been ready to do so for several years prior. I too was given a nice sendoff by my department, and I left knowing that I had done the best job I could do under the circumstances (very little research support and reduced staff). However, I do feel that he was valued in a more concrete way by his department than I was by mine; he had firmer support from research leadership than I did. I stay in touch with former colleagues; we meet for dinner a few times a year, and in the summertime, I invite them to a garden party. I hope for my husband that he stays in touch with some of his colleagues, who became friends over the years. They will miss him, that I know, because he, like my former bosses at Memorial, was very knowledgeable and generous with his expertise and time. 

School days and a lifetime of learning

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.