Oak Ridge National Labs Biomedical graduate school with Jane Setlow, Dick Kimball and Alexander Hollaender
My graduate career began at Oak Ridge National Labs, while Alexander Hollaender was the director of the Biology Division, building it into a scientific powerhouse of ideal conditions for scientists. The only goals and obligations were to produce as much good science as possible. Different groups were forging different paths without common mind-sets. He encouraged people, and was the one-minute manager walking around hearing about everyone’s research and then saying, “this is good, but what else do you have; I know you’ve got more” . To encourage expeditious habits he said, “if everybody came early, everybody would be able to find a parking place”. Dr. Hollaender obtained all the funding for the lab. Noone ever wrote for grants or stood before site visit committees. It was free-style research, most definitelynot hypothesis-driven research . It’s only because functioning as a scientist soon became so difficult and so straitjacketed into hypothesis-driven research (as long as the hypothesis met the common mind-set), that I realize what a great place it was. I once gave Alex a ride home from the airport, after we both arrived on the same plane from Washington, and he invited me in to his house, a very modest house, to see “the collection”. All manner of modern art work was on the walls, but also lined up on the floor. My favorites were the Hundertwasser’s hung in his office, though; they must have been his favorites too. His wife Henrietta used to travel with him and haunt art galleries around the world. The Toulouse-Lautrec hung in the bathroom. I surmised that their most valuable work was located where a thief wouldn’t think to look. Hollaender moved to Washington after Oak Ridge, to please his wife, so it was said, and so did I (to start a post-doc at NCI-Frederick in Maryland). When Hollaender died, I attended his funeral service in a small chapel in Washington National Cathedral. Their art collection was donated, and some can be seen on a search at the University of Wisconsin, where he obtained his PhD. I didn’t see any Hundertwasser’s though.
My next mentors were Dick and Jane Setlow, Jane being my thesis advisor (along with Dick Kimball) and Dick being a lecturer in the graduate school. Dick, a discoverer of DNA repair who should have won the Nobel prize but died before it was awarded to others, said “don’t worry about the third decimal point, beware of the big boo-boo;” worry that you have made a big mistake, like doing the wrong experiment. One of his lectures was entitled “A random walk in science”. I don’t remember what he talked about, but I do remember not understanding it. However, the idea of “random” as an aspect of science has stayed with me.
In Jane’s lab we had conversations via 20 numbers, such as #2.“Get your crap out of here.” #9, “to break thermometer, tilt back lid (on the water bath)”. Thus, you could just holler, #2. This taught me a lot about humor, organization and getting along in the lab.
One of the first things I did in the Jane Setlow lab was to demonstrate that something they had published was wrong (the big boo-boo, yes). My thesis project was thus derailed. I started out studying transforming DNA with MNNG in hemophilus influenzae – treat isolated DNA, transform mutagenized DNA into recipient bacteria, measure mutations. The treated DNA was diluted 100-fold into the bacteria prepared for transformation and mutations were seen in the recipients. However, the residual MNNG was sufficient to generate the mutations seen, and if the treated transforming data was dialyzed, the mutations were not seen. Thus, the whole premise was incorrect and the in vitro treatment of transforming DNA did not lead to mutations in transformed recipients.
This might have been the first time, but definitely was not the last time that I was “trouble” in the lab (overheard quote from an FDA office director).