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).