Work, part III

I’m between cases right now. I’ll update this throughout the day, time permitting. (Updated x 3, pic added.)

***

I’m asking myself whether grad school was work or not. For all I produced in the lab, I might as well have been making widgets. But even that’s a bad analogy, because whatever widgets are, someone must need them or else widget factories wouldn’t make them, right? Or do widgets exist solely to provide examples for intro economics textbooks?

Hundreds of hours in the lab for nothing. For “results” that didn’t advance the forefront of science a single micron. What a waste! But at least I earned tuition credits, made a few good friends, and could pretend, at least for a little while, that I was a scientist.

In my first few weeks in Larry Kedes’s lab, I learned that one of the research fellows (he was too long in the tooth to be a post-doc) showed the same DNA sequencing gel at every group meeting. He was a running joke, a guy who spent all of his time drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. The post-docs wondered why Larry kept him around, this fellow who was the last of the sea urchin group; maybe it was sentimentality. After all, Larry had made his name by being the first researcher to clone a protein-coding gene — one of the sea urchin histone genes.

Larry & Me, 1995. Note Larry’s alpha male body language.

I hooked up with one of Larry’s more senior post-docs, Karen O’Malley, who (if I remember correctly) worked on the human gene for dopamine beta hydroxylase. At the time, I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist. Working on a gene involved in neurotransmitter metabolism struck me as way cool. What was our mantra back then — “Where the bedside meets the bench”? In the 80s, molecular biology was in its toddlerhood, and we all had grand dreams for what we would be able to accomplish.

Karen finished up within the year and took her project with her. I was adrift. Larry’s m.o. as thesis advisor was strictly hands-off; I could work with whomever on whatever. I picked Dan Wells, the last of Larry’s histone scientists, mostly because I liked Dan and thought he was a good teacher. Did I have any interest in histones? Nah. Did I think that would matter? Nah. Was I right about that? Nah.

So while the rest of the lab went off into the competitive world of muscle genes, Dan and I toiled away at one of the human histone genes. The less said about that the better.

Meanwhile, I was being torn in different directions, both at home and in med school. Karen (my Karen) was about as sick as she ever, dealing with her own grad school b.s. too, and I had no idea how to cope with any of it. In the early days of chronic illness, the healthy spouse has only one reaction: This is sooo horrible and tough for me. What am I going to do. I was worse than useless to her.

Med school required me to take classes, and at some point they expected me to put in my clinical time, too. My thesis advisor begrudged every hour I spent away from the lab. Considering how unproductive I was, I wonder why he wasted the mental energy on me.

Gotta go operate now. I’ll update this later.

***
It’s later. I still have one case to go, but we’ll see what I can accomplish in the next few weeks.

I never became terribly close to any of my labmates, but I still miss a lot of ’em:

Tony Troutt (one T at the end? I can’t remember. Sorry, Tony), who treated his wife like a queen, and couldn’t stand the sight of a critically ill child;

Harry Erba, med student and grad student extraordinaire; while Harry was in the lab, I always felt a certain undertone of “why can’t you be more like Harry” — but I suspect that was coming from ME;

Peter Gunning, a true master of the field, a gentleman, and a kick in the pants. No matter how down any of us were about our work, we could spend ten minutes with Peter and imagine, if only for a time, that our project had Nobel potential;

George Muscat, who introduced Karen and me to teramosalata and basturma;

Gary Lyons, who understood better than anyone else what Karen was going through;

Vittorio Sartorelli, another kick in the pants — Vittorio, I’m sorry I lost touch with you and Jennifer;

Howard Prentice, who (along with his lovely wife Linda) was one of our best friends throughout grad school;

and Bob Wade, who would leave this planet way too early, but not after falling in love, marrying, and raising a family. I still dream about Bob, and although we weren’t close, I miss him.

***

Here’s one of my favorite stories from the lab. I hope I haven’t told this one before.

My thesis advisor had just been recruited to USC, lured by the promise of his very own center — the Institute for Genetic Medicine. (Just googled Larry’s name to get that link, and . . . damn, that man never ages. Of course, it could be a twenty-year-old photo.) As those of you with a science background know, a lab lives and dies on its post-docs, and Larry’s post-docs didn’t want to move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles.

He cornered me one Saturday and asked, “How do you suggest I make the position more attractive to them?”

“Promise them more money.”

I’m not sure what he wanted to hear, but that wasn’t it. “You’re a socialist. You know that, don’t you?” And that was that. He never again asked for my opinion.

***

I could write for hours about the lab, but I know I would never be able to answer the question which bothers me to this day. Why was I such a flop in research? Did I choose the wrong project, the wrong mentor, the wrong thesis advisor? Was I unlucky? Lazy? (Well, yeah, that’s a given, but if I had worked harder, wouldn’t I have produced more crap?)

My heart wasn’t in it. Perhaps that explains everything.

I wrote up my thesis on precious little data; I defended it, passed, got the extra three letters after my MD. I was left feeling that I wasn’t really a PhD, wouldn’t really be one unless I did a few years of post-doctoral work. But I had a family to think about, and the idea of several more years at little better than a grad student’s income had no luster. By the time I received my degree, I was getting old (28!) — I had to get on with my life.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

So what if I’m not a scientist. I’ll leave that for other people with better heads. I’m a pretty good ENT, I think, and when it comes right down to it, I would rather be a good doc than a crappy scientist.

D.