Читать книгу How to Construct Your Intellectual Pedigree - Elof Axel Carlson - Страница 17

I have supervised the research of six PhD students and one master’s student. I have also mentored dozens of undergraduates; some have gone on for PhD or MD-PhD programs. The six PhD students were all at UCLA.

1.John Southin (1937–2015) was born and died in Brockport, Ontario, in Canada. I met him as a student in my genetics class at Queen’s University. John became my first graduate student and came with Nedra and me when we moved to Los Angeles. At UCLA John studied the mosaic distributions of induced dumpy mutations. He was a loyalist to the Queen and an admirer of left-wing rebels (Tito and Castro). He helped Americans who came to Canada to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. He taught in Havana during the summers until he was told not to come back because he was gay. He taught the rest of his career at McGill University. He opened an androgynous bookstore in Montreal. He retired to Brockville where he died of a neuromuscular degenerative disease. John was an outstanding teacher at McGill.

2.Ronald Sederoff (b. 1939) was born in Montreal, Canada. He worked in my laboratory as an undergraduate and started a Medical School at Stanford but decided he preferred research. He did his dissertation on a comparison of mutagenesis in bacteriophage (with Robert Edgar at Caltech) and with fruit flies at UCLA. He went to Geneva to do a postdoctoral stay with Charles Epstein . He settled in the University of North Carolina in Raleigh and worked on forestry genetics devising a technique to introduce DNA into woody tissue and culturing trees from the altered cells. This was both new and important and it led to Ron’s election to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2018 Sederoff received the Wallenberg Prize for plant sciences in Stockholm from the King of Sweden. He was still active in 2017 as an emeritus professor.

3.Harry Corwin (1938–2017) was an able student in my genetics class at UCLA and I asked him to explore working in my laboratory. He studied chemical mutagens in Drosophila. He enjoyed his academic life at the University of Pittsburg where he became the Dean of the Honors Program. He asked me to teach in the Semester at Sea program (Spring 1992) for which he served as an academic dean. He retired to Colorado and died in the state of Washington of complications from diabetes.

4.Robert J. Hendrickson studied the cytology of the dumpy locus and induced rearrangements with X-rays that altered that gene’s expression. He did a postdoctoral at Yale where he became an alcoholic. He had served in WWII and was about ten years older than me. He lost two jobs and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in Denver. He earned a living as a photographer. I used to meet him in Colorado Springs when I was active with the Lilly Endowment workshops in the Liberal Arts. He disappeared a few years after recovering from a heart attack.

5.Dale Grace (1939–1990) was a gymnast as an undergraduate. He studied the structure of the dumpy gene and added additional sites to its map. He went to Holland for a postdoctoral study but switched to medical school there. He dropped out after a severe case of mononucleosis. He went to Oregon and studied mosquito genetics. I last saw him at a genetics congress meeting in Toronto in 1988. He died shortly after that.

6.John Jenkins (b. 1941) was born in Springfield Massachusetts. He did his undergraduate work at Utah State and joined my laboratory and used ethyl methane sulfonate as a mutagen to compare chemical and spontaneous dumpy mutations. He took a position at Swarthmore College and is still active there as an emeritus professor. He has written two textbooks in genetics and human genetics.

7.Shari Cohn (b. 1957) was born in Plainview, New York and she was an undergraduate at Stony Brook University who worked in my laboratory for undergraduates. She did a project on color blind expression in carrier females studying one eye at a time and using Ishihara charts with diminished lighting and other means of comparing homozygous XX or hemizygous (XY) normal color vision individuals from mutant bearing carriers. She found variations in color perception in such heterozygous females exist, confirming Mary Lyon’s hypothesis of X-inactivation for this trait. She extended this to a Master’s degree with me and David Emmerich, a psychologist at Stony Brook University, using more sophisticated machinery, a tachistoscope, to measure the time involved in recognizing colored dots or numbers. Shari went to Edinburgh, Scotland to do her PhD on second sight exploring its folklore, history, and prevalence in families and communities. She learned Gaelic to converse with Scottish people having a tradition of second sight experiences. She still resides in Edinburgh with her family.

Among my undergraduate students at Stony Brook University who have entered academic careers are:

1.Alfred Handler a PhD with John Postlethwait studying fruit fly oogenesis. He took up a postdoctoral course at Caltech and works in Florida doing Dipteran research for the US Department of Agriculture in Gainesville, Florida.

2.David B. Weiner got his PhD in Cincinnati and did research on vaccines at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now Vice-President for Research at the Wistar Institute. He is noted as a “father of DNA vaccines.”

3.Philip F. Giampietro received his MD at Stony Brook University and his PhD with Robert Desnick at Mount Sinai Medical School in NYC. He specialized in human genetic disorders and taught in Wisconsin before moving to the Philadelphia region, where he is a professor of pediatrics at Drexel University.

4.Daniel Ciccarone (b. 1960) was born in New York City. He received his MD at Stony Brook University and he is now a Professor of Community and Family Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School, where he got a MPH. He has published on the prevention of HIV transmission and opioid addiction. He has testified before Congressional Committees that addictions are stigmatizing diseases and need community responses that address their social problems and not just their psychological problems. He views were shaped in his youth. When he was attending medical school and his parent went bankrupt, he slept in a tent in the woods by the Biology Buildingw and took his showers in the basement of that building.

5.Owen Debowy received his PhD and MD at New York University with a dissertation on the neurological control of vision perception. He is Medical Director at Sturdy Medical Hospital in Plainville, Massachusetts, with specialization in internal medicine and pediatrics.

6.Thomas Houze got his PhD in Gothenburg, Sweden, and worked in molecular medicine and holds a patent. He went to Great Britain and cofounded a startup company using stem cell research. He worked for the NIH and is now with the FDA in Silver Spring, Maryland.

7.Bruce Luke Wang (b. 1965) got his PhD at the University of Illinois in Chicago where he worked on molecular pharmacology projects.

8.Gary Joel Vorsanger got his PhD and MD at Mount Sinai Medical School and has worked in drug development in the pharmaceutical industry. He is founder and President of Crossroads Scientific Medical Company, Morrisville, Pennsylvania. He specialized in internal medicine and Anesthesiology.

9.Peter W. Thompson, MD attended medical school and has focused on the hospital centered patient care model of treatment. It is heavily committed to maintaining a relation with patients throughout their illnesses. This physician-owned program is in some 20 states. It is called Apogeephysicians and mentoring is a major part of how participating physicians are trained. Thompson is Chief of Clinical Operations and mentors’ young physicians in the program.

10.Suzanne M. O’Neill was the coordinator for my Biology101–102 course. She took an interest in human genetics and went to Pittsburgh to study genetic counselling and eventually got a PhD there in 2001. She enjoys the practice of genetic counselling and helps other students entering that field at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.

11.Leonard Kellner (1952–2018) did a project on twinning, taking photos of identical and same sex non-identical twins. He would cut these, and match the left face of one twin with the right face of the other twin and this showed asymmetry for non-identical twins but perfect matching for identical twins. He also got photo albums of twins and showed that at all stages of life to old age the identical twins maintained their symmetry. After graduation Kellner took an interest in non-invasive prenatal diagnosis and founded his own company for detecting alpha-fetoprotein in maternal blood and other markers in maternal blood for a variety of genetic disorders. The alpha-fetoprotein identified a faulty development of the neural tube leading to spina bifida and anencephaly.

12.Tracey E. Meyers got her MD at NYU and worked for several years at Harlem Hospital working with sickle cell anemia patients and those at risk. She moved to Duke University in North Carolina and teaches Family Medicine.

From UCLA, I would add mentoring as an undergraduate, Anthony Shermoen, who got his PhD at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He does research on embryonic transcription in Drosophilia at the University of California, San Francisco, California.

Many students I have mentored so that they could direct their energies to creative outlets. This includes several Stony Brook students. Jonathan Hanke got his PhD in mathematics and taught basic creative mathematics as a professor and now applies mathematics to industry as a vice president at Goldman Sachs. He devotes time to encouraging high school students to experience mathematics as a creative activity. Michael Kramer developed his talents in computers and art and became Viacom’s art director. He also used his talents to restore WWII airplanes for the USS Enterprise museum in NYC. He now works for IBM in Texas. Michael’s older brother, Richard Kramer, also entered a field using computers as a systems engineer in Chicago. Howard Diamond studied Biblical references to sexual and eugenic practices and attitudes in the Old Testament. I learned a lot from his insights into Jewish interpretations (mostly Talmudic) of birth defects, intersex conditions, and eugenic practices. He became a Rabbi at Temple Bńai Sholom Beth David, Rockville Center, New York. Leonard Jay Moss started a graduate program at Albert Einstein Medical School and then shifted to a DO degree with a specialty in cardiology. He practices in New Jersey. Michael Yeh practices emergency medicine and toxicology. He combined journalism, epidemiology, and medicine in his formative years, and he hopes to write about medicine and society from his experiences. He is now at Emery University in Atlanta, Georgia. Sean Li practices anesthesiology and pain management in New Jersey and has published articles and book chapters in his field. Steven Chaikin became a lawyer representing impoverished clients in criminal cases. Scott Stein started a PhD program at IU but switched to medicine and specializes in rheumatology and immunology and practices in Victoria, Texas. Burton Rocks (b. 1972) got his law degree and combined it with his love for spectator sports. He coauthored autobiographies of baseball players and developed his own firm for representing them for their negotiated contracts. He teaches sports contract law as an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University. Adam Greenberg got his MD at SUNY Downstate and studied cell biology and genetics at Cornell Medical University. He is now at UC Davis.

I would also add a student I knew mostly through telephone conversations over more than two decades. Mark Italiano (1960–2017) was a gifted pianist who taught piano in Colonia, New Jersey to make a living but had an interest in what were then called hermaphroditic disorders. He earned a doctorate degree in alternative medicine and he wrote articles on intersexual disorders and how they have been interpreted by science and Society.

I would add Anthony Delurefficio who worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library as an archivist for the Watson papers. I have encouraged his interests in the history of genetics. He was a Librarian for the New School in NYC and now is data managing at Sloan Kettering.

I single out the influence of Robert Desnick (b. 1943) on my interests in human genetics. Desnick is Dean of Genetics and Genomic Medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System, New York. He is a member of the Institute for Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. I met him while I was a visiting professor in the history of science at the University of Minnesota and came back to spend a semester in his laboratory at the University of Minnesota and went on rounds with his pediatric fellows to acquaint myself with over 100 human genetic disorders and while there co-authored two articles with Desnick on mosaicism in retinoblastoma and how to counsel families with varied onsets of the condition in their children. Desnick and I also mentored a Stony Brook University student I recommended to him, Steven B. Galson, (b. 1956) who became Acting Surgeon General under the Bush Administration and Assistant Secretary of Health in the Obama administration. Galson has focused on public health issues such as obesity in children and the prevention of epidemic diseases. He is now Senior Vice President of Amgen.

Note that 26 names can be attached to my intellectual pedigree. With the 35 from Muller’s intellectual pedigree, that yields 61 persons associated with the Muller pedigree.