Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

A few days after my little spill in the cold room Dr. Dillon summoned me to his office. He asked me to repeat to him what had happened, when it happened, what I did about it, and whom I told. Dr. Dillon was an efficient person and wanting to hear something twice was not consistent [...]

After several months, I had accumulated enough pig arteries to start the purification process. This was a big deal and an important milestone for my work. It is kind of like having enough ingredients to bake a cake or make a soufflé. A good cook will get all the ingredients together and work hard to [...]

I was working in my “office” associated with Dr. Dillon’s lab. It wasn’t really an office, it was desk space in a busy, cluttered shared lab next to his lab. The door on the lab to my “office” was a huge, heavy, solid wood door that seemed to choose to open or close at random. [...]

I finished prepping the arteries, cleaned up the lab a bit, and we went to lunch. Deli sandwiches in Michigan are not as good as they are in New York, but it was a good lunch. I went back to the lab after lunch very happy and ready to get on with the experiments to [...]

Ann came to the physiology lab one day when I was freezing the arteries. She had never seen liquid nitrogen, so I went outside and picked some wildflowers and leafy green ferns to show her how fun research can be. I dipped a bunch of flowers into the liquid nitrogen and when they came out [...]

The rest of the season went fairly well for us too. We had a better than 500 season and won our first game in the playoffs. Our inconsistent play was largely due to scattered attendance of the science people, many of whom had experiments going on at all hours of the day, night and weekend. [...]

We got to the point where people were asking me what to do, and I said “nothing” because we had lots of well-meaning helpers now and just needed to hustle through the remaining tasks. Mary finally came to me and asked if we were going to make it. Without looking at my watch I told [...]

“What did you do, save someone’s life with a turkey club sandwich?” she joked. I smiled and made the friendliest eye contact I could by looking into Ann’s beautiful pale blue eyes and said, “No, no lives were at risk, but I think I saved someone’s wedding day.” Ann’s eyes seemed to soften and become [...]

Ann and I went to the comedy club and had a light dinner. I was driving and working (the experiment I’d left on the NMR), so I didn’t drink but she did. We chatted quietly during dinner and I learned about her brothers and the rest of her family and that she had a dog [...]

Michigan State is a huge university. The laboratories for my research were in two different buildings and they were about a mile apart. When the weather was nice, I would skateboard. One building was in the clinical center, where a lot of the doctors’ offices were, and the other building was the Department of Physiology, [...]