Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

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. [...]

Michigan State University has a great sports tradition. It also has a very well organized and large intramural sports program. The intramural slow pitch softball league had over 20 teams and would run all spring into summer. Some of the graduate students in physiology got together to form an intramural coed softball team. There were [...]

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, [...]

The Ph.D. treadmill is a long and intense ordeal of taking classes, helping teach classes, taking qualifying exams, doing research, proposing a thesis and then defending that thesis. All fairly well established and with clear requirements for continuing on to the next step. However, the need to produce and “’pass” was ever present. Michigan State [...]

Professor Sparks was excited. “Good, we finally have a clear difference of opinion here.” He continued quickly. “Joe, you did not think that the conclusions were supported by the data. What data would you personally want to see to support those conclusions?” I was on the spot and all alone on my opinion, but felt [...]

I was asked, or more precisely, ordered one semester, to do some lectures to the undergraduate physiology class on thermoregulation and thermogeneration in mammals. More simply stated, a series of lectures on how we keep warm. The senior lecturer for the class gave me some outline material and also the types of test questions that [...]