Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

For a poor graduate student, vacations were a luxury that was hard to afford, although they are something everyone needs for mental health. Ann said that if we did not get away together soon, one of us was going to go nuts. We planned an affordable 5- or 6-day getaway (Thursday to Tuesday or Wednesday) to the beautiful countryside of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, at the height of the fall so that we could see the changing colors of the leaves. The UP is only about 6 hours by car from Michigan State, so we left one evening after work and planned to drive until about midnight and find a hotel. We also brought Ellie and the goal was to go hiking along the old logging trails and take pictures of the foliage and the Great Lakes. So gas and accommodations were the major costs, but the day hikes we had in mind would cost little. For us, sleeping in the car was also not out of the question.

On Wednesday evening we did not make great time getting to the UP. By the time we left, it was late and we were tired, so shortly after crossing the Mackinaw bridge we found a place somewhere on Route 2 to park for the night. Ellie made us feel safe as we settled in for the night, eating some sandwiches and snack food for dinner. Ellie ate a little of her dog food but also had part of each of our sandwiches. She ate better than any of us. Then Ellie had a little walk outside and so did we, and we all went to sleep.

All three of us shared a blanket. Ellie liked being under the blanket nice and warm. We woke the next morning as the sun started to shine in the back window. We got up and picked up some coffee and donuts for breakfast and headed on to Marquette to find a hotel. We found a place and went to our room to shower and settle in. We did not stay long because we quickly headed out for some day hikes and photo safaris in the mountains. The hotel had some info on local attractions and we had some trails in mind too. Ann and I were excited and Ellie wagged her tail.

I was carrying the camera gear and some water. Ann had the leash for Ellie and some food. We found a perfect trail that had a bunch of waterfalls along the route and a lodge at the end where we could take a break before walking back. The first part of the trip was uphill much of the way, so it was somewhat strenuous, but always very pleasant. Ellie dragged Ann ahead and I kept lagging behind to take pix. Ann kept Ellie on the leash and I think that gave her the advantage of an extra pull up the hill. Occasionally the two of them would stop and wait for me and I could tell by the expression on Ellie’s face that she was not happy with me holding her and Ann back. Ann was happy to see me slowly trundle up the trail. We kissed and I told her about some of the great shots down the mountain I had been getting.

I took some pictures of a waterfall and with Ann in front of the waterfall and we continued on up. As we got higher we were treated to great views of the changing leaves and a panoramic view of Lake Superior. There was a wide range of waterfalls all the way up the trail. Some were quite tall; and one was long and broad. It sort of gradually cascaded onto a rock that was rippled, which caused to the water to look like it was bubbling vigorously as it flowed over the falls. I took multiple pictures of this, changing the exposure time to create different effects of the water on the rocks and falls. Longer exposure times made the flowing water look white and smooth; shorter ones made it look sharp and crisp.

We stopped for a light lunch—light because we hadn’t wanted to carry anything heavy. Ellie continued to forgo dog food and wanted human food, which we shared with her. There was plenty of water for Ellie to drink at all the falls, so we didn’t need to share our water with her. The walk back down the mountain went incredibly fast. Gravity helped, so much that Ann let Ellie off her leash. Ellie was off into the woods instantly like a dog on a mission.

We got to the car and Ellie waited patiently to be let in. Ann and I collapsed into our seats and drove back to the hotel. We showered, drank more water to re-hydrate and started making plans for dinner. Having Ellie along was a lot of fun, but it also meant we had to try hard to avoid leaving her in a hotel room. We decided to pick up some take-out pasties (a UP tradition). UP pasties are handheld pies completely covered in a tasty crust. The tradition of pasties is alleged to go back to Cornish miners, who would bring fresh baked pasties to the mines with them to eat for lunch. When the miners emigrated to the UP, pasties followed. Pasties usually contain meat, veggies and thick gravy. The pastie is entirely covered in a crust with a sturdy edge that can be held with one hand. The miners would heat the pastie on a mine shovel and eat it by holding the crusty edge. The last piece of crust was normally not finished but thrown back into the mine for good luck. Pasties are a meal in themselves, so Ann and I had one pastie each, with the crusts being given to Ellie. We played with Ellie by throwing around a Frisbee and enjoyed dinner and some soft drinks.

While in the UP we spent a day on the beach, went shopping around town and took a few more short hikes at different places. Research and thesis writing seemed a million miles away. I was enjoying taking pictures of Ann, Ellie and the beautiful countryside and natural wonders that abound in the U.P.

Having grown up near the beach in New York, I was used to the ocean and commented on the relatively calm water that started at my feet and met the horizon miles off shore. The water was cold, even though right then it was as warm as it ever gets. Lake Superior is a very large body of fresh water and very deep. It never gets very warm, hovering at about 50°F, so you do not see too many swimmers on the beach in the UP. But the beaches are gorgeous. Ellie thoroughly enjoyed chasing after birds and the waves. She played catch bounding after a tennis ball thrown in the water and chasing anything she could. Ann and I were enjoying a quiet and relaxing day after hiking all day yesterday, but Ellie was all energy. She kept us entertained.

It was a very enjoyable couple of days that ended too soon. The drive back home seemed to drag on and on. As Lansing got closer and closer, I could feel the stress and concern about my thesis grow with every mile. I kept looking at the highway in front of me as a career path. There were lots of exits and side roads, but I wanted to push forward with my thesis and get somewhere. Paris, France, was on the horizon, but there were miles to go to get there and I wanted Ann to be a passenger for the trip. I also did not want to get off track and really needed to focus on the Ph.D. prize. I knew what I needed to do, what was needed to get there, but I didn’t know what it would be like when I got there. There were too many things to think about, and I was thinking about them with great intensity as the car seemed to be driving me back into the fray of graduate school.

Attending a big scientific convention like The Biophysics Meeting was an opportunity to meet some of my heroes in person. I was giddy with anticipation at the prospect. I searched through the list of names and abstracts looking for names and subjects that might be related or important to my work. There were lots of people and things to see.

Once I got to the meeting, I went to a poster presentation by a guy from France who did a lot of important work on creatine kinase in the heart. I had never met him, only read his papers, but they seemed really high tech and related to my work. I went up to the poster and a young woman was there. I read over the poster and started to ask her questions. She had a pleasant French accent but spoke very clear and understandable English. I took notes on what she was saying, trying to take in the huge load of great information that came forth. She could do some things in the lab in France that we could not do in the Michigan State lab, and did this work using heart muscle.

I pointed to the name of the lead author, my hero, printed on the poster and said, “So do you work for or with this person?”

I pointed to his name because I was not sure how to pronounce “Ventura-Clapier” in French.

She said, “No, that is me; Renee Ventura-Clapier.”

Boy, was I embarrassed. I was talking to the big boss! If I had known who I was talking to, I would have been too shy to ask all those questions.

Undaunted by my faux pas, Dr. Ventura-Clapier continued. “What kind of research do you do?”

I told her about my work on vascular smooth muscle and creatine kinase, about my purification efforts, the NMR studies and the function work I was doing. Renee believed that the creatine and creatine kinase systems were important during diseases such as heart failure and high blood pressure and that they could affect or improve heart function. This was very similar to what I had been thinking about with the arteries. She also said her lab had been interested in studying the creatine and creatine kinase system in arteries, but had never found anyone interested in studying this.

“If you want to do some work in France, my lab could welcome you do to that,” she said almost off-handedly.

Was she offering me a job in France, or just being polite? Her lab was in Paris. I could do my work on arteries and do it in Paris. That was a exciting concept.

“Where are you working now?” she asked.

When I told her Michigan State, the expression on her face changed.

“Do you know Dr. Myer?”

“Yes I do,” I said not quite understanding her concerned tone.

“Dr. Myer does not believe in compartmentation,” she said.

Now I understood her cooler demeanor. She was a compartmentation supporter and must have assumed that I might be against that hypothesis because I was in the same department as Dr. Myer.

“My data seems to be showing compartmentation in vascular smooth muscle. I am not sure what to think just yet regarding compartmentation in other tissues, though. I know what you think based on your recent papers, but I am still trying to decide for myself what I believe based on the data.”

Renee smiled. “You’re going to make up your own mind independent of what Dr. Myer has published. Good for you.”

I really liked the fact that she did not try to convince me of her opinion and seemed content to let me make up my own mind. I genuinely liked Renee.

“Maybe you could come to Michigan to talk about your work.” I suggested.

“If you can arrange it, I’ll definitely come to talk to you and Dr. Myer.”

“Great, I’ll get started on it.”

We exchanged contact information and promised to be in touch after the meeting. I felt confident that I would see her again both at this meeting and eventually in Michigan. I was also intrigued by the concept of doing my postdoctoral training in Paris. I started to wonder about the possibilities. What would I need to do to go there? I would need a passport and a visa. I would also need to talk to Ann. How would I find a place to live in France, and exactly where would I live? These and a myriad of thoughts started to swirl around in my head. It sounded like I could have a job in Renee’s lab—I wondered what the salary would be. Renee had some great research tools and she had indicated that I could use them in my work with arteries in her lab. She was the leader of a cardiovascular lab and I could be the vascular part of her cardiovascular lab. They were studying things like heart failure and high blood pressure, and my work might help them find cures to those and related diseases. This would also give me an opportunity to learn more so that I could make up my own mind as to whether I supported the theory of compartmentation, or not.

I wandered around the Biophysics meeting for the rest of the day in somewhat of a daze, thinking thorough all the things Renee had said and mulling over the opportunities that seemed to be opening up. Would Ann be supportive, and could I bring her? Could she get a job over there? How long would I be in France? There were many things to think about.

Could I learn French? I’d taken Spanish in high school and German in college, but I had pretty much forgotten those. Would I need to speak French? Renee spoke English very well. What about Ann learning French? What if Ann did not want to go to France? It seemed like such an opportunity, if it was really an opportunity. Maybe I had misread Renee and she was just making polite conversation. I would have to get Renee to Michigan and see how serious she was with her invitation to work in her lab. The more I thought about it, the surer I was that there was a bright future for me in this research arena.

Dr. Dillon and I talked at length about my work and what I wanted to present at the meeting. We wrote up an abstract of the research data and started making plans to attend the meeting. Planning to attend a meeting like this takes time. The written abstract is submitted in October for a meeting in February, so a lot of thought and planning goes into it. It was very exciting.

I told Ann about it when we were moving in together. To my surprise she was not as excited about it as I had hoped she would be. The reason became clear, though. It would mean we would be apart from each other.

“Well, maybe you could come too.” I suggested.

“We can’t afford it, and who would take care of Ellie?”

“Our finances may be improved by then and we can talk about it more later. It would be nice to go away somewhere together.”

The electric atmosphere of our moving in together was not dampened, though. We were bringing furniture upstairs to the new apartment and I was pulling things out of my old place. Some of my stuff would go upstairs and some into storage. Ann was organizing the furniture and I was organizing the kitchen. When I had moved to Michigan I pretty much just put things where they seemed to fit and left them there. My apartment was a place to sleep, eat and store my possessions. We were putting together a home and I really enjoyed it. I felt good about passing my exams and felt great about the next stage of my life with Ann and my graduate career.

We were going to sleep in Ann’s bed and mine was going into storage. We were going to use my kitchen equipment and VCR as well as the coffee table and end tables I had. I’d made the tables myself in my father’s workshop. My father was a carpenter and he taught me how to do woodworking. Some of my woodworking projects were in my apartment and would become part of our new home. Ann had all the stuff for Ellie and we each had some dressers. I had a favorite study chair and lamp that we would use and Ann had a cupboard that we had the perfect place for.

So the new apartment was shaping up pretty well. It had a warm feeling and definitely reflected both our personalities. It was our place and I was very pleased with making this big step in our relationship. It had a little study corner for me with a comfortable chair, desk and shelves where I could study and work. It was a mini office in our new home. I had a small wooden plank that I would put over the two arms of the chair and use that as a laptop work space or alternatively sit at the desk and work.

Dr. Dillon and I were making plans for the trip to New Orleans. He helped me get ready for my presentation and prepared me for the questions I might get. I was going to present my data using a poster presentation, which is a 4 foot by 8 foot board containing figures and text of my data and graphs of my work. With Dr. Dillon’s help it looked really good. Ann was not going to get to come.

While I was excited about getting to go to the meeting, it was hard to leave Ann for a week. I was sharing a room in New Orleans with another graduate student and we were staying in one of the cheaper hotels. To me the meeting seemed huge. There were 7000 scientists and venders all talking about a wide range of biophysics. Before leaving for the meeting I tried to read all the latest journal articles of all my favorite scientists doing research in my field. There was always someone doing something interesting and it always seemed as if I should have heard about or known about earlier. The names of these scientists became part of my vocabulary. I could quote their work like a thespian quoting Shakespeare. Without ever having met many of these people, I could tell you what they thought or said about a scientific subject. These unseen scientists became my heroes and mentors because I would take their advice based on what they wrote in their articles and books.

In the scientific world there were two competing thoughts on the role of creatine in energy metabolism. One school of thought believed that a muscle cell was like a bowl where all the ingredients in the bowl were well mixed all the time. They felt that there would be the same metabolism everyplace in the cell. The other school believed that there were places in the cell where certain tasks were done. So one part of a cell might be important for consuming energy and another part of the cell might be used to do work. This second school of thought was called the “compartmentation” hypothesis. Between my reading and the data I was getting with my research, I was beginning to lean toward the compartmentation hypothesis. The problem was that one of the professors in the department was very much against it. I was just a lowly student and beginning to form an opinion that was counter to a person who was a superior to me and also fairly well known in the field. His name was Dr. Myer, and he had a graduate student in the same year as I was in. I talked to her about the differing theories and her comment was, “no one believes in compartmentation.”

I guess that meant it was not an open-minded scientific environment. I needed to form my own opinion and the biophysics meeting would be a good opportunity to get some alternate opinions.

Chapter 12. My First Scientific Meeting

 The physiology graduate students and I formed a nice little study group to relate our trials and tribulations to each other concerning classes and the physiology faculty. We could compare notes on classes, make suggestions as to classes or faculty advisors and just listen when things were going wrong. Senior graduate students would give warnings as to classes or difficult patches to avoid and we all tried to help keep one another going and survive the program.

Ann was a great confidant for me when I needed a boost in general, but other than moral support she could not really help with suggestions or related experiences of graduate school or research. I did, however, find comfort in two friends who were doing similar research in the NMR lab. Mark Delano and Jay Beauchamp were medical students who did NMR research on the brain. So we did similar experiments but on different tissues and this research overlap gave us some common ground to talk about. The radiology department had generously made available some desks that the three of us shared as a common workspace when doing NMR experiments. Being students we pushed that to the limit and used the space for studying and holding impromptu bitch sessions. It was important to vent about the research but also to do that with people who understood it because opportunities to solve problems or improve methods would arise.

The three of us had different educational backgrounds and different research interests, so when we would talk about the difficulties we were having with life, research, supervisors and classes, the diversity of opinions helped produce unique answers to questions. For example, I was trying to understand some issues related to vascular pathologies and doing my NMR experiments on pig arteries. Mark and Jay jointly suggested that I could get a better understanding of some of those pathologies by using images from the clinical imager; the MRI. With their help, I was able to get the “films” I needed to help better understand my research. The films were of patients whose arteries had diseases and the results of those diseases. Some patients had big bulges in their arteries, other arteries made strange twists and turns, while others could be seen as having diseased walls. Being able to see what was happening in a living patient using the MRIs was a great help for me to better appreciate what my research was doing. Fortunately with my experience working in emergency medicine as well as athletic training, I was able to pick up the things occurring in the patients’ films quite easily. It was good to chat with Mark and Jay because we understood each other’s research and could reinforce the things we were doing right and help find alternate directions for things that were going wrong.

As part of the griping one must always do in life, I was letting off steam with Ann on one occasion. The subject was Dr. Dillon. What I was complaining about was trivial, but I was complaining nonetheless. Ann suggested that I quit working for Dr. Dillon and work for someone else, because she knew lots of the faculty would like me as a student. I fully realized that Ann was giving me a compliment, and responded, “Oh no, I don’t want to leave Dr. Dillon’s lab. I just need to get some stresses off my chest.”

This conversation helped make me realize that I had a nice circle of friends and supporters with whom I could talk or gripe about the different aspects of my life and work. Different people or groups of people are appropriate for certain types of venting and having these avenues for release can be useful for relieving stress as well as for clearing the head to produce answers to problems. I was able to talk to John and Laura concerning medical issues and with their background in emergency medicine we had similar perspectives to draw upon. I had my family and especially my brother Jim, with whom I am very close, so we could confide in each other about many things. Obviously Ann was a big part of my life and we could communicate about anything and offer support at any time. My fellow graduate students in physiology: Dave, Vivian, Nancy, Glenna, etc. helped in surviving classes and dealing with faculty. Mark and Jay were good resources to talk about NMR specific research issues and troubleshooting, which is extremely important in a high-tech research project. I was fortunate and privileged to have a lot of intellectual resources available to me to help survive the years of work needed to obtain a Ph.D. So I have come to believe that bitching has its place as long as you use it to try to solve a problem as opposed to just stating it.

For my NMR experiments I was always reading the latest papers and scientific publications related to my work. There are no textbooks that are up to date enough to help form and write the science in a Ph.D. thesis. All the published information is in periodicals and presented at conferences. In this way I learned about a new technique that required multiple things to be done at one time during the NMR experiment. It was looking like this method would be important for my Ph.D. thesis work. Other scientists and labs would just buy extra equipment or upgrade their machines to do the experiments, but we couldn’t do that. Our NMR machine could do one of these things (called continuous wave), but it couldn’t do the two things I needed simultaneously. I read about another technique (called DANTE) that was able to behave like continuous wave. Unfortunately the two had not been done together, so if I wanted to do it, I would have to make up the process all by myself. Doing new things is part of what research is all about, so I decided to try.

I wrote some computer programs and did some experiments that showed that the two techniques could be done at the same time during my experiments. But there was some doubt in my mind if I could call them the same as what other scientists had done in their publications. To put my mind at rest, I did a series of mathematical computations of what I was doing and compared those computations to what other scientists had done. This process is called a mathematical proof because I was proving that my work was doing what I claimed it to be doing. I mathematically proved that my techniques and the techniques of others were identical and this conclusion was supported by the experiments. So, by writing a computer program and doing a mathematical proof, I was able to do an experiment with the NMR without the need to purchase additional hardware (a cost savings of tens of thousands of dollars). Dr. Dillon was happy with that, I was able to do the experiments needed for my thesis, and in addition I was able to add a couple of pages of math to my Ph.D. thesis justifying my methods.

My experiments and I were producing great data and Dr. Dillon said that it was time for me to present my research at a scientific meeting. He suggested that I attend the Biophysics meeting that was coming up in New Orleans. This was before Hurricane Katrina and it would be my first trip to New Orleans and my first big scientific meeting. I thought it was kind of humorous that he was suggesting that I attend The Biophysics meeting because that is what my Masters degree was supposed to have been in.

With the neurophysiology texts and cheat sheets in front of me I tried to get started on my final studying for Wednesday. But I couldn’t get the endocrine-reproduction exam out of my head. I wrote down each of the questions from both exams and a brief synopsis of what my answers were. I was sure that what I had written was pretty much correct, but was there info I forgot to write? I compared questions to answers to cheat sheets and main notes and found that I had forgotten to discuss some details in the endocrine part of the afternoon exam. But I there was a lot of info that could have gone into that answer. I resolved to closely examine the subjects I did not discuss in the written exam and be very ready to discuss them in detail during the oral test. I would need to either justify not having discussed them, or to discuss them then and say I had run out of time.

My brain was racing and I was not going to get any studying done. Now I wished I had invited Ann over for dinner. I missed her. It had been a week since we last saw each other—last Sunday—and that was too long.

Tuesday was a long day, but at least I could focus on neurophysiology. Cell physiology was also on Wednesday and that was a strong subject for me. I wanted to do well in cell physiology but had to focus on the neurophysiology to make up for the lost day of studying. The day flew by. I called Ann at lunch and promised to see her on Wednesday after the tests. That seemed to make her happy; it made me very happy too.

Wednesday’s neurophysiology test was strange. There were actually two tests. One was a single open-ended and highly subjective essay question, and the second was 8 relatively traditional essay questions. We were given the choice of doing one test or the other. The open-ended question was, “The spinal cord is both a superhighway of information and major interchange for that information. Discuss the role of the spinal cord as a signal processor and signal transducer.” I thought very carefully about the personality of the examiner, Dr. Adams. He was a very cerebral person, had a dry sense of humor and a very rigid educational and scientific perspective. He would not be interested in the philosophical and the use of the expression “superhighway” was certainly fitting, given the volume of information and importance of the processes in the spinal cord. I chose the spinal cord question. I focused much of my answer on how spinal cord injury affects the physiology of people with such injuries.

The subject of spinal cord injury was something that was very close to me and my family because a cousin broke his neck and ended up paralyzed in a wheelchair. So the subject is an emotional one for us and I had seen many of the aftereffects of spinal cord injury firsthand, between his injury and others I observed when I worked on the ambulance.

The spinal cord is actually like a mini brain that makes decisions and has its own reflexes that it can enact without involving the brain. When the spinal cord is injured, many reflexes are lost or changed. So in the neurophysiology exam I talked about the role of the spinal cord and how it changed with injury. This was another question that I could write for hours on, but I stopped after 4 hours and handed my exam into Sharon and ate lunch.

The afternoon exam was a traditional essay exam that I did almost on autopilot. I wanted the exam to end because I would get to see Ann when it was over. I had skateboarded in and would meet her at my apartment as soon as practicable. Ann was getting out of her car in the parking lot of the apartment complex just as I was skateboarding into the driveway. I picked up the board and we embraced for a long time in the parking lot. She told me about her day and I talked about mine. We shared a simple but very pleasant dinner and enjoyed each other’s company. Then we talked more about moving in together. She had signed the lease on an apartment and we could start moving in next weekend. The apartment was on the third floor in the same building as my apartment and the rent was reasonable. For the first time in what seemed like weeks, I forgot about the exams and all I could think about was moving in with Ann. Only true love could take my mind so completely off of those comprehensive exams and that was what was happening.

Friday came too fast. I’d been looking forward to getting these exams over and today the written part would be over, but I felt anything but ready. I wasn’t sure if I was distracted by moving in with Ann or if I was burning out. Either way my head was not focusing on those last exams. I went through the motions of taking them and writing the essays, but I couldn’t concentrate. I knew something was different because when I turned the exams in I had written much less. I wasn’t even confident about the information contained in what I had written. But I did feel relieved when it was over.

Ann and I got together again on Friday night. However, I spent Saturday comparing notes on the questions asked, my outline of answers and checking the details of what I said in the essays. I did all this from memory, but it was easy to recall what was asked and how I answered the questions. Unfortunately, I found several factual errors in my exams for Friday. I had one particular concept of fluid flow completely backwards.

Sunday was very busy with me fact checking various concepts and trying to formulate a strategy to address, explain or correct some of the errors I had made in Friday’s exams.

Monday I went to the department and tried to see if I could get any scuttlebutt on what people were thinking about the exams and if any of my comrades were feeling the pains of wrong answers. I confided some of my errors and misgivings about the exam to Dr. Dillon. I am not sure who he talked to or what exactly he knew, but he was able to give me some feedback.

“Don’t start packing your bags just yet,” he said. “Remember you can talk about such things in the orals.”

The oral exams were tomorrow and I was well aware that I would be able to try to redeem myself there.

On Tuesday morning I was scheduled for my oral exam at 11:00 A.M. The seven faculty members were seated at a semi-circular table and I was expected to stand before them with my back to the board and answer their questions. I was allowed to draw on the board if needed. My first question was concerning my Friday exams and they asked if there was anything I wanted to change about my answers.

“YES!” I almost shouted.

Without apologizing, I corrected my errors in detail and gave as precise and complete information concerning my errors on fluid dynamics as I could. The faculty members went around the table asking questions. On some of the tests I needed to expand the information because I had run out of time and on others I needed to explain some concepts in greater detail. I was especially surprised by rather intense questioning from Dr. Adams concerning the spinal cord question. I had apparently relied too heavily on the pathology and did not provide enough detail on normal physiological functioning in the spinal cord. I did not offer any excuses or talk about my cousin. I added to the information using traditional physiological terms and they went on with the questioning.

The time for the exam was winding down and Dr. Krier started to ask a series of short questions. He was a scary looking person with wild hair that tended to stick up in all directions and seemed to get fuller if he was annoyed. It became a kind of rapid-fire series of questions and very quick answers. He would quickly ask a question and I would respond immediately. Question, answer, question, answer went on and on. Finally he asked me a question and I paused and my mind went blank.

 “I do not know,” I said.

“OK,” he said. “I’m done.” 

The chair dismissed me and the minute I walked out the door I remembered the answer to that question. I wanted to run back in and announce the answer, but it was too late. Did I fail?

I did not fail. I passed and that was all I needed to know. Two people did fail, though. I was hated to lose them. They were friends and softball teammates. Dr. Dillon tried to console me by saying that the value of a Michigan State University Ph.D. is increased by keeping the quality of the graduates high. He was right, I guess, but from my perspective it meant losing two friends.

After the comprehensive exams I told Ann that despite being apart a lot during the past few weeks, I really felt much closer to her. She said it must be true that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I said, “I was thinking it might be the ‘Florence Nightingale Syndrome,’ where you fall in love with your caretaker, and you were certainly my caretaker.”

“Or,” she said, “it could be like the ‘Helsinki Syndrome’ where you fall in love with your captors. You’ve been held captive and I was your only visitor.” [1]

We settled on a new word, “HellSinkiGale,” to express our growing love during adversity.

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[1] Stockholm syndrome is the condition being referred to here. Our error at the time, but the name stuck.

The big day finally arrived, after 42 days of studying during which my body went through 41 sleep/wake cycles. All eight of the Ph.D. candidate students got to our meeting place very early with coffee, food, drinks and even changes of clothes to be prepared for a long 8 hours of testing split by a one-hour break. The clothes changes were necessary because the room temperature could fluctuate and you didn’t want to be too hot or cold during the exam. We each were assigned a room to ourselves and we were forbidden to meet with or talk to anyone during the exam. Signs were posted to keep people out of the eight exam rooms and there was no proctor or monitor. We were to turn in the exams by the end of four hours or risk failing. Dr. Miller gave us the exams and we were on our way to completing one of the last steps needed to obtain a Ph.D. from Michigan State.

The first exam was cardiovascular physiology. I liked this subject and was very well prepared for it. I wrote fast but tried hard to keep my handwriting legible. I am not the neatest writer and the examiners needed to be able to read it. Each test was read by two people; the expert in the field and someone from a related field on the comprehensive exam committee. The committee consisted of 7 people; a chair and 6 expert representatives from the fields being tested. One of the examiners was Dr. Jump and he was generally known by the graduate students as lacking in a sense of humor. It became almost a running contest to get him to smile or laugh. None of the graduate students were claiming to have gotten a chuckle from him.

For lunch I was afraid to leave the building for fear of getting hit by a car and not being able to complete the afternoon session. So, I brought sandwiches, snacks and drinks for lunch. I ate kind of numbly and stared at my condensed cheat sheet notes. I kept my cheat sheet notes in the lab; no one brought notes or texts into the room during the test. I felt good about the cardiovascular test, but was worried about endocrine-reproductive physiology in the afternoon. All the hormones and changes that occurred with pregnancy and reproduction were always hard for me to follow. After my studying I could actually draw graphs of how the female reproductive hormones changed during the monthly cycle and then name the hormones and cite the cycle times. I pretty much just memorized all of this and could draw a diagram of it and then explain it off the diagram. Fortunately, that was enough to convey the information even though the details of that knowledge for me, did not go much deeper.

When I got into the endocrine-reproduction exam at 1:00 P.M. on Monday, they asked for the hormone changes during a woman’s monthly cycle and I drew my picture and described what I had memorized. I regurgitated the answer I knew they wanted to see in the exam and went on to the other questions. All the questions were relatively long essay questions. Some of them were incredibly vague and open-ended. For example one question went something like this: “Diabetes can be caused by a lack of insulin. Discuss.” There are entire books on this subject, but based on the points allotted that question it was going to get 30 minutes of writing and then I would move on to another question. I tried to give each question the amount of time, thought and writing, that it deserved, based on how much it was worth in the test. Many of the questions could have been discussed for hours. So I spent 30 minutes talking about insulin, glucose, and diabetes and moved on. I would have needed about 16 hours to answer all the questions to the level that I thought they could be discussed, but all of this had to be done in only 4 hours. This was a big worry for me and it caused me to write faster and faster, the legibility of my handwriting getting worse and worse.

Time ran out on the endocrine-reproduction exam and I raced to the office to turn it in before 5:00 P.M. Sharon the assistant was there and I gave it to her. I was not the last person to hand in my exam—Sharon told me there were still two people left. I was so tired and stressed that I just nodded and walked away without finding out who was running later even than me.

I went home and called Ann. I told her about the exams and she commiserated with me. She asked if she could come over to share dinner with me but I said no. I really needed to get started on the next two exams. She was disappointed. I ate quickly, while all of the questions and my answers to them ran through my head. It was like an endless tape of questions, answers all repeating over and over in my mind. I could see the questions and my answers to each one.

I was intensely studying something called kinetics. This is the study of rates of chemical reactions and it involves a lot of math. It was an essential part of my research and I worked hard to learn all of the formulas and how the math worked with the science. I had all sorts of numbers and formulas running through my head and a number popped to mind: 1021008576-75707. I was familiar with all sorts of constants like pi (p=3.14159265358979323846) and Avogadro’s number, which is 6.02214179 X 10²³. That is a 6 with 23 zeros after it, and is a very big number. This was a number I did not recognize, but it kept resonating in my head. I knew that 1021008576-75707 meant something important and felt I had written that number down before. I had worked with it somehow and obviously memorized it. Why would I memorize something? I could only think for scientific reasons, but I just couldn’t remember where this number came from.

Some time later, I was writing a check to pay the rent when it hit me. 1021008576-75707 was the account and routing number of a bank account I had over 10 years ago; two bank accounts ago. I was simultaneously happy and frustrated with myself.

One day when I was driving home to go to sleep— it must have been about 5:30 A.M.—I fell asleep at the wheel of my car. I was on campus at the time and quickly woke up when my car hit the curb. A university police officer saw this and pulled me over. He did a brief field sobriety test and asked me what happened. I told him that I was working late studying and that I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home, sir.” I responded.

“Where is home?”

“2339 Haslett Road,” I responded.

“I’m worried about you. Are you going to make it home safely this morning?” He seemed genuinely concerned.

“Yes, sir, I can assure you I will not fall asleep at the wheel. In fact I may have a trouble falling asleep when I get home after all this excitement.”

“All right, I’ll follow to the edge of campus. Drive slow and safely and get home and get some sleep.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said as he walked back to his car.

I followed him until he turned off at the edge of the campus. Then I drove home and went to bed.

I went to sleep and got up 6 hours later to continue studying for my comps. I was so focused on those exams it was weeks before I told Ann I had been stopped by the police.

The date for my exams was fast approaching and Ann reminded me of something important. I was nocturnal now and I would need to be ready to take the tests on a conventional sleep cycle. While I had not really thought about this, I had realized that my I seemed to be getting to bed later and later and my work days getting longer and longer. So to get back on a more normal schedule, I just extended this by degrees, so that instead of going to bed at sunrise, I went to bed at 8:00 A.M., the next day at 10:00, then 11:00, and so on. Eventually I was sleeping and waking on a normal cycle. This gradual extension of my sleep/wake cycle caused me to lose a day, however. My study schedule had been based on a certain number of days to study each subject. I had used up all my time-off days, so I would have to adjust my study schedule to split this loss between subjects. I decided to split the time between neurophysiology and renal-respiratory physiology. I chose these because they were the least interesting to me and I welcomed an excuse to decrease the amount of time I would be looking at them. The second reason for choosing those was because they were scheduled to be on Wednesday and Friday respectively. Therefore, I had extra days to study for them.

There were eight physiology graduate students taking the comprehensive exams and we all worked alone on cramming the information into our brains. We rarely saw each other and when we did, we generally talked about how sleep deprived we were. Sometimes we would talk about the stuff we were studying, but I always felt angst from myself and anyone around if we talked about science because we were all afraid to discover something we didn’t know. No one wanted to discover a knowledge gap. If someone asked me how I felt at this point, I’d tell them that I felt like a glazed doughnut. This is as accurate a description as I could find. I was stressed from the studying, stressed from a lack of sleep, my eyes burned from constantly staring at text and my hand hurt from writing. Without exercising my whole body felt soft and squishy like the dough of a doughnut. My middle finger had an indentation in it from the pen I used to write my study notes with. My study technique was to write what I thought was important on pages and pages of notepaper. Then I would condense my notes into crib notes and finally I would put those notes onto one sheet of paper. The writing and thinking about what to write helped me learn because I was not just copying, I was re-writing what I felt was important. I adopted this study technique when a former college professor allowed one 3 x 5 card of cheat notes in an exam. During those tests I found that anything I put on the cheat sheet I remembered. So I made cheat sheets to study because I would remember what was on them.

I also learned that if a question popped into my head and I couldn’t remember the answer to it, I would have to stop what I was doing and find the answer. The act of searching for an answer would reinforce the memory and I would have learned that fact. But if I didn’t look for the answer immediately, I would not remember the fact if I got the answer or asked someone else for the info later.

The comprehensive exam is a big written and oral exam that every Ph.D. student at Michigan State University needs to take and pass. In my own case, it would cover all of the material in my physiology texts and be broken up into the 6 major areas of physiology. Those areas were: Neurophysiology, cardiovascular physiology, cell physiology, renal-respiratory physiology, and endocrine-reproductive physiology. There was a four hour test for each of the six subjects followed by an oral test. The schedule for the comprehensive exam was a pair of 4-hour exams on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and a 1-hour oral test the following week.

The Ph.D. comprehensive exams were known to all the Ph.D. candidates as a major barrier to graduation because usually about 25% of the people taking the exam failed. We regularly lost several people at the level of the comprehensives, so they were taken very seriously. At Michigan State I was known as a relatively good student, but that was not always the case. At Susquehanna my grades were not as good as they were here. Often people who have a high grade point average as undergraduates find this harder to maintain in graduate school. When I was at Susquehanna I worked on the ambulance, and even at Michigan State University as a student athletic trainer, my grades were not the best. But when I got a job doing research in physiology, this actually helped my grades because my research was teaching me what I was learning in class too. So my grades in graduate school went up a lot. However I was not in college to get good grades. I was there for an education and had the goal of eventually using that knowledge to help people. So the grades were less important. I would calculate what test score I would need to achieve an acceptable grade in a class, study just enough to get that grade and get by. I was working hard and learning, but not getting the best grades until graduate school where the learning and the grades seemed to be more one and the same.

The problem with a Ph.D. comprehensive exam was that it was a test for which you could not study the minimum amount and get a grade. You either passed or failed, and the subject matter was pretty much everything you had learned about the subject of physiology. I estimated the amount of time I would need to study for the comprehensive exams accordingly, and made a schedule to meet those needs. I figured I would need 7 weeks to prepare for the exam, and scheduled in 5 days off during that time.

I talked to Dr. Dillon and I did not need to work in the lab during that time, so I could focus on preparing myself to pass the comprehensive exams. I started studying on a Monday 42 days before the exams and each subject would get 6 days of studying. I paid attention to nothing else. I would eat when hungry, sleep when sleepy, make pit stops and shower stops as necessary and work every other minute I was awake. What started to happen was that I would stay awake later and later and try to sleep in. So, I just let myself sleep in as needed. Eventually I would set my alarm to wake me 6 hours after I was going to sleep. With 6 hours of sleep a night and working 18-hour days, I had no problem sleeping and kept to my study schedule faithfully. However, I did become nocturnal.

It was just about impossible to see Ann during my study days, but I carefully planned my 6 days off to be with her. Those days became pretty intense, with us trying hard to maximize our time together. They were always a Saturday or Sunday, and we would spend every second together doing every fun thing we could think of. One morning we went to the east coast of Michigan to watch the sunrise and then drove the breadth of Michigan to the beach on the west coast overlooking Lake Michigan at Sleeping Bear Dunes. We enjoyed the scenery and each other until sunset. We had watched the sun rise out of Lake Huron and now we were watching it set into the cold waters of Lake Michigan, all in one day. It was the perfect way to bracket a perfect day together.

Kissing her good-bye after such a beautiful day was a sad and painful. It felt as if I was leaving on some long trip and we would be thousands of miles apart. While that was not the case, the emotions were strong and made it hard to part. Even though I had become pretty much nocturnal, I would do my best to be with her for the entirety of those days. Then I would quickly return to my nocturnal routine as if there was no break in my sleep rhythms. My life was study, sleep, study… with too little time for Ann.

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 with his normal mode of operations. Nonetheless I repeated the story and also mentioned that I had since told Ann about it. When I was finished, he said that at this morning’s physiology department’s faculty meeting one of the other faculty had complained about the smell in the cold room and “discovered” that I had caused the spill and claimed that I had not told anyone. Dr. Dillon was present and said that I did inform him of what happened and what I had done about it, and that I had notified another graduate student. It turned out that Jack, the person I told about the spill, was the graduate student of the person who reported my spill. Dr. Dillon seemed to relish saying that this graduate student had been notified and had no problems with the spill or its cleanup. Dr. Dillon said he also assured the faculty that he checked the cold room afterward and found that it was adequately cleaned and cleared and the residual smell was as good as could be expected.

For me, the lesson learned from this was to tell everyone everything. Tell the good, the bad, and the ugly. I also realized that even if a mistake occurs, what you do afterward may be just as if not more important than the original mistake. Expanding on this lesson, I resolved to write and submit regular reports on my work to Dr. Dillon and all my future supervisors, whether this was asked for or not. Information was on my side and something that needed to always flow freely.

Ann and I were able to catch up a few days later. I told her that I thought she seemed distracted and asked again what was wrong. She said that the rent for the house she and her brother shared was going up a lot and that they couldn’t afford it any longer. It was also hard to find accommodations that accepted pets and she was worried about finding a place to live that was affordable and would take Ellie.

Almost without thinking, I said, “Well, you can stay with me.”

She gave me a surprised look as I continued.

“I know we’ve only been together for a few months, but I think it is the right thing to do and I am ready for it.”

Ann knew that I had never lived with a girlfriend and she seemed to appreciate that I was proposing a big step and commitment.

Apparently starting to warm to the idea, she asked, “Do they take pets in your place?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure they take pets and I am sure I want to do this. I also happen to know that there are some apartments in the complex that are a better size for the two of us, with a balcony. I don’t know what they cost, but between us I’m sure we can afford it. That of course means that your brother needs to find his own place. Are you OK with that?”

“I am very ready for that,” she said emphatically. I was a little concerned by the force with which she made that statement, because I hadn’t sensed any tension between her and her brother. I was sincerely hoping that Ann would agree to move in with me. I felt like I was in a very good place. My career was moving forward with all the signs of a future as a researcher, and I was seeing an opportunity to have a relationship and family with Ann. It is extremely hard to balance career and relationships, but I really wanted to try with Ann. I saw clear advantages in a relationship with Ann because we could see each other at work and have plenty of time together.

We talked at length about the logistics of moving in together. Some of our stuff would have to go into storage, but we would be together, which is something I desperately wanted. She would talk to her brother about how they might divide their furnishings and I would talk to my landlord about a couple-oriented apartment. My present apartment was perfect for a single college male, but not really right for a couple. It was in the basement of the complex, across from the boiler room and the laundry room. It was ultra cheap, with windows that began about 5 feet up from the floor and a ceiling that was lower than those of the apartments in the rest of the complex. The apartments on the upper floors were nicer and more expensive, as well as much better suited for couples. I really liked the idea of moving up, physically and figuratively. I had missed Holly but needed to move on from her memory and Ann allowed me to do this.

Ann and I tackled our respective tasks and found no barriers to living together. We were going to share a place—it was decided. We would move in together as soon as I finished my Ph.D. comprehensive exams. This meant a bit of a delay, but it also gave us time to get things ready for the move. We would need to put some stuff in storage and Ann could get her old accommodations closed down as well as settle things with her brother. There was no looking back. I was committed to this relationship and I was moving in with this woman. A lot was going to change very quickly.

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 mix and make the soufflé. You need enough of all the ingredients before you get started, and I now had all I needed. I had hundreds of frozen arteries collected over many weeks and would be using them all at one time. Protein purification is also a lot like making a soufflé. The whole soufflé can be ruined suddenly and with protein purification that is just as possible. However, I couldn’t just go get more ingredients from a grocery store. If I made a mistake doing protein purification it would take weeks more of collection and work to try again. Plus the purification process itself would take many steps taken over 3 months of time. As with the soufflé, I would not know until the very end of the process if I had been successful or not.

For the blending step of protein purification, the lab blender was a much larger version of the blender I had in my kitchen, with a much stronger motor and a metal container with a lid that would screw on. The screw-on lid was important because you did not want the chemical contents of a lab blender spraying across the lab due to a lid popping off. The motor was so powerful that the frozen arteries could get hot very quickly from the friction of the blender’s blades. After blending the arteries, I poured the resulting liquid into a big glass beaker and it looked like and had the consistency of a vanilla milkshake.

All the next steps in the purification needed to be done in the cold and the university had a whole room cooled to the temperature of a refrigerator. It was aptly called “the cold room.” I set up a bunch of plastic and glass tubing with the milkshake flowing through it in there. The whole setup went from the floor to the ceiling, about 10 feet high. At the end of the tubing a trickle of product would be produced at an agonizingly slow rate. The milkshake would flow through this system for a week, drop by drop, to produce enough product for me to work on. One of the chemicals I used in this cold room had a real bad smell—like a combination of rotten eggs and vomit[1]. So I tried very hard to prevent that chemical from leaking and smelling up the cold room. The cold room was used by many different people and I needed to prevent a spill that might close the room or make people upset.

As I became more proficient with my research and experiments, I was able to do more and more simultaneous experiments to produce more and more data. I would regularly have protein purification going in the cold room, experiments in the NMR lab and function experiments in the physiology lab all at once. The collection of data became a full time job and an obsessive mission of mine. It gave me a kind of thrill to be out on a date with Ann and know that I had three different experiments on going at the same time. Ann and I were becoming very close after about 3 months of dating, and I was falling very much in love with her.

The multi and simultaneous experiments became a kind of house of cards for me and eventually it did indeed fall down. Very late one Wednesday evening I came into the cold room and immediately smelt a chemical spill. My milkshake flow-through system had started to leak, and the chemical was on the floor around my tubing. It had only been leaking for a couple of hours, so was not so serious as to require an emergency cleanup. But even from this small a spill, the smell was quite evident and it would take me hours to clean up.

The first thing I did was stop the leak, then I made sure the milkshake and other chemicals had not been contaminated, and then I set about the cleanup. Near the end of the cleanup (about 6:00 A.M.) Jack, a graduate student from a neighboring lab, came in. I explained to him what happened and that the smell was dissipating and should not affect his experiments. He was unconcerned and went about his experiments.

I was heading home from the cleanup as Dr. Dillon was coming in for the day. I told him what happened, what I did and who I told about it. He shrugged and said, “Those things are bound to happen. Are you heading home?”

“Yes, to shower and come back to take down the NMR experiment.”

Dr. Dillon nodded and headed to his office. I drove home, showered, dressed and grabbed my skateboard to return to the NMR lab. I often would skateboard to the lab during the workday because it was fun, good exercise, and actually a faster way to get around campus than by car.

At the NMR lab I told Ann about my night and day of catch-up on my experiment’s spill, and explained that I wouldn’t be able to see her today because I had a lot of work and sleep to catch up on. She nodded her approval, seeming distracted. I hoped she wasn’t mad at me. Something seemed to be bothering her. Sleep deprived and frazzled as I was, I was awake enough to know something was wrong, and it gnawed at me.

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[1] The chemical in question is beta mercaptoethanol.