Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

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. So I used a sturdy steel cone about five inches in diameter, that looked like an artillery shell, as a doorstop. I found the stopper sitting in a dark corner of a closet in the lab surrounded by dust. I picked it up and was surprised by its substantial weight, but not surprised to see a dust imprint left where it had been standing for many years. It seemed to be a solid piece of metal, and made a perfect doorstop. I would pull open the door when I arrived for work and then kick the heavy doorstop in front of the door. This routine continued for several years. Occasionally, I would pick up the stopper and use it to crush a cockroach. The cockroaches in the building were notorious. They were very large, very strong and everywhere. The building had housed a cockroach colony for teaching and research purposes many years ago. At some point the colony had taken up residence in the building and these roaches grew to 2 and 3 inches long. I refused to step on them because the guts would be all over my shoes and I was afraid that if I squished a female cockroach carrying eggs, the eggs would stick to my shoe and I could bring them home. On the rare occasion I did step on them, they were so big the crunching sensation of the exoskeleton collapsing was unnerving—it felt like they were moving under my foot. So I killed them with the doorstopper, which made a loud thud on the floor but no sensation or crunch. I think the cockroach guts also made the stopper slide more easily when I was kicking it around.

I also discovered that alcohol killed cockroaches. We had rubbing alcohol in the lab in squirt bottles for disinfecting. One squirt would kill a cockroach instantly. I would still crush it with the stopper after it was dead. A friend, Dave Levier, collected some uncrushed cockroaches and spray painted them gold and silver. He mounted them on some string and hung them up in a cockroach mobile. I suggested making them into Christmas tree decorations, but he declined. Dave was a graduate student who was a year behind me and we had labs near each other and socialized a bit with the other graduate students.

While shoving the doorstop one day I almost knocked it over, and noticed it wobbled strangely before it fell on its side. I picked up the 20-pound-plus piece of metal to set it upright and it felt “loose” for some reason. I shook it and it felt like something was in it. I also noticed some writing on the side of it. The writing was very hard to read in the rust and flaked paint, but it was clearly text, and it said: “Contents: 2 liters Hg.” Hg is the chemical designation for mercury. I shook the doorstop and felt liquid mercury sloshing around inside. The top of what looked like an artillery shell was actually a screw top to a metal container of mercury. Liquid mercury is deadly poisonous and such a large amount, if it ever leaked out, would require an evacuation of the building. I had been kicking the bottle around for years thinking it was a solid piece of metal, but now I gently put it down and contacted building management to dispose of it. What surprised me most was that the faculty and staff were NOT shocked, surprised or aghast at the find. Most just seemed to chuckle wryly. The consensus was that in an ancient building that had been used for science experiments for so long that finding stashes of solid sodium metal, radioactive carbon and toxic mercury was common. I did learn one thing though. I learned where liquid mercury comes from. As the joke goes, ‘Liquid mercury comes from little mercury wells which are called “H.G. Wells.”’

The liquid mercury incident did not slow the progress of my research. Ann liked to tell her friends that I had been kicking around enough liquid mercury to kill the whole school. She asked if I was concerned as to whether the bottle might have broken and I assured her that there was a lot of metal holding in that mercury.

Even without a doorstop to help me kill cockroaches and enable quick access to the lab, my purification of creatine kinase was able to push forward. The first step in purifying creatine kinase was to put a bunch of frozen arteries in a big blender and blend them to a smooth puree. A lot of lab work is very similar to cooking. A scientist will follow a recipe like a cook and produce something at the end, like a cook baking cookies. The scientist will test his or her product and the cook will taste it. Testing and tasting become quite analogous for scientists and cooks I think part of the reason I like both science and cooking is because they have many similarities, which I enjoy.

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 produce lots of data. Following on my theme of working hard to not work hard, I had planned to set up a long-term function study and start a NMR study at the same time. The trick with this strategy was that each needed fresh living arteries and the experiments were to be performed in different buildings. But the data produced by such planning would be valuable and would keep me from having to take twice as long to get the same amount of data. So I set up the function experiments in the physiology lab right away and gave the arteries time to stabilize. They needed a couple of hours to become stable after being collected from the pigs and put into the function machine. Next, I went to the NMR lab and took a couple of hours to get that experiment set up. I used the program I wrote to do the whole experimental protocol and went back to the physiology lab and did the rest of the function experiments.

Function experiments for a pig artery are a lot like making a fist—an artery can clamp around in a grip as we do when we grasp something. So I would make an artery contract its muscle like this and measure the force it could generate. The more force, the better the function.

So, now I was collecting data in both the NMR lab and the physiology lab. I could maximize the data being collected by doing these simultaneous experiments on carotid arteries from the same pig. I just needed to make sure the programs were working and get them started such that they could go for hours or even a day or two. I would be working collecting data while at home asleep in bed.

After three months of research and protein purification, I was getting a solution that I knew contained the protein creatine kinase. The solution also contained some salts that I did not want with the protein. I needed a solid protein without solution or salts. This is called crystallization. This meant getting protein crystals to form in the solution so I could collect pure protein. Dr. Dillon suggested that I add some pure creatine kinase purchased from a chemical company to seed the crystals. At first I thought what he was suggesting sounded too much like cheating. Was he telling me to add someone else’s protein to mine and claim it to be mine? While it may sound a little suspicious, this is actually more like using a starter when baking bread. You start with a little dough from an earlier batch and add that to the ingredients of a new batch of bread. The new dough rises and acts like bread because of the yeast and other ingredients in the starter. Before you bake the new bread you save a bit of the dough for a new starter. The newly baked bread is your bread because you made it and now the new starter contains mostly your own bread dough. Using a few “seed” crystals in this case was very similar. I added a small amount of purchased creatine kinase protein and ended up with a lot more protein than I had added. I used some of that new protein for experiments and saved some to seed the next purification. As an example, if I added 1 ounce of protein as seed and got back 9 ounces, my first batch was 90% my protein. If I did it again, with seed crystals from my first batch, then my second batch would be 99% my protein, and so on. So I used someone else’s starter to get my purification going and quickly had protein that was pure and without cheating on my research results.

The data that resulted were showing that the enzyme creatine kinase and creatine were very important to normal artery function and metabolism. Creatine and creatine kinase gave the artery the energy it needed to work and function normally. This was a neat little discovery. I knew from the research of others that when hearts and arteries were diseased they always lost creatine and even creatine kinase into the bloodstream. When a heart attack was suspected physicians would do a blood test to see if creatine kinase was in the blood. The heart cells and sometimes the artery cells lose creatine kinase when sick or injured. Thus my data might be useful in understanding cardiovascular disease and perhaps someday devising a treatment for patients who were losing creatine and creatine kinase from their muscle. My research might be able to someday “help people”— with luck lots and lots of them.

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 they looked almost normal, but a little wet and frosty. I then smashed them on the table and they shattered into thousands of tiny shards of colored petals and I was left holding a few fractured stems. She was shocked and impressed. I let her do the same to some more flowers and some ferns. As the vegetation thawed it made a bit of a mushy mess on the table, but I didn’t mind. It was nice to spend time with Ann.

“Why do you need so many of these things frozen?” she asked.

“I am going to purify a protein from them and do experiments on the protein. So I need lots of protein to do the experiments and will need lots of arteries to be able to purify enough protein,” was my response.

“How do you purify a protein and why do you want to?”

“I want to purify it because the data I get from it will be compared to the data I get on the same enzyme in the NMR. The data are going into my thesis so I can get my degree. So why I want to purify the protein is to get my degree and to do something that no one has ever done before.”

“I understand data is important,” she said, “But why do you need it from the NMR and the pure protein?” She asked.

“Good question. First though, data are plural, datum is the singular. So, ‘data are important.’ And I want lots and lots of data. Now to answer your question, with the NMR and protein studies I can tell what is controlling the function of creatine kinase in the artery.” I regretted correcting her grammar in that way, but it slipped out by force of habit. Dr. Dillon was big on using correct grammar in science and that kept me sensitive to the subject.

“So one group of data are compared to the other group of data.”

“Yep.”

“But, other than getting a degree, why is that such a big deal?” she asked.

This was a question I was very ready and happy to answer.

 “The enzyme is something that helps the muscle in the artery function normally,” I explained. Arteries are not just pipes; they open and close to maintain blood pressure and to provide blood flow to important tissues. If the artery cannot work right, disease occurs. So my thesis is that the normal function of the protein will keep the artery functioning normally. One reason I think this enzyme might be important is because it is one of the most active in our bodies. But why is it so active in arteries? If I figure that out I may figure out ways to protect the arteries from dying during organ transplant or improve artery function during diseases such as high blood pressure. The information could literally save lives.”

“Cool. Wanna go to lunch?” she asked.

“Sure. How about macaroni and cheese.” I said, holding up a piece of artery that looked a lot like macaroni.

Ann laughed and said, “I was thinking of sandwiches at the deli, and since you’re such an expert, you can rate the meal.”

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. I had to miss a few games too. But again the goal was to enjoy ourselves and we succeeded, while still doing some research.

Research is a lot of work and a lot of fun, and to be successful it needs a lot of luck, too. I designed a research program with Dr. Dillon to do a project that had never been done before, in order to make some real discoveries and also to help me to learn a bunch of relevant research skills. I learned how to do research on measuring muscle function, protein chemistry, enzyme kinetics and work the NMR machine. All these were done using arteries from pigs and the studies were focused on the enzyme creatine kinase. At least once a week I would go to the slaughterhouse to get the arteries. The workers there were used to people coming from the university to pick up samples, this was relatively simple. I found it easy going even though there would be pigs being shocked, their throats cut and bled, and their body hair shaved off in a big machine. After being shaved the pigs were hung by their back legs and the bodies passed along an assembly line of butchers and meat inspectors.

I was able to obtain the arteries from the neck, the carotid arteries, myself by sneaking in between people working on the assembly line. Most of the people who obtained tissue from the slaughterhouse would tell the line workers or butchers what they needed and wait for it to be brought to them. I didn’t know that so the first time I came I just asked if I could go get the tissue from the pig carcasses. With my experience dissecting cadavers (see Chapter 3) and working on the ambulance, I had little problem obtaining the arteries and working fast on the line. I quickly got to the point where I could procure the arteries by feeling in the neck, not even looking at what I was doing, and making a few simple cuts with surgical scissors. The guys on the line thought that was clever. When there was a new guy working on the line, the regular line workers would have me show off my little trick of picking an artery out of the neck of a pig without looking. It was kind of a party trick and I would try to do it faster and faster to make sure I did not slow down the line. If I slowed down the line, it meant longer hours for the workers, and I would be very unpopular. So I tried to stay on their good side. Any time there was down time, I would try to explain to the guys what I was doing and why. I got to know the line workers and butchers fairly well and the visits to the slaughterhouse became a relatively pleasant weekly event.

Once I had the arteries I would put them in a bucket with a special solution to keep them alive and take them back to the physiology lab. Some of my experiments, such as these, were done in the physiology lab and others in the NMR lab. People often seem surprised that the arteries are alive after the pigs have been killed and the arteries removed from their bodies, but yes the arteries live on. When a person dies their arteries live for hours and even days later. The muscle cells in your artery will be alive long after your heart has stopped. In fact they are some of the last cells to die. If they did not live on after the heart stopped, organ transplant would not work. Keeping arteries alive and healthy will improve the success of organ transplants. One of the leading causes of organ transplant failure is the transplanted organ not getting enough blood flow from defective arteries. Again, the more we know about arteries the more we can help people and save lives.

At the physiology lab the arteries would be divided up to be used for research in the different experiments I needed to do. Some arteries would go to protein chemistry, some to muscle function, and others to NMR studies. The protein chemistry arteries had to be frozen quickly. Freezing arteries for protein chemistry is more than just putting them in a freezer. It was essential to freeze the arteries completely and quickly. So we used liquid nitrogen, which has a temperature of –346° Fahrenheit. The pig arteries (which looked and felt like long pieces of elbow macaroni) were plunged into a bucket of liquid nitrogen, freezing them nearly instantly. They became hard white tubes as fragile as glass. It was actually kind of fun freezing the arteries. Well, it was fun at first. After I did this to a few hundred and then a few thousand arteries it eventually became routine.

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 lots of students and some faculty interested in playing and we had a meeting to talk about forming a team. The meeting had two goals. The first was to decide whether to form a team or not. We unanimously agreed to do so, and there were more than enough people (both males and females) for a team. The second goal of the gathering was to decide whether we were going to play to win or play to have fun. In previous years some people took the team too seriously and that caused stress in the ranks of those who wanted to play to have fun. So we debated the issue, everyone had his or her say, and we voted. An overwhelming majority opted to play to have fun. We concluded the meeting by electing team captains and scheduling the first practices. The two team captains were Ken Loch and John McRorie. John was a power hitter and Ken was tremendous at defense and a good leader on the field. So they made a good team to lead our team.

At the first practice people were requesting positions and I requested outfield. Ken and John had no problems with me in the outfield, so that is the position I got. I actually made my high school baseball team, but I am not a very good baseball player and had played very little softball. By intramural standards, however, I was pretty good. I could hit consistently, and I could usually handle the fly balls that came my way. I was also in decent physical condition for the running around. All in all, softball was a pleasant diversion. Ann didn’t play, but she made some of the games. She and Ellie would often be on the sidelines watching. Ellie always wanted to chase the balls or be chewing on something. Ann hung out, getting a fantastic tan.

Even though we did not take the games seriously and we all wanted to have fun, we played well together and did in fact have a lot of fun. There was one exceptional player on our team, our captain Ken Loch, and he played second base. And although he agreed with the low-stress, have fun attitude; he still played to win. John McRorie was pitching. I was playing center field against a team from the sports med department (my former colleagues) that was exceptional and it was a very close game, with them in the lead and one out. I wanted to win more than usual because of the former connection I had with the other team. Their batter hit a fly ball with two people on base and it shot up over towards left field. The left fielder scrambled for it and I was running on an angle to back her up. But, when she lost sight of the ball in the sun, I accelerated to try to catch the ball myself. Before I even got to the ball Ken was telling me where to throw it to cut off the runners already heading to home. He had assumed the ball would hit the ground before I got to it. That thought pushed me harder. I dove to catch the ball, keeping my head up to see where the runners were. When I actually did manage to catch it Ken was silent and I saw that the runners were heading back to their bases to tag up. I threw to second for a double play from the outfield to end the inning.

I brushed myself off and Beth, the woman who lost sight of the ball, told me that I was bleeding. I had scraped my right elbow pretty good and it was oozing blood. Not a serious cut, but it looked impressive, making the catch all the more rewarding. Ken was still looking at me as I jogged to our sideline along the third base line. He shook his head and said,

“I would kill to have a chance to make that kind of play.”

That was a high compliment coming from Ken. I smiled and thanked him as Beth, Ken and I arrived at the sideline to a warm welcome from our teammates. Ann cleaned me off a bit and we continued the game. Eventually we lost the game, but we all had fun, which was always our goal. The scrapes on my elbow were like badges of honor.

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 her to look at the buffet line and said, ‘Yes. We are pretty much done. What I am focusing on now is garnishes and making things look nice. The line is organized in a logical way for people to serve themselves. We have all the required utensils. The tables are set. The hot food is hot, the cold food is cold, the drinks are ready to be served. We have an experienced bartender and I can help with mixed drinks too. By the way, all the food is very high quality and all that was missing was people. We have more people offering to help now than we need. Relax, food is not going to be a problem; forget the food and focus on fun.”

“Mary smiled and said, ‘Have I thanked you yet?’ ‘Yes, you thanked me,’ I said, ‘and so has every person who’s arrived here in the past 2 hours.’

People were arriving in numbers now, oblivious to what had transpired with the catering, and finding seats at the tables. The DJ was set up and all was as it should be.

The father of the bride came in and looked extremely concerned as he walked up to me. ‘Are you the one they say set all this up?’ he asked.

‘Yes sir, I am,’ I replied.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and shook my hand. I washed my hands and got back to work garnishing the trays. I was making radish and tomato rosettes with orange and lemon peel flower rings.

Needless to say, I was the most popular person at the wedding. I got to dance with the bride, and my date was thanked by everyone there and acknowledged by the DJ. It really felt good helping Mary, Linda and of course Susan.”

Ann just smiled at me and said, “That is the sweetest story ever. So, do you like to cook?”

“Yes, of course. If you play your cards right I can see a homemade meal for two in the future.” I said. “The problem will be that I’ll cook for two but the result will feed about 20 people”

She laughed and we got up to go. I was relieved that it seemed to be a nice evening and all indications were that there might be another date for us in the future.

We stopped by her place to meet her dog Ellie, a black and white collie mix, who was very affectionate and knew several tricks. I dropped Ann off at her car and kissed her good night and we each headed home.

“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 more interested in what I was saying. “Tell me more,” she said.

“I was dating a women who was a bridesmaid in a wedding. The wedding was out of town and she traveled ahead to that town a couple of days before. I was invited to the wedding but would not be sitting with her at the head table. Her name was Linda and the bride’s name was Susan – not Sue. She didn’t like being called Sue. I knew absolutely no one at the wedding and had only met Susan a couple of times. I also knew no one where the wedding was. Linda knew everyone and was staying with friends. I was staying alone in a hotel room the night before the wedding. So I was very much flying solo.

“I arrived at the church for the wedding in plenty of time and was seated on the bride’s side of the church. The service went well and I took some pictures of the bride and her bridesmaids. Afterward I wanted to go right to where the reception was being held, hoping to at least get a chance to talk to Linda for a little while and tell her she looked great.”

At this point, I paused to see if that comment on the looks of an ex was a problem, but Ann’s expression didn’t change, so I went on.

“The wedding party had plans to do photos and all of the usual stuff between the ceremony and the reception, so there was quite a bit of time between the two. I followed the directions to the reception and it was a kind of lodge in a park. The lodge was a large open room with a stage at one end, a serving area at another and a well-equipped kitchen behind the serving area. Tables were set up and it was attractively decorated. What was missing was food—servers, a buffet line or anything that would work for a wedding reception, which was to begin in less than three hours. One lone woman was sitting next to some boxes, looking as if she had been crying. I was beginning to think that maybe I was not at the right place and that she was not someone who would want to help a lost person. But I went up to her and asked a dumb question. ‘Excuse me, is this the location of the Oliver wedding reception?’”

“The woman looked and me and now I was sure she had been crying, and it was about to start again.”

“Yes, but this is a disaster. The caterers just dropped off all this stuff and left. There is no one here to set up the food, the buffet or anything.”

“‘Are you saying that the stuff in these boxes is the food and catering supplies for the reception, but you don’t know how to set it all up?’ I asked.”

“‘Yes,’ she said.”

“I glanced at my watch. ‘No problem, we have tons of time to set this up.’”

“She looked at me. ‘Do you know how what to do with all this stuff?’”

“‘Sure, no problem.’ I said.”

“I started unpacking boxes and telling her—her name was Mary—where to put things. It was clear that it was a hot and cold buffet. There were hot plates and the food was still warm and needed to get on the warmers. The cold plate consisted of traditional cold cuts, cheeses and garnishes. The caterers had supplied lettuce, tomatoes, radishes and various other accoutrements for salad and sandwich fixings. It was a very well equipped food choice for a wedding reception.

We laid out the tablecloths for the serving tables and there was more than enough room for a buffet line for a reception of this size. Mary was glad to be doing something and I was having a great time setting up the buffet. They even supplied sharp knives and I took to chopping and cutting veggies to be placed on the line.

Mary and I worked for about 30 minutes before some early out-of-town guests started arriving. Mary told them about the caterers dropping off the food and that I was directing the set up. Everyone who arrived got put to work immediately to finish getting the reception ready. I gave orders and did the more complicated food preparation. There was a lot of cutting to do and I can chop extremely fast – like the chef taught me – and there was even a good chopping knife. Much of the rest of the food prep could be done by any experienced cook, and everything else just needed someone to be told what to do or quickly shown.

I kept checking my watch and our progress was not far behind what we would have expected at the deli. The only problem was that I was the only one who knew what to do. Nonetheless I was having fun. It got pretty hot in the little kitchen, so I took my tie off and put it around my forehead to keep the sweat out of my eyes and out of the food. We had no hairnets, so this was the best I could do.

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 named Ellie. She shared a house with her older brother the faculty member, and they lived very close to campus. On the way back we would need to drive past it to take Ann back to her car, so we planned to stop to see Ellie on the way home.

We could have talked all night. Actually we did talk well into the night after the comedians finished. She had been married and lived in California for several years. She came home after her divorce and changed her name back to her maiden name. Her father was an avid flyer with his own plane, and she was taking flying lessons on Dad’s Piper Cub. Mom and Dad lived about an hour north of the university and she went home often to visit and for the flying lessons. She planned to get her pilot’s license. As to whether she would use that as a vocation or avocation would depend upon how much fun she had with it.

            “Right now I have a job and it is a good one. But I want a career,” she said.

The more I found out about her, the more interested I became. She said that her divorce had come about because she and her husband had married too young and they grew apart. He loved California and was stationed there in the Navy. When he got out of the service he wanted to stay, but she wanted to come back to Michigan. So, that and what she described as divergent futures led to the divorce. Ann told me all these things about her ex in a sincere but dispassionate tone of voice. She showed no sign of emotional pain or turmoil from her marriage and divorce. She seemed very open and comfortable talking about these very personal subjects on a first date.

The conversation inevitably turned to me and I was far less at ease talking about myself. I told her about my research and that I wanted a career helping people. I told her about my ambulance work and the athletic training I had done earlier. I did not tell her about being fired. I didn’t want her to think that I was a loser getting fired from a GA job.

“Why did you leave the training job?” she asked.

“Well,” I stammered, “I got really interested in research and the type of research I am doing now.”

I went on to tell her about the numbers of people who die of artery-related diseases and that my research could help save thousands of lives. She seemed touched by my emphatic desire to “help people” with my work.

“Did you ever have a job that was not ‘helping people?’” she asked.

“Yes, I did have a job working in a catering delicatessen when I was in high school. It was my first regular job.”

She didn’t say anything so I went on.

“The owners of the deli were cousins and one of them was a graduate of the Culinary Institute of New York. He was a great chef and he taught me all sorts of stuff for food prep in the deli as well as for catering. We would cater weddings, proms, parties—all kinds of events. I learned how to do hot and cold food prep, make sandwiches, and serve people all sorts of prepared foods. It was a lot of fun. I use a lot of recipes from the deli for my own cooking at home. The problem is I can only cook in large quantities.”

Ann laughed and said, “I see—so that is a job where it would be hard to ‘help people.’”

“Actually, there was a time when I was able to use those skills to help people who really needed help,” I replied.

The moment those words came out of my mouth my heart began to race and I felt I had just made a huge blunder. Helping people with deli skills was a story that would require me to talk about an ex girlfriend. The ex in question was not Holly, but I felt it could be a cardinal sin to talk about an ex on a first date. Yes, Ann had talked about her ex husband, but he lived in California. I was bringing up an ex who lived locally. Nonetheless the cat was out of the bag and now the whole story would have to come out.

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, where traditional research labs could be found. Traditional laboratories are labs that have beakers, tubes, chemicals, and colored solutions, and sometimes where experiments are done with animals. I worked in both types of laboratories; a traditional lab and the dry lab in the clinical center. The dry lab was where the big Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine would do analysis of samples. I would prepare my samples in the Physiology lab and analyze them in the NMR lab.

I felt very comfortable in the Physiology lab because this is how I was trained in chemistry and doing research. The people there, technicians, support staff, and administrators, became familiar friends and colleagues. As a graduate student I developed a network of friends and colleagues to talk to and to get ideas from as well as assistance with my work when needed. The old saying that it takes a village to raise a child is true in the mentoring system of obtaining a Ph.D. in that it takes a whole department of faculty, students and staff to ‘raise’ that student to become a Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Dillon, for example, was my teacher and mentor and trained me to do vascular smooth muscle research.

I also felt very much at home in the clinical center. I worked with the Family Practice and the Radiology people. With my experience on the ambulance, in emergency departments, and as an athletic trainer I was able to connect with them and got to know a lot of the physicians and staff quite well.

My research required a lot of organization and logistics because I needed to collect tissue samples from the slaughterhouse, make the experimental solutions, and then get time on the NMR to do the experiments. I befriended one of the assistants in the Radiology Department. Her name was Ann Murphy. She was blonde haired, blue eyed and quite attractive. She was about the age of my little sister; about 3.5 years younger than me. I often needed to talk to her about scheduling time on the NMR machine, organizing research meetings and other research related issues and we seemed to have a connection. She was recently divorced and we flirted pretty openly. While I was probably imagining it, she seemed sincerely interested in the research I was doing and how I was making up new programs on the NMR. She even pretended to be interested in my previous work as an Athletic Trainer and on the ambulance. I was quickly becoming interested in her. She was born and raised locally. She had a brother who was a faculty member on campus and her family still lived in the house she grew up in.

Finally, our banter and flirting needed to take a next step. I asked her on a date. I told her that I had an experiment on the NMR that was to start at 5:00 P.M. on a Thursday evening and that I had tickets to the local comedy club that evening. I invited her to dinner and the show and she said yes. So my advanced computer programming was letting me do an experiment while out on a date. When Thursday came, I had everything all set up to go and got the experiment running in record time. I went to her desk to pick up Ann and she was not there. Her colleague Jean was there and told me Ann would be back in a second.

When Ann walked down the hall she looked gorgeous. Her long blonde hair flowed gently about her shoulders and in the air as she walked and her blue and pink floral print dress accentuated her feminine form. She smiled brightly when she saw me and I think I was too struck by her beauty to smile back. I had seen her at work hundreds of times sitting at her desk and passing in the hall, but I had never really looked at her and it was like I was seeing her for the first time.

Out of some kind of nervous habit, I looked at my watch.

“Are we late?” she asked.

“No, I just wanted to see what time it is. We have tons of time.” I said in a meek and halting voice.

Ann got her stuff and we walked out with a wave to Jean, who had a big smile on her face.

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 University was a state school and it had a philosophy of accepting lots of students and then failing out the people who do not produce. So the attrition rate for the whole university was well over 20%. My Ph.D. class had an attrition rate of 25%. People would start but not finish the program. In the Ph.D. programs some people would get very far in the program but not be able to finish the thesis or defend it successfully. This is sometimes called an ABD (all but degree or all but dissertation). On occasion the failed Ph.D. candidate would petition to get a masters, but that was not an option for me. A second master’s would do nothing for me, as it would be like bringing two baseball bats to the plate. You can only really use one.

One of the requirements for a Ph.D. was to take a class that had the students giving lectures and presentations to each other. It was a practical exercise because it taught us public speaking and lecturing. Generally this class was team taught, meaning that the senior faculty would take turns teaching sections. So there would be different and changing theories on how to teach as well as what to teach. On one occasion we were told to pick a single research paper and present it to the group, and to make the talk as memorable as possible. We could use visual aids or limited multi media (acetate overhead projections, but no audio or video).

I chose a paper and went to work on my presentation. On the day of the presentation, I had all my acetate projections made with black text and figures on a bright red background. I also wore an outfit that was all red, including red shirt and tie, and even red shoes and socks. I started my talk by saying that there was no particular reason for the background of my projections being red, and the audience laughed at the obvious irony of red slides presented by a speaker dressed in red. Professor Sparks agreed that the talk was memorable, which was my goal. I had indeed met the requirements for that task. I don’t think anyone remembered what I talked about, but rather that I had done it all dressed in red. I did get one question at the end of my presentation: someone asking if my underwear was also red.

“Why do you ask?” I enquired sarcastically.

I worked hard in graduate school, but I was able to have fun too. After working for years on an ambulance and then more as an athletic trainer, I enjoyed having no one depending upon me for their health or well-being. On the ambulance if I had a bad day, someone died. As a trainer if I had a bad day, an athlete might have been injured and ended their career or season. Those were hard things. It may seem harsh to say so, but sometimes the injuries to the athletes were harder to take because these were often people I knew and even friends. So their injury became a personal failure for me. It would often bring male and female athletes to tears to be told their season was likely over. But in graduate school if I had a bad day at the lab, the experiment did not work, so I went home early and studied for a class. No one died and no one cried.

As a graduate assistant I also had an income, so I did not need to work multiple jobs. For my undergraduate and Master’s I worked a bunch of jobs to pay for my education. I worked on an ambulance, in an emergency room, in labs, and selling shoes. Now I just focused on the Ph.D. treadmill. If I could just jump through their hoops, I should end up with a Ph.D. degree in a couple years. These hoops required classes, teaching experience, comprehensive exams and research. My research was going to use nuclear magnetic resonance to analyze reactions in living arteries.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is an analytic method that can study atoms and molecules. It can work on pure chemicals and living people. The way it works is that a magnetic field makes the atoms more able to sense radio waves. When a radio wave is sent into the magnetic field, those atoms absorb the waves. When the radio is turned off, the absorbed radio waves are sent back and can be used to analyze the atoms and molecules present. So if a person is put in an NMR that can detect the radio waves given off and assemble them into a picture, you have a magnetic resonance image (MRI). Because MRI and NMR use magnets and radios they can be used on humans without hurting the person or changing the physiology of what is being analyzed.

In my research on NMR I was measuring the molecules in the arteries and how they were changing to affect the function of the arteries. The NMR facility was in the clinical center because it was associated with radiology and the clinical imaging people were using it too. I would need to schedule time on the NMR to do my research. Because I was the new kid on the team and not a professor or radiologist, I would often be scheduled for nights and weekends on the NMR. This was largely fine with me because it allowed me to work somewhat unsupervised and to try things I might not try with lots of supervision. I rationalized that this was all part of doing research—trying new things and observing the results. I would write programs on the NMR’s computer and run them to see what the system would let me do. I actually got kind of a rush pushing the computer system to do things it was not really designed to do.

I also wrote programs for my experiments that would allow me to automate many of my research protocols. A research protocol is kind of like a recipe for a cook. It is a series of steps designed to produce a certain end result. This gave me time to concentrate on other things. I worked really hard at not having to work too hard. My programming got to the point where I could set up experiments to run for days at a time. I could set up an experiment on the machine in a couple of hours and let it run for a day or more, while checking on it occasionally to avoid glitches. Sometimes, I would be in another building doing other experiments and other times I would go home to bed (if I had an overnighter scheduled).