Some reflections on reaching 70
My father met my mother in a movie theater – a cinema – in the East End of London early in the 1930’s when he sat next to her and when the lights went up he asked her for a light for his cigarette. She didn’t smoke, but they got chatting, as people do, and he asked if he could see her again. She agreed and gave him her address – they had no phones then – and one thing lead to another and they got married in 1935 and I was born in 1938, and here I am 70 years later. This event has caused me some ambivalence about being anti-smoking!
Naomi’s parents were Zionists, and when the State of Israel was founded in 1948 they decided to move there from London, which they did in 1949. However, things were difficult then, at first they lived on a kibbutz, but there were problems, so they moved to a small town near Haifa. But, then her father got ill, and the doctor advised them to return to London for treatment and then he promptly bought all their furniture. If they hadn’t returned then I would not have met my wife in London.
I went to Queen Mary College of London University and studied chemistry and read about the then recent discovery of the structure of DNA, and decided to go and do my PhD in Cambridge with Lord Todd who had won the Nobel Prize for his work on DNA in 1957. I was lucky enough to be accepted there and obtained my PhD in 1964 and from there went on to do a post-doc at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.
Sharing my lab in the Isotope Dept. there was Aviva Lapidot and a young man named Brian Silver. He was a very charming fellow, who had done his PhD in London with Professor Gold, and they had published a paper together, “Silver and Gold” – I am not making this up. He had gone to Paris to study and there met a young woman who was going to visit Israel and he went with her, and they decided to stay.
It was Brian Silver who told me about NMR spectroscopy and recommended that I do a post-doc in the US, and he even recommended some specific people. One of them was Oleg Jardetzky. So I wrote to Jardetzky and the letter was forwarded to him in Cambridge, where he was on sabbatical, and he went to see Lord Todd and got a good report about me, and so he accepted me to work with him.
I went to Boston to work with Jardetzky at Harvard Medical School in 1966, but he hadn’t told me that he was leaving there, and so I went with him to Merck Research Labs in New Jersey. Naomi and the kids joined me there and we stayed for 3 years. That’s where we met the Portugals, whose parents were neighbors of our friends the Olarshs in Linden NJ and who became our first friends in Bethesda.
I never got along with Jardetzky, and so I looked around for somewhere else to work. I happened to be invited to a regional Am. Chem. Soc. Conf. In Washington DC by a fellow named Steve Heller, who told me that NIH was looking for someone to do NMR research. So I applied for this job and got it. That’s how I came to NIH in 1969.
This skein of coincidence and chance brought me to meet a lot of people. Of course, when I started at NIH I had no idea that I would stay there for 21 years and eventually I would affect so many lives and be affected in turn. We made some wonderful friends during our 30 years in the Bethesda area, and we are still in touch with many of them.
I remember after I had moved to NCI in 1983 that I was looking for a technician, and I was sitting outside the office of the personnel officer going thru applications, and I heard her interviewing someone and I was impressed by how polite he was, he called her “ma’am” all the time. After he left she gave me his application form, and I called Patrick Faustino to come in for an interview, and he was very polite, calling me “sir” all the time. I accepted him on condition that he stopped calling me “sir.”
I had over the course of my career about 32 post-docs and graduate students, both in the US and Israel. One incident I remember was that I received an application from Pittsburgh from a chemical physicist named Peter van Zijl, who was from Holland and wanted to stay in the US to marry his American girlfriend. His former Thesis advisor had been Professor McClean of Amsterdam University, and since I had met him previously I called him and he highly recommended Peter. So when Peter came to be interviewed he was very surprised when he walked thru the door and I told him immediately that he got the job.
I remember one incident from that time, when I was given a lab on the 6N corridor, but it was in a mess. I applied for it to be painted, but that would take weeks, and we wanted to move in immediately. So one weekend Pat and I sneaked in with paint and brushes and painted the lab. Of course, this was illegal, since it had to be painted by the official painters. When the painters showed up several weeks later we told them it had been a mistake.
After I had done the work on antisense oligonucleotides and got the patent for NIH, I joined Georgetown Medical School in 1990, which was a fateful year because both my children got married that year and I had an operation on my optic nerve that was fully successful. Then I spent two years as co-director of the Biochemistry Program at the Natl. Science Foundation In VA from 1994-1996. I moved on to Israel in 1996 and after a stint as Chief Scientist at the Sheba Medical Center I became a Visiting Professor working with Israel Ringel in the Pharmacology Dept. of Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 2001.
Looking back I don’t regret anything. I started as a poor boy in the East End of London with no prospects. I managed to get a PhD in Cambridge, and I was the first person in my whole extended family to even get a degree. Then I went to the US and became an American, and because of that my son now lives in California. Finally I moved to Israel and ended my career at Hebrew University. I know that I influenced many lives, for the better I hope, and I am grateful that we had a wonderful time together.
Now that I am retired I intend starting the career that I always dreamed of, to be an artist, but this time with no financial constraints, a bourgeois artist.
Naomi’s parents were Zionists, and when the State of Israel was founded in 1948 they decided to move there from London, which they did in 1949. However, things were difficult then, at first they lived on a kibbutz, but there were problems, so they moved to a small town near Haifa. But, then her father got ill, and the doctor advised them to return to London for treatment and then he promptly bought all their furniture. If they hadn’t returned then I would not have met my wife in London.
I went to Queen Mary College of London University and studied chemistry and read about the then recent discovery of the structure of DNA, and decided to go and do my PhD in Cambridge with Lord Todd who had won the Nobel Prize for his work on DNA in 1957. I was lucky enough to be accepted there and obtained my PhD in 1964 and from there went on to do a post-doc at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.
Sharing my lab in the Isotope Dept. there was Aviva Lapidot and a young man named Brian Silver. He was a very charming fellow, who had done his PhD in London with Professor Gold, and they had published a paper together, “Silver and Gold” – I am not making this up. He had gone to Paris to study and there met a young woman who was going to visit Israel and he went with her, and they decided to stay.
It was Brian Silver who told me about NMR spectroscopy and recommended that I do a post-doc in the US, and he even recommended some specific people. One of them was Oleg Jardetzky. So I wrote to Jardetzky and the letter was forwarded to him in Cambridge, where he was on sabbatical, and he went to see Lord Todd and got a good report about me, and so he accepted me to work with him.
I went to Boston to work with Jardetzky at Harvard Medical School in 1966, but he hadn’t told me that he was leaving there, and so I went with him to Merck Research Labs in New Jersey. Naomi and the kids joined me there and we stayed for 3 years. That’s where we met the Portugals, whose parents were neighbors of our friends the Olarshs in Linden NJ and who became our first friends in Bethesda.
I never got along with Jardetzky, and so I looked around for somewhere else to work. I happened to be invited to a regional Am. Chem. Soc. Conf. In Washington DC by a fellow named Steve Heller, who told me that NIH was looking for someone to do NMR research. So I applied for this job and got it. That’s how I came to NIH in 1969.
This skein of coincidence and chance brought me to meet a lot of people. Of course, when I started at NIH I had no idea that I would stay there for 21 years and eventually I would affect so many lives and be affected in turn. We made some wonderful friends during our 30 years in the Bethesda area, and we are still in touch with many of them.
I remember after I had moved to NCI in 1983 that I was looking for a technician, and I was sitting outside the office of the personnel officer going thru applications, and I heard her interviewing someone and I was impressed by how polite he was, he called her “ma’am” all the time. After he left she gave me his application form, and I called Patrick Faustino to come in for an interview, and he was very polite, calling me “sir” all the time. I accepted him on condition that he stopped calling me “sir.”
I had over the course of my career about 32 post-docs and graduate students, both in the US and Israel. One incident I remember was that I received an application from Pittsburgh from a chemical physicist named Peter van Zijl, who was from Holland and wanted to stay in the US to marry his American girlfriend. His former Thesis advisor had been Professor McClean of Amsterdam University, and since I had met him previously I called him and he highly recommended Peter. So when Peter came to be interviewed he was very surprised when he walked thru the door and I told him immediately that he got the job.
I remember one incident from that time, when I was given a lab on the 6N corridor, but it was in a mess. I applied for it to be painted, but that would take weeks, and we wanted to move in immediately. So one weekend Pat and I sneaked in with paint and brushes and painted the lab. Of course, this was illegal, since it had to be painted by the official painters. When the painters showed up several weeks later we told them it had been a mistake.
After I had done the work on antisense oligonucleotides and got the patent for NIH, I joined Georgetown Medical School in 1990, which was a fateful year because both my children got married that year and I had an operation on my optic nerve that was fully successful. Then I spent two years as co-director of the Biochemistry Program at the Natl. Science Foundation In VA from 1994-1996. I moved on to Israel in 1996 and after a stint as Chief Scientist at the Sheba Medical Center I became a Visiting Professor working with Israel Ringel in the Pharmacology Dept. of Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 2001.
Looking back I don’t regret anything. I started as a poor boy in the East End of London with no prospects. I managed to get a PhD in Cambridge, and I was the first person in my whole extended family to even get a degree. Then I went to the US and became an American, and because of that my son now lives in California. Finally I moved to Israel and ended my career at Hebrew University. I know that I influenced many lives, for the better I hope, and I am grateful that we had a wonderful time together.
Now that I am retired I intend starting the career that I always dreamed of, to be an artist, but this time with no financial constraints, a bourgeois artist.
posted by Jack Cohen at 7:59 PM
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