I was born and raised on the south side of Indianapolis, Indiana. I attended the same elementary and high schools that my father and his siblings attended. I lived three blocks from my paternal grandparents, who lived down the street from the house my grandmother was born in. My maternal roots are in southern Indiana, in the small towns of West Baden and French Lick. My first encounter with the life sciences was in my high school biology class, taught by Mr. Don Fisher. Suffice it to say, it was not an inspiring experience. In those days it was typical for students to observe Hydra in high school biology classes, but I don’t recall that we did. After graduating from high school in 1970, I went to college at Indiana University in Bloomington, where I joined the newly established honors track in the biological sciences. My intention at this point was to go to medical school. My cohort in the honors track had only about 30 students, remarkable for a large university like Indiana. The track consisted of courses in biochemistry, genetics, developmental biology, physiology, and ecology. I really enjoyed the courses and was starting to think about taking the MCAT when I took the developmental biology course during my junior year. The course was taught by George Malacinski. I had not had a teacher anything like George in my previous two years of college (nor since). Here was someone who was making us develop hypotheses, critique our classmates’ ideas, analyze data, defend our conclusions, all right there in the classroom. George was making us do what we thought we had come to college for, using our brains as analytical tools rather than simply as storage devices. We used no textbook for the course, and we actually covered only a very small amount of factual information. But we learned so much. Essentially, we had a semester long Socratic dialogue on doing experimental biology. A friend of mine (who is also now a university faculty member in biology) was in the course at the same time as me and I remember well that we spent much of our time that semester discussing what a strange and wonderful experience George’s course was.

As I mentioned above, at the time I enrolled in George’s course, I was certain that I wanted to go to medical school. By the time I was part way through the semester I knew that I had to go to graduate school. George’s teaching style showed me what a truly thrilling business biological research could be, and I simply couldn’t resist. Near the end of the course, I approached George about doing an undergraduate research elective in his lab. He said yes and my career as a scientist was started. I spent the rest of my junior and senior years working in George’s lab, studying amphibian development. While I was in his lab, George alerted me to a National Science Foundation summer research program at MIT which gave me the opportunity to spend the summer between my junior and senior years working in the lab of Nobel laureate David Baltimore, under the tutelage of his graduate student Debbie Spector. I have no doubt that George’s letter of recommendation played a very important role in getting me into the MIT program and subsequently into graduate school at Yale.

My experiences with George were not restricted to the classroom and laboratory. When I decided to apply to Yale for graduate school, George informed me that he and several colleagues were driving from Bloomington to Yale for a meeting and that I could come along to check out the place. It was a truly memorable trip. I also remember riding on the back of George’s motorcycle to play touch football on Sunday mornings as an undergraduate. George didn’t stop being my teacher after I left Bloomington. When I visited George shortly after starting my own lab as a faculty member, I told him about what projects my lab was embarking on. George’s response was to ask me whether the questions we were asking were really going to tell us something worthwhile and if so, what?