The first decisions I had to make after starting graduate school in the Biology Department at Yale in 1974 were what courses to take and what lab to join. Incoming students met with a faculty committee during orientation week to decide what courses to take. For reasons I still cannot fathom, one of my committee members thought I should take a course on differential equations. Luckily another member of the committee vetoed that idea. I was initially given a desk in Doug Kankel’s lab as a place to hang out while I decided what lab I wanted to work in. I didn’t know at the time that Doug had published a study of budding in Hydra that he did as an undergraduate in the Shostak lab at the University of Pittsburgh. As a result of having a desk in Doug’s lab, I met Elliot Meyerowitz, who was starting his second year of graduate school in Doug’s lab. Elliot, Wayne Leibel, and I were housemates for a year during our time at Yale. Elliot would go on to a faculty position at Caltech and great acclaim as a plant biologist. He and I are still good friends.

After perusing the research going on in various labs, I approached Peter Rae about joining his lab. I was intrigued by work that Peter had done on dinoflagellate DNA, and I asked him if I could work on that project. Peter’s lab had the added benefit of being next door to Joe Gall’s lab. The two labs shared a dark room, cold room, etc., and the graduate students from the two labs shared offices. Joe was on the thesis committees of most of Peter’s students (including mine) and vice versa. My PhD thesis was entitled “Aspects of the Composition and Organization of Dinoflagellate DNA.” Peter’s and Joe’s labs were two of the earliest labs at Yale to use recombinant DNA methods. I was the first person to clone DNA from a dinoflagellate. While a graduate student, I had my first close encounter with Hydra in the lab. Rahul Warrior, now my faculty colleague at UCI, was a graduate student in the Gall lab, studying mitochondrial DNA in Hydra. Rahul and I overlapped at Yale by a year. I remember seeing the Gall lab Hydra cultures in the cold room.

I spent the summer between my second and third years of graduate school as a student in the Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. As is almost invariably said about the summer courses at the MBL, this was a transformative experience for me. During the part of the course when we did independent projects, I had the pleasure of working with Joan Ruderman on histone genes in the surf clam. I have been back to Woods Hole as a course instructor and summer researcher multiple times since. It is always a thrill to step off the bus and head down Water Street to the MBL.

In 1977, Ron Reeder’s lab in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington published a paper describing the isolation and characterization of ribosomal DNA chromatin. I was quite excited by this paper since it provided an opportunity to identify the proteins associated with an active gene. I applied to Ron for a postdoctoral position in his lab. Ron invited me to visit his lab and give a seminar at the Carnegie. Shortly after my visit, Ron called to offer me a position in his lab, which he informed me would be moving from Baltimore to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The Hutch was a truly amazing place to be a postdoc. There was so much exciting science going on, and so much interaction between faculty. postdocs, technicians, and graduate students. In addition there was basketball with Hal Weintraub, Mark Groudine, Steve McKnight, and a host of graduate students and postdocs. When I look back, I am amazed at how tolerant Ron was of my meandering research path during my time in his lab. When I wasn’t doing science, I was hiking, climbing, and cross-country skiing in the Cascades and Olympics. For most of the time I lived in Seattle, I did not own a car. That meant a three-mile uphill bike ride to the lab every morning, come rain or shine, which in Seattle often meant rain. During my time at the Hutch I was lucky to overlap with fellow Hoosier Dan Gottschling, who was a postdoc in Ginger Zakian’s lab. We became close friends and have had some great adventures together, including climbing Mt. Rainier and a three-week bicycle trip in Iceland.

While I spent much of my time in the Reeder lab working on ribosomal DNA in the frog Xenopus, towards the end of my tenure in his lab, I began to get interested in oncogenes and the proto-oncogenes that gave rise to them. This was not surprising given the number of labs at the Hutch working on cancer. I thought Xenopus oocytes and embryos might be useful for studying the role of proto-oncogenes in development. For this reason, I set out to isolate and characterize the src proto-oncogene from Xenopus. I was successful in doing this and wanted to focus my future research on src instead of rDNA. Since Ron wanted to keep his lab’s research focused on ribosomal DNA, he informed me that it was time for me to wrap things up in his lab and move on. I had no idea what I would do next. And then something wonderful happened. One day, out of the blue, Mark Groudine suggested that I apply for a Leukemia Society Special Fellowship, and if I got it that I could work in his lab. I got the fellowship and had a wonderful two years as a member of Mark’s lab. I will be forever indebted to Mark for seeing something in me that he thought worth nurturing.