NOT OC. WHY I AM NOT A BIOCHEMIST

Linda and her good friend Pat Beechem

probably about 1989

With my new mission(s) in life – cure ovarian cancer and win the Noble prize in medicine – I have taken a close look at why I did not become a biochemist.  There are, it seems, two reasons: Linus Pauling and Samuel J. Sims.  I will explain.

I was at Caltech during the early 50s.  According to something I read in “The Eighth Day of Creation” (an excellent book, by the way), Linus taught chemistry to the freshman class at that time.  Insisted on it, I think was said.  Well, that is only partly true, and a small part at that.  What he actually did was lecture at us, every so often, seemingly on a topic that happened to interest him that morning.  He was unlike others who tried to teach us; he seemed to enjoy what he was doing.  He hammed it up.  I remember one lecture – probably about refraction of X-rays through crystals – he talked to us while looking at us sideways through a highly refractive piece of something.    I must have felt that, if a world-renowned chemist could behave in such an unserious manner, then chemistry itself must not be all that serious, either.  Nobody in the room paid him much attention, except when, once in a while, he would say “Every Caltech chemistry student should know ….X”.  You knew that"X" would be on the test, so you wrote it down.  So, Linus is to blame.  But even more to blame is …. Sam Sims. 

Sam Sims and I were freshmen together at Tech, and we went to all our classes together as well.  Sam was a better football player than me, but I could beat him at freestyle wrestling.  We did the latter every evening after dinner – Tech students need ways to blow off steam, God knows: we were nerds, and there were no girls.  Anyway, we played lots of catch with the football.  (Sam actually started with the Tech varsity.  I might have been on the team, too.  I was asked to turn out.  That shows how desperate they were.)  During the spring-quarter chem final (Tech finals then lasted four hours, and were unsupervised) I discovered that Sims had brought his football to class.  After several hours of misery we climbed out through the window and tossed the football around for a long time.  Then, refreshed, sweaty and desperate, we finished the test.  Sims got a good grade.  I passed.  The next year I was at Stanford, studying political science.  It was a long road back to science, and on that road I never stumbled across any chemistry, nor biology for that matter.  Thus, when I started to volunteer at Fred Hutch, my ignorance was pure and complete.  Unfortunately, after six months of study, it still is.