An Epis­tle From the Past

by Elio

I re­cently found a let­ter I re­ceived in 1955, giv­ing me ad­vice about where to ap­ply for a post­doc in Eu­rope. In those days, do­ing a post­doc in Eu­rope was nearly de rigueur for young Amer­i­cans who wanted to fol­low an aca­d­e­mic ca­reer. I'm not en­tirely clear what the rea­son was, as there were plenty of front-line labs ac­tive in mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­ogy in the US. Surely the joy­ful prospect of a year or two abroad played a big role. At any rate, I was caught in this and be­gan to plan ahead of time which lab would suit me best. So, I con­sulted with Gun­ther Stent (1924−2008), a mem­ber of the leg­endary early phage ge­neti­cist group led by Max Del­bruck. I knew Stent slightly from a cou­ple of Cold Spring Har­bor sym­posia I had at­tended as a grad­u­ate stu­dent and he seemed to be friendly enough. His let­ter con­firmed his good will to­wards a young sci­en­tist.

Let­ter from Gun­ther Stent, July 11, 1955. Page 1

The sug­ges­tions Stent made turned out to be a mixed bag, skewed surely by my hav­ing stated an in­ter­est in "cell frac­tion­a­tion" (by which I meant what is now called bac­te­r­ial cell bi­ol­ogy). So, his is not a com­plete list of the most at­trac­tive labs in Eu­rope. Miss­ing con­spic­u­ously are the labs in Cam­bridge, Eng­land, where Crick and Bren­ner presided. But most of the ones Stent in­cluded were in­deed out­stand­ing.

Let­ter from Gun­ther Stent, July 11, 1955. Page 2

Note that even in those days, look­ing for a post­doc took time and ef­fort. The most at­trac­tive labs had long lists of ap­pli­cants; thus fore­thought was called for even then. Even­tu­ally, I chose to ap­ply to Ole Maaløe's lab in Copen­hagen, guided in part by what Stent had to say about the work on syn­chro­nous cul­tures that was be­ing done there. This, it turns out, was a very happy choice. I joined the lab at the in­cep­tion of what be­came known as the "Copen­hagen School of Bac­te­r­ial Growth Phys­i­ol­ogy." See here for some of its his­tory. Some­what para­dox­i­cal is that when I ar­rived, Maaløe was try­ing to de­ter­mine if his syn­chrony ex­per­i­ments were due to an ar­ti­fact. They were in­deed, as we soon found out. So, un­til Helm­stet­ter and Cooper in­vented the baby ma­chine, the sub­ject did not ful­fill the "bright fu­ture" that Stent had pre­dicted for it. Re­gard­less, I was surely in­flu­enced by Stent's mea­sured opin­ion and grate­ful for his will­ing­ness to help me.

The ref­er­ence in Stent's let­ter is to Carl­ton Gaj­dusek, a med­ical ad­ven­turer if there ever was one. He went on to get the No­bel Prize for show­ing that Kuru, the first hu­man prion dis­ease, was in­fec­tious. If you won­der about my ad­dress on the let­ter, I was at that time serv­ing as a pri­vate in the U.S. Army, as­signed to a lab do­ing re­search on rick­ettsiae. Gaj­dusek was at Wal­ter Reed at the time as a civil­ian, dur­ing one of his in­fre­quent state­side so­journs. He was one of sev­eral out­stand­ing sci­en­tists I got to know there, some of who were my bar­racks-mates. That was dur­ing the Ko­rean War, when prac­ti­cally every­one my age was drafted. Sci­en­tists dur­ing work­ing hours, sol­diers the rest of the time! Four days af­ter my dis­charge, my wife and I were on a ship to Copen­hagen.