An Academic Journey

Abstract

Although I am seventy-six years old and long past adolescence, words my beloved grandfather spoke to me when I was a teenager still resound in my mind: “Tommy (my childhood name),” he said, “now that I finally know something about pediatrics, I must leave.” Ludwig Ferdinand Meyer, M.D., indeed knew something about pediatrics—as a young researcher in Berlin, Germany, he had discovered the role of potassium in infant diarrhea, thus radically improving every child’s chances of surviving infancy. Today I feel much as I imagine my grandfather did then. I have no immediate plans to leave, but hopefully I know something about adolescence. And, like my grandfather before me, I now have an opportunity to share some random thoughts about my career as a research scholar with younger generations. I hope these ideas and reminiscences will be useful to those of you who find yourselves on a similar path. If you, like me, end your career a researcher, then you probably started out in life as one too. As I look back on my own journey, I can see that an intense desire to explore has always been an important part of my being. Perhaps I was born with this drive: according to my mother Ilse’s diary of my early childhood, I was a curious child, always asking a lot of “why” questions. And inquiry was certainly a part of everyday life as I was growing up; my father and grandfather were pediatric researchers, and I eavesdropped on academic discussions throughout my childhood. In my high school years, I undertook my first real research project—the classification of my prized insect collection. I