Developmental biology using purified genes

Abstract

Some history After three years of college I entered the University of Chicago Medical School in the fall of 1952 and discovered biochemistry and research. Lloyd Kozloff, a member of the bacteriophage group in the Department of Biochemistry, guided my research. While in medical school I began searching for a future research subject, thinking it should be an important medically related problem but unexplored by what were then the modern methods of biochemistry. The field of embryology, newly named ‘developmental biology’, caught my attention. Reproductive biology was barely discussed, and descriptive embryology was taught in two lectures as a part of gross anatomy. In 1953, I attended a biochemistry journal club discussion of the Watson-Crick Nature paper describing the structure of DNA. I knew immediately that my future would involve some merger of DNA research, biochemistry and the field of embryology. After an internship at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and my wedding, my wife and I moved to Bethesda, Maryland. My two years of service were fulfilled as a member of the first class of ‘research associates’ at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). I spent two wonderful years in the Institute of Mental Health as part of a project organized by Seymour Kety to investigate systematically the metabolism of molecules that had been implicated in schizophrenia. I was assigned to study the urinary metabolites of the amino acid histidine because it was the precursor of one such compound—histamine. I ended my two years by feeding 10 microCuries of 14C-histidine to ten healthy controls and ten people with schizophrenia, collecting their urine and analyzing the radioactive products. Then I published one of the few negative studies on the subject of the biochemical basis of schizophrenia. Developmental biology using purified genes