First Protein Crystallography Experiments on a Synchrotron

Abstract

My story started in the winter of 1973/1974. I was a graduate student at UCLA, my thesis work was going nowhere, and my wife was expecting a baby in the early summer, while we had no health insurance that would pay for this happy event. It was clearly time to find a place other than Los Angeles to continue work in protein crystallography. Since I wanted to study crystal structure of the nerve growth factor (NGF), and the West Coast expert in that field was Eric Shooter at Stanford, I asked him if he would be willing to accept me as a postdoc. He was, but had no funds. However, somehow he contacted Keith Hodgson and the two of them managed to find some money, to the best of my recollection in the Department of Psychiatry. Although Keith agreed to let me work on the structure of NGF and a few other proteins, he stipulated that my primary objective should be to help in setting up the first in the world beamline devoted to the use of synchrotron radiation for single-crystal diffraction from protein crystals. To tell the truth, I initially had some problems understanding what exactly he had in mind—somehow my undergraduate degree in physics did not cover that particular subject. Thus, in the late spring of 1974, the team was established—Keith at the lead, two postdocs (Margueritte Yevitz Bernheim and myself) and a graduate student, James Phillips. We were joined by Julia Goodfellow (now Dame Julia) a year later. And the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Project also officially commenced at about the same time.