Abstract
If you don't know where you're going, you might wind up someplace else—Yogi Berra My professional journey, once I accepted the fact that I would not play first base for the Chicago Cubs, was not accomplished in a straight line. I entered medical school intending to become a family physician but soon became interested in research. I took an internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), then a long research fellowship in the nascent field of molecular biology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and followed that with training in clinical endocrinology at the University of Wisconsin. I spent the next fifteen years dividing my time between the clinic and laboratory at the University of Iowa. Finally, I decided to concentrate on research and spent the next twenty-three years at Vanderbilt University. For the past eleven years, I have been at the University of Iowa, where I helped establish a new diabetes research center. My research journey also had several different directions. Upon reflection, I guess I ended up “someplace else” by choice, and it certainly has been an interesting trip. It is one I unreservedly recommend.
Highlights
About half of the sixteen students in my high school class in a small Iowa town were destined to go to college
REFLECTIONS: In Pursuit of Genes of Glucose Metabolism the three months of summer “vacation.” I was selected to ask whether he would consider taking all three of us. He agreed, and this led to a life-changing experience
He designed experiments that never seemed to fail. He initiated our education in the elements of experimental design, conduct, and interpretation. When he decided the story was complete, he wrote a draft in longhand in an evening, his secretary typed it, and he sent it to a journal, all in 24 h
Summary
From the Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242. I spent the two years taking medical and graduate school classes, serving as a teaching assistant in the gross anatomy and histology laboratories, and doing research. With the assistance of several classmates who served as able technicians and with occasional directions from Nick in the form of handwritten letters (no phone calls, E-mails, or computers), we completed three projects concerning how intracellular iodide influences the transport process [1,2,3] All of this was accomplished while I was a full-time third-year medical student, and it had the blessing of the department chairman. During the spring of 1964, one of my attending physicians, Mort Myers, an Iowa graduate and an internist in Berkeley, brought Gordon Tomkins ( at the NIH) to ward rounds one morning This was my first exposure to Gordon’s incredible intellect. He invited me to stop by his laboratory after I arrived
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