On being a pathologist: a turning point in my career

Abstract

I was born and bred in Argentina. I completed my medical education and basic pathology training in Buenos Aires. Soon after, in 1968, my husband, Professor Daniel Catovsky and I, with a very young child, came to London, England, for further postgraduate education. It was then when I had the fortune of meeting and working with the late Professor Anthony Everson Pearse, the great innovator and histochemist. The technique of immunocytochemistry, as originally proposed by Coons et al [1], had begun to emerge as a potential method to understand mechanisms of disease by demonstrating specific cellular products. In parallel the nascent field of “gut hormones” had begun to take center stage, in particular with the isolation, purification, and subsequent synthesis of 2 putative gut hormones: secretin and enteroglucagon. Armed with specific antibodies and the nascent immunocytochemistry method, I was able to improve the original methods and demonstrate the cellular origin, in the gut, of these 2 hormones [2,3]. This was followed by the demonstration that there was a third endocrine cell type in the pancreatic islets, the so-called D cell, that produced the paracrine regulator, somatostatin [4]. These discoveries earned me the honor of being the eighth most quoted author, and a couple of the papers were selected by the “current content watch dog” as scientific highlights. The early 1970s were exciting times for endocrine pathology. Ignited with enthusiasm and following the concept of Feyrter [5] of the presence of “clear” cells (possibly endocrine/paracrine cells), I began to search, using specific antibodies, for the presence of these cells in other endodermal derivatives, like the lung. Lo and behold the