The Path to Anatomy via Molecular Biology

Abstract

Prior to the advent of Maxam and Gilbert DNA sequencing and Sanger, Nicklen and Coulson DNA sequencing, I was a student in an RNA sequencing laboratory. The experience taught me the proper paranoia for isolating and handling RNA. This was useful when, in the 1980s, I joined the lab of Bjorn Olsen at Rutgers Medical School, now called Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. There I learned the most current procedures in molecular biology, DNA sequencing and cloning. Bjorn was a great mentor, and he was an interesting guy. One day, another student and I found his histology notebook on his bookshelf‐‐he had hand drawn and colored every tissue section he had viewed so that he could study them for his histology exams. They were beautiful, accurate works of art, so intricate that I wished I could draw like that. Bjorn's passion about his work was contagious, and as a consequence, I fell in love with the family of collagens, which consisted of only 9 or 10 members then. A postdoc in the Olsen lab, Yoshifumi Ninomiya, had a role in determining the structure of type IX collagen by making a cDNA library from cartilage mRNAs and isolating the cDNAs corresponding to the collagen IX polypeptide chains. I was in awe of the idea that there were molecular biology strategies that could be used to identify and characterize new collagens, all because these triple helical molecules had repeating Gly‐Xxx‐Yyy sequences. The thrill of potentially being able to discover a new collagen made me love this type of science even more, and I put my whole heart into it. Around that time, a postdoc from Elizabeth Hay's lab visited Bjorn's lab, and this led to my meeting one of the best friends I'll ever have. That person, Kathy Svoboda, is not only partially responsible for Bjorn being hired by Betty Hay, chair of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, but her suggestion meant my life would change too! If Bjorn went to Boston, my husband Don and I would also get to go. And we did! It was an exciting experience to be in that department. Kathy, Betty, Bjorn and other faculty would talk about the American Association of Anatomists, and Kathy convinced me that AAA had investigators and educators that covered just about any topic in the biological sciences that could possibly interest me. She talked me into attending one of the annual meetings. I joined AAA sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and, finding that what Kathy had said was true, I wanted to play a role in the society. I began serving on a committee as a guest member in 1999, and by 2001 I was committed to giving back to the Association since I had gotten so much from it. As I met more and more of the AAA members, I realized I now had greatly extended my “family” of scientists from this society, and that they played a big role in my being happy in my career.Support or Funding InformationSupported by National Eye Institute EY009056, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases U54AR055073, and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences P30ES005022