I was born in Cambridge, England, where my father, David Green, had done the research for his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins and where he remained as a Beit Fellow. My mother was English, whereas my father was an American citizen. When war broke out in Europe in 1940, America remained neutral, and my father was forced to leave England or give up his American citizenship. I grew up in Boston, New York, and then Madison, WI, where my father held a succession of academic positions. My earliest exposure to biochemistry, and to vitamins, was meeting the stream of scientists who joined our family for dinners. My mother was famous for her ability to prepare a dinner for guests with very limited notice and for her warm hospitality. Among those whose visits I remember were Luis Leloir and Sarah Ratner. I of course also met the members of my father's laboratory at the Enzyme Institute in Madison, and sometimes on Saturdays, I accompanied him to the laboratory and played with pH indicator dyes in little dimpled porcelain trays. I liked science and mathematics in school but never seriously imagined a career in science, most particularly because at that time there were few women in science, and most of those whom I met had chosen science to the exclusion of marriage and families. During one summer when I was in high school, my father employed me on the “night shift,” charged with preparing beef heart mitochondria for the next day's research. We would process vast amounts of beef heart from the local slaughterhouse in giant Waring Blendors and then isolate the mitochondria by differential centrifugation using a bank of centrifuges in the basement of the Enzyme Institute. I was amazed to find that I liked the work and enjoyed the camaraderie of the night shift. Nonetheless, I went to Radcliffe College in 1956 with the stated goal of becoming a social worker rather than a scientist! By that time, Radcliffe had merged with Harvard in all but name, and our classes were held jointly and graded jointly, even though our degrees remained separate. My cousin Barbara Green was a senior in Bertram Hall, where I was assigned as a freshman, and she was majoring in Biology. She spent hours telling me about the revolution in biology that was occurring, some of it at the Biology Laboratories at Harvard. So in the second semester of my freshman year, I signed up for my first science course, Biology 1. In the laboratory that accompanied this course, I met my husband-to-be, a Harvard sophomore named Larry Matthews. By the end of the first year of college, I had decided to major in Biology. The next 2 years were spent taking the required preparatory courses. I loved organic chemistry and calculus and hated introductory physics for non-majors, which seemed incredibly dry and unrelated to biology; at that time, the course was all about levers and pulleys, with almost nothing about atomic structure and nothing at all about quantum mechanics. In my junior and senior years, my biology courses were fascinating, e.g. a seminar in genetics taught by R. P. Levine and a course in biochemistry taught by George Wald. Wald was an incredibly inspiring lecturer, whose enthusiasm for science was infectious. A few months before graduation and my marriage to Larry, I broke my leg rather badly in a skiing accident, which greatly impaired my hunting for a job after college. Wald offered me a job as a research assistant in his laboratory. In retrospect, I find it amazing that I did not even consider applying to graduate school despite the fact that I graduated summa cum laude in Biology, but in 1960, there were almost no female role models on the faculty at Harvard, and I think it is fair to say that most male faculty members did not expect women, and especially married women, to seriously pursue academic careers in science.
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Jan 1, 2010
A Kuzelov + 2
Open Access
