Postdoctoral Years Research Articles

Shang Fa Yang: Pioneer in plant ethylene biochemistry

Shang Fa Yang was born in Taiwan in 1932. After receiving his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Agricultural Chemistry from the National Taiwan University, he came to the United States in 1958 to pursue a Ph.D. degree at Utah State University. Following three postdoctoral years, he was hired at the University of California, Davis, in 1966 where he was a biochemist and professor for 28 years. After retiring early from UC Davis, he subsequently established a research program at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and served as Vice President of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Yang's research achievements included discovering the biochemical pathway for the synthesis of ethylene by identifying the key steps by which S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) is converted into 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC) and subsequently into ethylene. Yang further demonstrated how the methylthio and ribose moieties from SAM were recycled back into methionine in order to sustain high rates of ethylene synthesis, as in ripening fruits. This recycling pathway is now known as the Yang Cycle. Yang also contributed to the isolation, characterization and cloning of ACC synthase and ACC oxidase, the two enzymes in the ethylene biosynthetic pathway, and to the elucidation of their structure and reaction mechanisms. He made important contributions to auxin, cytokinin, cyanide and sulfur metabolism in plants as well. His work formed the basis for subsequent research that has established ethylene as the most thoroughly characterized of the hormonal biosynthesis and signaling pathways in plants.

40 Years with Bacteriophage ø29

I have dedicated the past 46 years of my life to science and I expect to be active in research for many more years. I have been lucky in my professional life. During my postdoctoral years I discovered two proteins that I showed to be involved in the initiation of protein synthesis. Working with bacteriophage ø29 for the past 40 years, we have made many interesting findings. Among them is the discovery of a protein covalently linked to the 5' ends of ø29 DNA that we later showed to be the primer for the initiation of ø29 DNA replication. Also, the finding of the ø29 DNA polymerase with its properties of high processivity, strand displacement, and high fidelity has been very rewarding. The ø29 DNA polymerase has become the ideal enzyme for DNA amplification, both rolling circle and whole-genome amplification. I also am happy because I have worked with many brilliant students and collaborators over the years, most of whom have become excellent scientists.

Publishing Trends of Psychology Faculty During Their Pretenure Years

This article describes an analysis of the productivity of psychology faculty during their first 7 postdoctoral years. The primary goal was to provide objective data regarding the typical rates of productivity for untenured cognitive, developmental, and social psychologists who hold appointments at highly ranked institutions. Although the median rate of pretenure publishing conforms to informal impressions that junior faculty are typically awarded tenure if they publish at least one or two articles per year, tenure was awarded to 25% of the sample even though these individuals published less than one article per year. This finding cannot be explained by appealing to (a) the number of articles published prior to accepting a tenure-track appointment, (b) the number of chapters produced, or (c) the impact factors of the journals in which the individuals published.

Interviews With Andrologists (Part 1)

Interviews With Andrologists (Part 1)

A voyage to the inner space of cells.

The title I have chosen for my personal recollections describes, in a nutshell, the direction my scientific endeavors from the time of my Ph.D. thesis, which I began in 1970, to the present day. Over the years, I have changed fields a number of times. There were periods when I was preoccupied with the development of methods; at other times, the focus was on biological problems. Science can be advanced by new hypotheses about how things work, which can be tested and proven right or wrong, and by new methods which enable us to tackle questions that we were unable to address with the existing methods. Or, as Richard Feynman put it, “Science means, sometimes, a special method of finding things out. Sometimes it means the body of knowledge arising from the things found out. It may also mean the new things you can do when you have found something out, or the actual doing of new things. This last field is usually called technology. . . .” (R.P. Feynman in the John Danz Lectures, 1963 [Feynman 1998]).

Reminiscences of Leon A. Heppel

Reminiscences of Leon A. Heppel

Meet the Guest Editor [ Novel Roles for Metallopeptidases in Cellular Signalling (Guest Editor: Rebecca A. Lew)

Following the completion of her doctorate in physiology from the University of Virginia in 1990, Dr. Lew moved to Melbourne, Australia where she began her work in the peptidase field, primarily at the Baker Heart Research Institute with Dr. Ian Smith, a working relationship that has lasted over 10 years. Throughout her postdoctoral years, she has maintained research interests in how peptide hormones control cardiovascular and neuroendocrine function, with a focus on the enzymes that synthesize and degrade these signalling molecules. Her work has resulted in over 35 papers in peer-reviewed journals, as well as a number of book chapters and meeting proceedings. She has recently moved to the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Monash University, and is actively involved in both the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Moelcular Biology and the Australian Peptide Society.

Q & A

After spending two postdoctoral years each in the laboratories of Jun-ichi Tomizawa in Tokyo and Dick Epstein in Geneva, David Shub joined the faculty of the Biology Department at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he has been ever since. For the past 17 years his lab has explored the self-splicing group I introns in bacteria and phages, with emphasis on their origin, distribution, and function as selfish elements.

Bo Andersson

Bo Andersson

Easing the Perils of the Postdoctoral Years A Call for Institutional Attention

Easing the Perils of the Postdoctoral Years A Call for Institutional Attention

John Bardeen (1908-1991)

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of John Bardeen, one of the most outstanding figures in the science of the 20 th century. In this article I offer a necessarily brief description of the life and work of this extraordinary physicist, whom I was lucky enough to know during my postdoctoral years at the University of Illinois. This narration will be mostly devoted to John Bardeen as an inventor and as a scientist, but some attention will also be paid to him as a consultant to industry and and advisor to government. An attempt will also be made to outline the main traits of his personality. Most of the material used to ellaborate this presentation has been taken from the account prepared by Lilian Hoddeson for the celebration of John Bardeen's eightieth birthday held at Urbana in 1988 [1], and from the articles written by Conyers Herring, Nick Holonyak Jr., J. Robert Schrieffer, George Pake, and David Pines, which were published in the April 1992 special issue of Physics Today [2].

The 11th Bracey Report on The Condition of Public Education

Mr. Bracey takes a close look at our national mania for testing, at new NAEP data, at international comparisons - and, alarming, at where it could all end up. A LOT of people think I defend schools reflexively. Not so. But a little more than a decade ago, I found a lot of data that proved that the people who make up what I have come to call the Education Scare Industry were wrong, and I said so. When I have thought the schools have been wrong, I have said that, too. I begin this report with three of the most despicable, totalitarian acts by school authorities known to me in the 34 postdoctoral years I've been in education. These are the attacks by Gwinnett County, Georgia, on Susan Ohanian; by the Massachusetts Department of Education on Alfie Kohn; and by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) on George Schmidt. I presume Ohanian and Kohn are known to Kappan readers from their bylines in this journal. Schmidt was a teacher in Chicago. All three of their stories are dirty - but informative - tales about deeds done in the name of high-stakes testing. The beginning of the Schmidt and Ohanian stories were recounted in the 10th Bracey Report. They continue here. In addition to being a longtime teacher of English and journalism, Schmidt also publishes a muckraking (not a pejorative term in my lexicon) monthly newspaper called Substance. One day, a plain brown envelope delivered to the Substance offices was found to contain copies of the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations). Schmidt thought the test items were awful and, rather than write an editorial to that effect, published them in his paper. CPS suspended him without pay and sued for $1.4 million, which it claimed would be necessary to write new tests. CPS subsequently fired him. When I saw the tests, I tried to imagine what would have happened had I produced them back in the days when I was director of testing for the Virginia Department of Education. Someone would have leaked the tests to the Richmond-Times Dispatch. The Dispatch would have published the worst questions, along with a scathing editorial mocking the state department's incompetence. The department would have summarily sacked me and deservedly so. This is what should have taken place in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune should have picked the tests up from Schmidt, published the worst items, and written a scathing editorial. Then CPS should have fired Carole Perlman, director of testing. Instead, the Tribune backed the tests and demanded that Schmidt be fired. Perlman testified against Schmidt at his hearing. These tests were more than just a set of trivial pursuit items, although most of the items were that, too. The tests contained items that had no right answer, items that had multiple right answers, and items to which the official right answer was wrong. It also contained items for which an earlier item cued the answer for a later one. In short, these tests were garbage. At a hearing on the issue (at which I testified in support of Schmidt), Perlman had the effrontery to defend the tests and even cajoled Tom Kerins, former Illinois director of testing, to testify on behalf of the tests and to confirm the cost estimate to replace them. Shame on you, Tom. The $1.4 million, by the way, works out to about $12,000 an item. Chicago schoolteachers, not professional item writers, wrote the questions. At $12,000 per question, every four items cost the equivalent of a Chicago teacher's annual salary. How could they possibly cost so much? Well, it is true that CRESST (Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards, and Testing) liberated $500,000 from CPS, but it claimed to have provided only a little technical assistance in teaching teachers how to write items. How CRESST could charge so much money for so little work could also spark an investigation. The CPS suit is ongoing, as is Schmidt's countersuit involving First Amendment arguments. Some educators in Western Massachusetts invited Alfie Kohn to be the keynote speaker at a conference. …

The future in our hands.

The future in our hands.

Finding identity and voice: A national survey of Canadian postdoctoral fellows

Are the postdoctoral years the “best time of your scientific life”? Although postdoctoral fellows generate a high proportion of ‘cutting-edge’ research, there is little support for, and information about, this vital group of future scientific leaders. To fill this void, an interdisciplinary, national study of postdoctoral fellows (PDFs) in Canada and of Canadian PDFs abroad was undertaken. This questionnaire-based study determined basic demographics, evaluated job stress/satisfaction and work environment, and assessed outlook for future careers using a variety of parameters. Although several aspects were rated satisfactory, the PDFs surveyed identified key areas of concern in their training, including low value placed on them by institutions, lack of benefits, low pay, increased time in postdoctoral positions and concerns about career advancement. Addressing and improving these areas may make a significant difference to the speed and confidence with which future PDFs make the transition to independent positions. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Rethinking physical organic chemistry

Abstract

How the plague bacillus and its transmission through fleas were discovered: reminiscences from my years at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

At present, there are only occasional cases of human plague reported in the United States. As an example, there were only 14 nonfatal cases of human plague recorded in 1988 and 5 cases in 1990. Each resulted from exposure to wild rodents, carrying the plague bacillus and fleas, in the western United States: Colorado, New Mexico, California, Arizona, and Texas. The affected individuals were treated with antibiotics (usually streptomycin and tetracycline) and recovered. Local, endemic outbreaks of plague have been reported from Uganda, Kenya, and the island of Madagascar. More recently, in outbreaks of plague, bubonic or pneumonic, in limited local epidemics, a total of over 700 patients have been reported from certain areas of India in 1994. This manuscript was prepared in order to describe a few interesting details referring to the initial discovery of the plague bacillus and its mode of transmission from the rat carriers to other rats and to humans. A few centuries ago, plague represented a massive disaster, killing millions of local populations in India, China, IndoChina, Africa, and, particularly, Europe. The cause of this disease was unknown and was attributed to unfavorable constellations of stars, to comets, to the wrath of supernatural powers, and frequently also to poisoning of wells by Jews, or other ethnic groups of people, who paid for this with tortures inflicted on them by the panicked population. The mystery of plague was solved fairly recently. Alexandre Yersin, who discovered the bacillus of plague, died in 1943, during World War II. In June 1940, Yersin was in Paris, attending a Pasteur Institute meeting, and left Lutetia Hotel, where he was staying (and where I was staying also at the same time), barely a few hours before the German armies entered the French capital; in fact, Yersin left Paris for Saigon, by air, only 6 hours before the airport was closed. Paul-Louis Simond, who discovered that plague is transmitted by fleas, was collecting plants, and living quietly in retirement, in Valence (province of Drome, south of Lyon), in France, and he very kindly replied in writing to my letters, which I wrote to him from the Pasteur Institute in 1938, asking him for details of his fundamental discovery. Since my childhood years, I have always been interested in finding out how the great medical discoveries were made and how the epidemics of transmissible diseases were prevented. In my early postdoctoral years, I had the opportunity, shortly before World War II, to spend several years, as a young guest investigator, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. I was intrigued by an isolated laboratory, located in a separate small building, at 25, rue du Docteur Roux. I was told that the upper floor of this small building has a laboratory dedicated to the problem of plague and that it contains notes and records of Yersin, who recognized that this disease infects predominantly rats, and of Simond. I visited this small laboratory several times and studied the notes of Yersin and

The Backstage Story of the Discovery of LHRH

During my postdoctoral years (1956-1961) spent first at Yale University and then at Tulane University, I was fortunate to become acquainted with many talented endocrinologists. At that time, my major interest was the role of vasopressin in stimulating ACTH secretion. Vasopressin was then one of the strongest candidates for CRF, as advocated by Don McCann. Roger Guillemin and Andrew Serially claimed the existence of separate CRF-a and CRF-β molecules. At Tulane University I worked with Joseph Dingman in the Department of Medicine where I tried to establish a method for separating vasopressin from human plasma using glass fiber paper chromatography. In 1960, on the way home from Miami after attending the Annual Endocrinology Meeting, I happened to board the plane with Schally. He showed a considerable interest in the chromatographic method on which I was working. We talked enthusiastically about CRF and he emphatically denied the possibility that vasopressin was CRF. During my stay in New Orleans, I visited...

Promoting research productivity in new faculty: a developmental perspective of the early postdoctoral years.

The years immediately after attainment of the doctorate can be conceptualized as an adult development phase. Four developmental principles operate to influence scholarly productivity in these early postdoctoral years. The first, rhythmicity, which involves the rhythm of learning and the way faculty pattern their roles throughout the research process, can be divided into three stages: romance, the exploration of and attachment to research ideas; precision, the focusing on methodologic details; and generalization, the addressing of pragmatic issues of knowledge building. The second principle, the contextualdialectic, suggests contextual factors are important in developing the research career, especially factors that produce conflict. The third principle, unidirectionality, refers to the forward movement of professional development and incorporates trading-away of certain roles and concepts and a retrogression in development. The final principle, multidimensionality, can be understood in terms of developmental precursors and vestiges as decisions and actions of the early postdoctoral years that influence later career success. The four principles are presented as a framework for understanding and facilitating research productivity during the early postdoctoral years but may also be useful to other phases of the research career.

The University of Rochester Associated Hospitals program in internal medicine: Seven years experience with an innovative city-wide residency for preparation of general internists

The Associated Hospitals Program (AHP), with a total of 61 residents, engages the staff, patients and facilities of six hospitals and selected community health centers and private practices. The AHP is interlocked with separately accredited residencies in internal medicine in the participating hospitals and provides experiences, especially with ambulant patients, beyond those of more traditional programs in internal medicine. Strategies used by the AHP are minimally dependent upon grants from governmental and private sources for support of the basic three-year program. About one-third of the residents enter practice after completing the basic program; the larger share have a wide range of engagements in the fourth and fifth post-doctoral years for enhancement of clinical and teaching abilities and for critical study of health care. Eighty-seven, or 94 percent, of the 93 alumni are engaged in practice, and many also in teaching, of general internal medicine. Included in the 87 alumni are 12 of 18 residents who had two-year fellowships in medical subspecialties after completion of the AHP residency. The alumni have wide geographic distribution; 33 are practicing in communities with populations of less than 100,000 and 17 of these 33 are in communities of less than 25,000 persons.

JGR Editor Tom Ahrens

The new editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research (Red, Solid Earth and Planets) is Thomas J . Ahrens of the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Tom Ahrens is no stranger to JGR. He published his first paper in the journal in 1962 while he was a graduate student at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and since then has authored or coauthored 18 JGR papers. In his first research he measured elasticity under pressure using low‐amplitude ultrasonic waves and in subsequent research has continued to investigate elasticity using mechanical waves with very large amplitudes. His first postdoctoral position was with Poulter Laboratory of Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Poulter Laboratory was investigating detonation phenomena, shock waves, and the dynamic response of materials and structures. In reflecting on his five postdoctoral years at SRI, Ahrens recently remarked that two memories stand out: coming home each night with TNT under his fingernails and being completely engrossed in using shock waves to study how rocks and minerals behave elastically under great pressure.