Chapter 03: Working with Dr. James Watson
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Description
In this Chapter, Dr. Mendelsohn speaks about a key experience that led him to medicine. Though focused on science in high school and early college, Dr. Mendelsohn had never thought about becoming a doctor (and admits that the thought of blood and the responsibility scared him). He had the luck, he says, to be at Harvard when the structure of DNA has just been unraveled and found an opportunity to work in the lab of Dr. James Watson. There he discovered the excitement of research, of designing experiments to build new knowledge, and the thrill of working with the latest scientific equipment. (He tells a funny anecdote about a centrifuge.) He characterizes Dr. Watson as a researcher with a very clear vision of what would happen in the areas of genetics and molecular biology, but notes that he was not a detail person. Alfred Tissieres, a second individual in the laboratory, influenced Dr. Mendelsohn’s understanding of experimental design. Dr. Mendelsohn explains that Dr. Watson encouraged him to go to graduate school, but he wanted to work with people. It was at this point in his college career that he began to formulate the then unusual idea that laboratory science could help people –an early inkling of the translational approach he would later develop.
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20120926_C03
Publication Date
9-26-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, September 26, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational PathProfessional Path Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine Influences from People and Life Experiences The Researcher The Clinician The Researcher Discovery, Creativity and Innovation Evolution of Career Formative Experiences Portraits Professional Practice The Professional at Work Collaborations On Research and Researchers
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When I was reading about your academic background, as you shifted definitively into medicine, I noticed that you studied hematology and oncology, immunology, biochemistry, and molecular biology. There were all these different areas.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
They converge on what I’ve done the past 40 years.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did you put them together as a collage and then find what you were going to focus on in terms of your research? I’m trying to get a handle on this person sitting here who is so interested in literature and science and applied things and ideas and politics and just seems like an omnivore.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I guess I’m curious, and I like the stimulus of new things. I don’t think I would want to run the same operation for 2 or 3 decades. I want to do something new. I was very lucky in what happened in my life. Just to put it in perspective, I was born in 1936. In 1944, it was determined that the genetic material is DNA, so I’m already 8 years old before they knew DNA was the genetic material. In 1953, the structure of DNA was published. I was 17. Three years later, I was working in the laboratory of the man who made that discovery. What an incredible, lucky opportunity to be at Harvard College, to do research and switch into pre-med. I was in physics and chemistry, and it was very clear to me that that wasn’t “people” enough for me.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You talked about working with Dr. Watson as a defining moment for you. Do you still feel that, and what exactly was the crystal that developed at that point?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I don’t know when people decide what they want to be. I never thought of being a physician until I was a junior in college. I knew I enjoyed science, I knew I enjoyed people, but frankly, blood and doctoring and the level of responsibility sort of scared me. In my junior year in college, I had really the thrill of working in the laboratory of the man who had around him some of the brightest minds in a field which became molecular biology. That term had not been used really until then, and I learned how exciting research is. I learned how exciting it is to make a hypothesis and try to discover something that no one knows the answer to. You’re out on a limb and you’re working hard; many late nights, not as many movies. The excitement of designing experiments and then figuring out why most of them didn’t work and taking advantage of incredible new equipment and new machinery that was being developed. One piece of equipment was called an analytical ultracentrifuge. They had one at Harvard. It was in the laboratory of the chairman of biology. And I needed it for some of my work. What you can do is you’re centrifuging things and you actually can watch them move because there are optics set up. It is spinning around at 33,000 revolutions per minute. Yet it’s set up so you can optically watch what’s going on.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why is it done that way?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Right now you don’t need to do that. Those instruments are in museums. There was no other way to track the size and separate large aggregates of molecules from each other based on moving them through a very viscous solution.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You had to develop pretty keen visual skills to use that.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
No. You just had to learn how to push the buttons without messing up, so that was my instruction from Watson. I got on at night when the other people were done, and I was told, “Don’t break it.” These instruments are marvels of physics, like the new sequencing machines. They’re intricate, they’re complex, and you have to do everything right. In this case, if I had done something wrong, if anything had leaked out of this little centrifuge vessel which had thick glass windows built into it, it would have hurt the machine badly, so I had to be very meticulous. That was very important to learn. The research worked out well. We wrote a paper. I understood that science could discover things that could move knowledge along.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You really saw the entire process, working with Dr. Watson, from formulating a hypothesis all the way through publishing results?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Right. That’s common today, but in 1957, there weren’t that many people that had that kind of a privilege.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What kind of an individual was he as a mentor, like teaching those ineffable things that aren’t written down in textbooks? What did you learn from him as a researcher?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Again, you learn some things to do and some things not to do. Dr. Watson was brilliant. His view of what was going to happen in the field of molecular biology and genetics was prescient. He understood what was going to be important. He could formulate grandiose ideas. He wasn’t very good at the details of running an experiment. He could do it, but he wasn’t someone who invested the time and energy into doing that, so I had a double mentor. When he was just opening his lab, there was a man named Alfred Tissieres. He was a Swiss and also a brilliant scientist but much more willing to work with me at the level of “how do you design this experiment” and “how do you do it.” We spent a lot of time on that together.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You got a window into the whole idea of teamwork too, like one person’s gift supplementing another person’s lack.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Yes. They helped each other a lot. He went on to become a leading scientist back in Switzerland in his hometown. We visited him. He’s an expert on mushrooms, so we went hiking, and it was the only time in my life I trusted I could pick a mushroom and eat it rather than not eat it, because my wife won’t let me do that at all. With Alfred, it was okay. He grew up there. We reached a dichotomy at the end of this, because Dr. Watson said, “You know, you ought to go to grad school, get a PhD, and move into this new field. You seem to be pretty good at the science, and look at all that’s happening.” I told him, “No. I want to go to med school.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When did that idea dawn on you?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
That’s why I went to work in his lab. The idea dawned on me at the end of my sophomore year in college. I had an interest in science, which goes back to high school, but I also wanted to work with people. I was beginning to believe that laboratory science could contribute to how you treat people. Today that’s taken for granted. It wasn’t that common back then. A lot of the people were studying viruses. After working in Dr. Watson’s laboratory for a year and a half studying bacteria, I said to myself, “I’m going to learn human biology, and I think all of this can be applied to studying humans.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did you have any kind of sense of what that might look like at that point? Was it just an intuition? What was that?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I was reading a bit of the literature, and there were places like Harvard Medical School and the other medical schools that I knew a bit about. There were researchers studying human disease beginning to take some of this very sophisticated science that had been worked out, mainly on bacteria and viruses, and applying it to human disease, so I was there at the right time. Today, most of the people that do this get MD/PhDs. Back then, most MDs who ran labs didn’t get PhDs, but they went and did the equivalent. They worked in labs and learned how to learn from laboratory science and apply it to patients. We had a long discussion, and I finally said, “You know, I’ll get back to the laboratory, but I want to go to medical school, and I want to be a doctor.” He obviously wrote a good letter for me, because I got into Harvard Medical School.
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 03: Working with Dr. James Watson" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1419.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1419
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