Chapter 02: A Research Path Starts with James Watson at Harvard
Files
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20050103_C02
Publication Date
1-3-2005
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, January 03, 2005
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; Professional Path; Educational Path; Evolution of Career; The Researcher; Overview; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine; Influences from People and Life Experiences; The History of Health Care, Patient Care
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
James Olson:
: Now, Steve gave me a little bio, in which it mentioned you were the first undergraduate student at James Watson at Harvard. Can you tell us about that experience?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Sure. I went to Harvard. In high school, I was very good in science. I enjoyed science. I went to Harvard and thought I would major in physics and chemistry. And I took German and chemistry and physics. And my sophomore year I decided I was more of a humanist than I thought. And chemistry and a lot of other very scientific oriented courses with some liberal arts. I switched out – I guess freshman year I took a course in government and a few liberal arts courses. Broad courses. I switched and took an increased number of courses in government and literature and things like that. And during my sophomore year, I decided to go into medicine rather than into physics and chemistry and differential equations. It’s just something I was able to get through but I didn’t find that exciting. I learned I wasn’t going to be a mathematically oriented physical chemist. So I went to the biology department and asked if I could do research at the end of my sophomore year, and it was the end of the year so they said everything was booked up. But I came back later and the secretary said there’s a new professor who is very young but he’s supposed to be good. And I said what’s his name. And she said James Watson, and I said where is he. I knew what he had done. And I knocked on his door and he was just unpacking really.
James Olson:
: Do you remember what building it was?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah, it was the biology building with a bunch of rhinoceroses in the front. It’s still very active at Harvard College. Biological Laboratories Building. And he said sure. So there was a man named Alfred [Tissieres], who was the first scientist working in his lab, and he was a visiting scientist and Dr. Watson and myself and then the lab group over the next year and a half, two years I was there. I met some wonderful people who did some very important research. I learned how to do research. I learned how to question. I learned how to think big and think small. Focus on how to analyze data and how to handle the fact that you often learn something you didn’t ask when you do research and you have to keep an open mind and the purpose of an open mind is to learn not to justify a hypothesis and things like that. I spent a lot of time in the lab and really learned the habits of a researcher?
James Olson:
: Was there a specific project you were working on?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah, we were doing a project – this is when Messenger RNA hadn’t even been discovered and the only RNA that was known was ribosomal RNA, and the specific project we did, which we ended up publishing and which was my senior thesis as a Harvard undergrad, was seeing – establishing that when bacteria that are in resting phase get into a long growth phase and they divide every 20 minutes, they make a whole lot of ribosomes. And if you starve them and the media no longer supports them, because it is too crowded or too few nutrients, they go into a stationary growth phase and end up proliferating and then actually metabolize their ribosomes and the products into the medium. We established them. Dr. Tissieres and I wrote a publication on it. Dr. Watson kept his name off of most papers that came out of his lab. It’s actually quoted in a – there’s a big volume of his work that was published in the last couple of years from Cold Spring Harbor, and that point is correct. Unless he did the experiment or designed them, he encouraged his students – there’s a little thank you note to Dr. Watson on the paper, but he didn’t want his name on it. He taught me something. I’ve kept myself as either the last author or off of papers. I think that’s very important to let young people bask in the research they did, even though it’s in a lab that you run.
James Olson:
: Otherwise, people are just going to say that it was so-and-so’s work and not you.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: So this was very exciting times. This was the time when the whole DNA to RNA protein paradigm was being worked on. It wasn’t understood. You have to understand that the Watson-Crick model was published in 53. And we’re talking 56 when I knocked on his door. There was a lot to be done. And he was very appreciative. He sat with me and told me I shouldn’t go to medical school and told me about the research that would come up in the next 10 years.
James Olson:
: Why not medical school?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: He just thought to just do research. It’s an exciting area. I said it is an exciting area, but I want to do it as a physician. So I went off to medical school. But I took an extra year to do a Fulbright in Scotland with a man named J. Norman Davidson, who is an expert in DNA. He wrote a lot of books on DNA. But I really used that year to see Europe and expand my horizons. Although I did some research that year. It was mainly a year of growth, technically.
Lesley Brunet:
: You said you wanted to do research as a physician. Were you thinking about it that clearly or –
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah, in Scotland, I remember, I can’t find it now, but I wrote a diary there. I was at the University of Glasgow and most of the Americans who went off to Scotland were in [Edinburgh]. I met very few Americans there. I met a lot from the British Empire and a lot of Scots and I had a lot of time to think on my own and take hikes in the Highlands. I wrote in my diary, I want to dedicate my life to using science to improve medicine, to improve the care of patients, and I didn’t know what I’d be doing. I didn’t know I’d have such wonderful opportunities to succeed. But that was before – before I went to medical school, I made that entry in a diary and it’s pretty well stuck. When I was in medical school at Harvard, I went back after a year, and I was a year behind my age group at Harvard. Today, only one of my three kids graduated from college in four years. Today, kids take a lot of time off. But back then, it was unusual. People were in a hurry. So when I got to medical school, I had that extra year of maturity compared to the rest of my class and it helped. I did well in medical school, but I did several interesting projects. One was with a man named Byron Waksman. WAKSMAN. Whose father is Selmin Waksman got a Nobel Prize for discovering [streptomycin?] and Byron worked at Mass. General and was interested in lymphocytes, and cell proliferation, and what stimulates lymphocytes to proliferate. At Harvard Medical School my freshman year they covered the lymphocyte in one hour. We didn’t even know about B cells and T cells at that time. Waksman was one of three people who discovered B cells and T cells, and that work was going on in his lab while I was there. But we did an experiment to show that if you take lymphocytes from a guinea pig that has been immunized to turbuculen and exposed the lymphocytes and the mononuceurcytes to turbuculen, there’s a proliferative response. Getting me interested in the field I still am interested in. What external molecules can bind to a cell and stimulate to proliferate. And I followed that up with further work during my fellowship. Now, looking at lymphocytes stimulated with (inaudible) which is a chemical produced by plants and in the case of turbuculen, stimulating them so that turbuculen is in a very small percentage of the cells but with phytohemogluten, you can stimulate most of the peripheral blood lymphocytes to proliferate. And I did some research in that area, and after –after my fellowship, for the first 10 years I was at UCSD as an assistant professor I studied the regulation of lymphocyte proliferation, using phytohemogluten as an external stimulant to proliferation. We looked at signal transduction pathways. Then, the only one known was cycliucanp at that time. So we looked at cyclicanp and we looked at what turns on or off cyclic proliferation.
James Olson:
: Now was this at NIH?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Oh I spent – before I finished my training, well, you got my CV. But I went to Harvard Medical School. I had a residency at the Peter M. Brigham. I had my research at Harvard Medical School and I spent two years at NIH at the laboratory of Dr. [Norman Salzman]. It was a terrific laboratory and they were interested in the proliferation of cells and the lab had originally been run by a man named Harry Eagle. And it was very influential in looking at the essential media it takes to grow cells in culture. But with Salzman, the project was to determine whether chromosomes have RNA in them or not. We showed them that D Chromosomes are just as DNA protein, not RNA. I learned a whole lot of technical skills. When I was in Glasgow, that was 1959, the laboratory was ill-equipped even though it was one of the best in Europe, compared to American labs. Salzman’s lab from 1966 through 68 was very well equipped and I learned the modern technology and molecular biology from him and the people in the lab. Dr. Michael Bishop was on the bench next to me. He won the Nobel Prize (inaudible). A man named Aaron [Shackton] was in the lab who is at Rutgers and has done fabulous work in virology. It was an exciting group of people. I’ve been very lucky because in Watson’s lab, in Byron Waksman’s lab, in the lab in Scotland, and then in the lab at the NIH, I was with very smart people, stimulating people, who were really trying to move science ahead. That’s when I learned the technology to study DNA and RNA and protein. And how to use the equipment that was coming out. And how to ask I think sophisticated questions. Then in my fellowship at Washington University, then I went back to the Peter M. Brigham and had another year of clinical training, which was very important. Now it’s called a residency. Then it was called an internship and two years of residency. And a very strong clinical background. And I think that’s important for somebody who wants to try to do both. It’s very hard to try to do both. I want to take care of patients, but I wanted to spend a lot of time in the lab. So as a senior resident at the Peter M. Brigham every other night and every other weekend, my poor suffering wife put up with this. There’s an apocryphal story. My son would come to visit when I was at the Brigham when he was only a few months old. And anybody in a white coat he would go bananas and grab onto. And we had to explain to him that a lot of people wear white coats, not just your daddy.
James Olson:
: Great story. How old was he?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: He was under a year. He was an infant. But that training was very valuable. It’s a very interesting career looking back on it, where you had intensive laboratory experience, intensive clinical training, then back into the lab and back into the clinic. It’s hard. And it’s even harder today than it is then. I didn’t get a PhD, but I got the equivalent in training of a PhD if you add up my time with Watson and my time with Watson – that was undergrad. Then my time with Waksman, and then my fellowship at Washington University --I had a year in the laboratory and my mentor there was a man named Stewart Cornfeld. That’s when I synthesized everything I had learned in these places and began to study the regulation of lymphocyte proliferation stimulating the (inaudible) which I continued then when I moved to UCSD as an assistant professor. It was great.
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD, "Chapter 02: A Research Path Starts with James Watson at Harvard" (2005). Interview Chapters. 1444.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1444
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