Chapter 04: College Provides Exposure to Many Disciplines
Files
Description
Dr. Bogler talks about the path that took him to Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge University. He first explains that he took a year off before going to university, working at pharmaceutical companies in Strasbourg, France, and in New Jersey.
Dr. Bogler notes that he was “completely committed to doing research” when he began college. He sketches the advantages that a Cambridge education offered, as it exposed him to many disciplines and offered close contact with professors. He explains why he was “never drawn to medicine.”
Identifier
BoglerO_01_20141110_C04
Publication Date
11-17-2014
Publisher
The Historical Resources Center, Research Medical Library, The University of Texas Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Oliver Bogler, PhD, Oral History Interview, November 10, 2014
Keywords
Educational Path; Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Professional Path; Overview; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; The Researcher
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational Path; Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Professional Path; Overview; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; The Researcher
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:
Tell me about the decision to go for your BA. Now, how did that—because I’m not sure how that works. You took your O-levels, you chose your track, and—
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
You do you’re A-levels, you do your A-level exams, and then in the U.K. system, you have a national university application system where you actually fill out one set of forms and you pick your five universities and you apply to them, and then they can make you offers. It’s a complicated system. Some of the universities will make you offers before you’ve sat your final exams in high school, your A-levels. They’ll make you certain conditional offers. At the time—and I don’t know how much this has changed—at the time the Oxford and Cambridge universities had a collegiate approach to entrance. So, you would actually apply not to the university, but to one of their colleges. So, they each have thirty-odd colleges in them. Because the school I went to, Oundle, was very much connected to Oxford and Cambridge, we actually—I remember going on a visit to Cambridge, which wasn’t that far from Oundle, it was like an hour bus ride or something, sort of a fieldtrip, go see the place and check it out. And the college I ended up going to in Cambridge, Sydney Sussex, hosted us, and I remember touring the college and meeting the master. It turns out at the time he was a biochemist, Don Northcote, he was a man who’d worked on the Golgi apparatus, and they put on a good show for us.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m sorry. You mentioned the Golgi apparatus?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m pronouncing that correctly?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Yeah. That’s one of the organelles in the cell that puts sugars on proteins, and he was one of the people that was working on the structure and function at the time. Anyway, so, yeah, that’s where the germ was, and at the time, I don’t know if it was fair or not, Cambridge had a reputation for being better at science than all other universities, and I’m not sure that was true at the time or not, but that was certainly perhaps my perspective. And obviously a lot of famous biology had gone on there. Watson and Crick had worked there and so on, so forth. So it was a place I certainly wanted to go to as my top choice, and so I applied to this college, and they gave me—I forget how it worked exactly. I don’t think I sat a separate exam. In fact, I didn’t. But each college did it differently. My brother, I remember, he did this for Oxford the year before. He sat a separate exam, but I didn’t, and I got a conditional offer on my grades, basically on my exam grades. Then they offered me a place, and so then I took a year out actually between school and university and then—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
It was a thing that people did in those days. I mean, maybe they still do.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What did you do during that time?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
I actually did a couple things. I spent about four months of it working at a pharmaceutical company in Strasbourg and working in the lab. I got a paper out of it and learned some basic lab discipline and skills and things like that. It was bacteriology. It was cool. I had a great time. Strasbourg’s in France. I enjoyed being in France. It’s very close to Germany, it has mixed German and French roots, and it’s a wonderful part of the world. And then I was actually also in New Jersey for, I think, about two months in the summer, working in another pharmaceutical company. So these were connections. My mother, when she was younger, had worked for the BASF, and so these were connections of hers. They were both BASF subsidiaries, and she still knew some people. So these people put me up and put up with me. (laughs) In New Jersey it was more of a clinical testing lab. They were doing QC work on—there was a manufacturing plant, they made drugs there, and they did QC things at the lab. So there it was a good chance that I got to see a little bit of the United States, and it was close enough to New York to go into New York for the day or for a day or something like that, so it was cool. And then I also did some traveling around Europe and did some vacation stuff and just hung around home for a bit. So, yeah, it was a nice year. (laughs)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So when you applied to Sydney, what were you envisioning yourself doing in the future?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
Oh, I definitely wanted to do research, absolutely. No, definitely I was completely committed to doing research, and this was going to be my step to the next step. Yeah, I mean, I was completely focused on a research career. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but it was going to be something to do with cells or molecules and things like that. So it just seemed like a very natural progression to me. The other reason, I mean, I was pretty sure that one of the advantages that Cambridge offered was that in most other universities in the U.K., and I think across the world, you kind of—well, not in the United States. United States has a very different approach. But mostly in the U.K., as a student you would matriculate into a department, so you would matriculate into Biochemistry or Pharmacology or Chemistry or whatever, and you could switch, but it would be hard. You’d have to sort of say beforehand what you wanted to do. In Cambridge, you matriculated into Natural Sciences, and during your three years, you put together different combinations. You would end up in the first year you did three things, and then you did two, and then you kind of did one, more or less. Or maybe I think it was three, three, and one. Anyway, so I knew I could move around, and actually my second year I took a pharmacology course and a pathology course, which were interesting, actually with the people who were doing medicine, which is done as an undergraduate degree in the U.K., not as a graduate degree. And I was able to stick my nose into those disciplines and see if—because I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a doctor, but, you know, I wanted to give myself the opportunity. I thought that was really interesting, so I did biology of cells and biology of organisms and chemistry my first year, very sort of fundamental courses. Then I did biochemistry, pharmacology, and pathology, and then I did biochemistry in my last year.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So were you already seeing crossovers and connections between those different disciplines?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
I think so. I mean, I was exploring them. It wasn’t really taught in that way. I’d say the pharmacology and particularly the pathology course was taught straight up as a medical school kind of course, very heavy on learning and memorizing. I really, frankly, didn’t enjoy it very much because it was very much about, you know, learning things that were—I mean, not learning them as understanding them, but it was much more about putting the information into your brain, which is clearly very valuable because if you don’t have anything there, then it’s very hard to think of what to do next. But unlike the biochemistry kind of work, which really contained a lot of molecular biology at the time, it wasn’t nearly so inspiring. So it was really an opportunity to try and look into some other corners of the biomedical field and just sort of make sure that I was really doing exactly what I wanted to do.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So you were considering medicine, but that was sort of a backburner, not-so-sure thing?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
It wasn’t a passion, so I figured pretty much that—so I guess one way to say it is that I wanted to give myself the opportunity to discover if there was a passion there for that, and I discovered that there wasn’t, so I knew that I was more confident in that. I mean, I was never drawn towards medicine. That’s not just now how I’m built. And that was confirmed very strongly during my first faculty job when I was teaching histology in an anatomy classroom amongst the cadavers. (laughs) That was many years later. And some of my friends in the collegiate system in Cambridge, you’re mixed in with students doing all different things, so clearly some of my friends were doing medicine, others were doing all kinds of arts and stuff like that. So they would come back and tell me about their day with their body and stuff like that, and I’d be like, “Okay, that’s good. I’m glad you’re learning stuff, because I’m—you know.” So pathology was pretty good, because by that time the body bits were between glass slides, and so it was a little bit more removed from that. So it was just a chance to look into another thing and see, well, maybe that’s interesting or not. I think until you sort of do it, you probably don’t know it, or at least until you get confronted with some of it. So I kept getting drawn back to the biochemistry, and that’s where my passion was. And I have to say we had some amazing teachers. Amongst the faculty that taught me, there were two Nobel laureates. They both became Nobel laureates after, I think, I was there. I’d have to go back and look it up. One, I know, quite a few years after. But these were amazing people. The other thing in the Oxford and Cambridge system is you have really close contact to the faculty, so you’re not just in a lecture hall with three hundred students. You are there as well, but then you have these what they call supervisions at Cambridge where once a week you meet in a small group, maybe with two or three students and a professor, and you spend an hour discussing it. The whole education is essay-based, so there’s no multiple choice. It doesn’t exist. So you would get a topic, you’d go to the lecture courses, you’d go to the labs, and then you’d have a topic for the week, and you’d write a three-, four-, five-page essay, and then the faculty would grade it, and you would come together and discuss it. So one of the people I had that supervision with in my second year was a fellow named John Walker. His middle initial was E., so of course we called him “Johnny Walker.” And he won the Nobel Prize for discovering or elucidating the structure of the ATP-ase, which is one of the machines that makes the whole biology thing tick. The other fellow, who was our chief examiner, was Tim Hunt, and he won the Nobel Prize for cyclins. He discovered cyclins, which regulate the cell cycle. He was a brilliant fellow, and I never had supervisions with him, but he lectured us and he would come—this was in the third year then of biochemistry when we were specialized, and there were about twenty, twenty-five students in the classroom now. And he would come in with a stack of Cell, Science, and Nature journals and sort of plop them on the desk, and then he would pick one up. I remember we were doing RNA, we were doing splicing, and he would just lecture from the paper, this week’s Cell, Science, and Nature papers. So you were right—I mean, this was the thing when you got—that’s why in England the PhD has no coursework in it anymore, because basically as an undergrad, you’re taught right up to the level of what’s going on that week. And he was an inspirational man, I mean just really smart and such passion for the sciences, just beautiful, and it was easy to get inspired.
Recommended Citation
Rosolowksi, Tacey A. PhD and Bogler, Oliver PhD, "Chapter 04: College Provides Exposure to Many Disciplines" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1557.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1557
Conditions Governing Access
Open
