Interview with Paul Sondel

Paul Sondel (#773) Transcript

RL: This is the ongoing interview with Dr. Paul Sondel. This is tape number three, side one, June 12, 2006.

PS: So again, this spring of 1970 was the Kent State episode. And that convinced me that no matter what else was going on in my life, I needed to be socially involved and politically aware, to be able to at least vote appropriately and speak appropriately, and to be sympathetic with big, important issues that influenced all of us. And because of what happened at Kent State, I was questioning some of the wisdom of Gandhi's civil disobedience and passive resistance, as to whether that really is the effective way to go. I did not, as 00:01:00some students did at that time, make the transition into civil disobedience that went beyond anything other than passive. But I at least contemplated whether under appropriate circumstances it would be right.

And that summer, I was working in Fritz' lab, working with [Miriam Segal?], working till very late at night. I rode my bicycle, whenever I was a student on campus, I'd ride my bike all over. And the experiments that I was working on in Fritz's lab, which was in the genetics building at the time on Henry Mall, often I'd be there till two or three in the morning. Just because the way the experiments would work, it would take that long to get everything mixed together and do what you need to do.

And one night I came back to my apartment on Dayton and Mills. We knew we were going to have to move from that building by September because the building was 00:02:00going to be demolished because the university had bought the land and was going to put a university building on that corner. So we had made plans to move out, but I was still living there. And I must have gotten back, oh, it feels like it was 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning. And I think I got the history right. I was asleep and all of a sudden heard this huge explosion. I thought it was a car backfiring that was parked right outside my window. It was that sort of a huge, loud explosion. And I immediately ran out the door and looked out the sky. And literally, there were papers coming out of the sky. You know, loose leaf kind of paper. Because our apartment was exactly two blocks from Sterling Hall.

RL: Oh my gosh.

PS: And I heard the explosion and I saw the paper. And my reaction was to run towards it. Someone's in trouble. And my college roommate grabbed me by the belt and said, "We don't know what's going on there. We probably shouldn't run up there and get involved" because there was enough noise and stuff coming out of the sky. By now, police sirens and other things were happening.

So we walked up there and police told us to go back home. We weren't sure exactly what had happened. All we knew was that there was this huge explosion and we felt it in the pit of our stomach. And then that next day, the news came out as to what had happened. And Dr. Fassnacht, I believe, as the name of the 00:04:00physicist, a physics graduate student who was tragically killed. And if there was any doubt in my mind prior to that that one needed to establish certain ground rules about what means justify what ends in one's life in trying to accomplish something, and that you need to draw lines in what's appropriate and what wasn't, this clearly drove that home. That this was something that although maybe had been done for what some people perceived as the correct reasons, was clearly the inappropriate action. This was not the way to go. And it, it left an important memory on everybody in Madison at the time. And I think that it had a national effect. As much as Kent State had an effect on bringing together those 00:05:00that wanted so desperately to convince the voting public to stop the war, I believe that that terrible tragedy convinced those who weren't sure how to go about doing it that the rule of law still needed to prevail.

So I was very much here for that, and it influenced a lot of my thinking at the time. And we will get to this in a bit, but very coincidentally, three years later, no, four years later, Fritz Bach would move his laboratory from the genetics building to Sterling Hall. And when I come back to do my graduate work 00:06:00in Fritz' lab and I finish my PhD, it is in what's called the Old Pharmacy Building, but it is attached to Sterling Hall. And where my office is and where I'm working is right in the area that's been fixed up as a result of the bombing. So that was a daily reminder of what had happened.

RL: Were you stunned? I don't know what else, what other word to use, to find this happening? This explosion within the boundaries of the University of Wisconsin? Or was there a part of you that was not surprised?

PS: Well, during the first hour or so, nobody really knew what had happened. So we were surprised by the noise and the explosion. And nobody was sure who had done what for what purpose, and what had actually happened. But as the story 00:07:00came clear, I guess I was terribly disappointed and shaken. But I had been involved in several antiwar rallies where a very small component of the people that were involved allowed themselves to emotionally be swayed over by a mob violence sort of an attitude, where there would be a crowd of people marching down the street, protesting why we had to get out of this war. And from out of nowhere, someone would have a brick going through a window. No good purpose to do that. But someone would do that, and you'd hear other people laugh, and other people egg them on. And I don't know if it was one out of a hundred or one out of ten or one out of a thousand. I don't know if the person who did that was a 00:08:00fellow student, or as some suggested these were outside agitators that were brought in to try and stimulate students to try and go that way. But clearly there were some people who were quite impressionable and open minded who somehow thought that taking that step of violent civil disobedience was what it was going to need to take in order to have the correct end result.

And because I had seen that, I guess I could imagine some people doing an action as crazy as this thinking, they didn't think they were bombing Sterling Hall, an academic institution. What they thought they were doing was closing down the Army Math Research Center, which they thought was just supporting the war effort. And while it may have been doing that, there was also academic activity going on there. And there were students. And the people who planted the bomb, no 00:09:00matter how well meaning they thought they were, hadn't thought through all of the implications of their actions.

RL: And Paul, before we leave the subject, the reaction of your parents? Did they want you out of here? Or were they just concerned about you? Or did you not talk about it much?

PS: Neither. Talked about it with them. They were, they were concerned about my best interests. But I was able to reassure them that I was making wise decisions and playing it safe. And I was able to show them my grades and academic progress and academic plans, and was able to reassure them that I was on track, and that I was not going to let anything interfere with that. And I think that in itself was reassuring to them.

Thinking back to those years, it was a complete turnaround that our country went 00:10:00through at the time. And while it was not necessarily led by students, I think college age people probably were convinced a little bit earlier than the rest of the voting age public that the war at that time was something to get out of. And it took, probably, an additional year or two for people of my parents' generation to be convinced. And during that transition time, I remember occasionally going back to Milwaukee and having discussions with my family. And my mother, recall, was the one who was the rebel in college. And she, whether she agreed with me or not, she understood where I was coming from and she supported my antiwar attitude and the approach I was taking.

My father, who had been a navy man throughout World War Two, and his twin brother, had different thoughts about it. My dad, at least, accepted my opinion, although he was very willing to disagree with me. And we had some very heated debates at family events. The Friday night Sabbath dinner at my grandma's used to be the place where I was going to be the rabbi on the moon, got into some very heavy conversations. And my father's identical twin brother, whose son was not yet in college, so they were not yet thinking about these issues, he hadn't gone through the draft number decisions, like I had gone through that spring, I remember having a very heated discussion at a family meal. and it was very divisive. And it took several years for me to be able to patch up my relations 00:12:00with that uncle who felt that I was turning my back on the country.

He asked me point blank. I mean, I was planning on going to medical school. I had all of these plans for biology and science in my career. I was going to get a draft number. And he asked me point blank, "If your draft number's called and you're asked to go, of course you'll go, wouldn't you? It's your duty to serve your country. Look at what we did for our country."

I said, "I don't believe in this war. I don't think that we should be doing this. If my number is called, I'm going to figure out some way not to go, because I don't believe in it." And those were clearly fighting words for a man who had spent four years fighting in the South Pacific. And it wasn't until I was quite a bit older that I could understand that what I was saying was right for me, but I had a better appreciation of why he believed what he believed. And it was okay for me to disagree with him. But I should have been a little bit more willing to try and understand his point of view. And at least understand 00:13:00that he had an opinion that was valid. But some of that is what you get with age.

RL: You were only nineteen! [laughs]

PS: Right.

RL: So, okay. So you continue in school that fall. And you go, in 1971, through summer school.

PS: That's right. I go through summer school. And that summer I take an incredible course taught by Carter Denniston, who is a wonderful humanitarian human geneticist who also taught ethics. And I remember an exercise that he had us do. In going through all the math, the human genetics and genetics counseling and stuff. He had us write a prospective letter to parents whose child was born with a genetic defect that would not be fatal, but that would restrict the child 00:14:00to quite severe mental retardation. And I was turning twenty that summer. And I wrote a letter that seemed to me to be appropriate. And I'm frankly very glad that I don't still have that letter. Because when I think back to what I wrote at age almost twenty to a parent that would be going through the tragedy of having a child with lifelong severe difficulties, I think what I wrote was very intellectually and academically correct, but it was not humanitarianly sensitive. And my life experiences and professional experiences since then would have me take a completely different tact toward that same exercise now if I was given that job. But I think it was wonderful that Carter asked us to do that. I got an A in the course. I think I probably did okay on that exam, because I got 00:15:00all the math right. But I didn't get all the human side of it right, and I know I didn't.

RL: And you still remember that to this day.

PS: Oh, absolutely.

RL: That's almost forty years ago. Thirty-five, forty years ago.

PS: I remember the advice that I gave the family. Which maybe might have been a little more politically correct at the time. I gave them the numbers of the likelihood of them having another child with the same problem, what to kind of expect from their child at various points in age, and how it would probably be best for their family and their child to have the child institutionalized, and where a good institution could be. And I know I thought it was appropriate at the time, but I know I'd do it very differently now. Being put in a position of needing to try and act and feel like an adult for an exam, but for me it was in 00:16:00preparation for doing the same thing, real world. Of having to write real letters, or have face to face conversations about issues exactly like that, if not more serious and grave with families. Talking to them about children and their irreversible problems. So in some ways, it was foreshadowing for me.

So that year I was in graduate school, and I had taken all of the required genetics courses, but I was focusing on immunology research with Fritz. And Fritz and Richard Hong and Robert Auerbach, who I haven't mentioned yet, but was another of my undergraduate heroes, who remains on the faculty here today and is an outstanding intellect. The three of them taught the best immunology course I've ever taken in my life. And because all three of them were flying worldwide giving lectures in their own respective areas of immunology, they named the 00:17:00immunology course Immunology 747. [laughter]

RL: Are you just playing that for a laugh, or is that true?

PS: Absolutely true. That was the number of the course, and they named it that for that reason. It was a wonderful course, and they gave outstanding lectures. Part of the wonder for me of being in Fritz' lab was not only he world class and traveling around the world giving lectures, but in turn, the world's most prominent immunologists were stopping in Madison on their way between coasts to go to meetings or give talks. And we had outstanding scientists come and not only give lectures, but Fritz would have us get together with him in his office. And Fritz had five graduate students at the time, and we'd get together with [Jerro Chucalini?] form Italy, or [Jean Dossee?] from Paris, or [John Von 00:18:00Rhode?] from Denmark, or from Holland. We had [Hein Ginsberg?] from Israel, who was the person who invented a way of looking at the activated white blood cells. Fritz had shown how activated white blood cells can divide when they see each other. [Hein Ginsberg?] from Israel figured out a way that he could not only recognize each other, but kill each other. Which mimicked in the test tube exactly what would happen in patients that we were injecting tissues from one another.

And [Heim Ginsberg?] came from Israel to spend summer of 1971 working in Fritz' lab as a two-month sabbatical. And as luck would have it, he took me under his wing. And I spent that summer working with [Heim Ginsberg?] who was the most flamboyant, wonderful, demonstrative person I had ever met. He was the first 00:19:00Israeli I had ever spent time with. In addition to working at all hours of the night, he loved to go hiking and camping. He and I took hikes and camped around the central Wisconsin area. And I remember we'd drive and he'd see a farm land somewhere that looked nice, and it was late, and he said, "Let's just sleep here." And we'd just pull the car over and put our sleeping bags out in the grass next to the road and we would stay there. And he would tell incredible stories.

In addition to being an incredible immunologist was a botanist who collected seeds. And he could look at any plant that you'd see in the forest or a field or a prairie and pick it out and find where the seeds were hidden. And before opening the flower, he could tell you what color the seeds would be and what their shape would be. And he would tell you the Hebrew name of the plant. And 00:20:00then he usually could remember the English name. It was a wonderful summer for me.

RL: Did you and he become friends?

PS: We did become friends. And we met up again on several occasions, both here in the United States and in Israel in the future. We'll get back to that. I hope I remember. But he spent more time here in the United States. He came close to spending a lengthy sabbatical in my laboratory when I was on the faculty. It ended up being only about a week, two weeks. But I visited him several occasions when I was in Israel doing a sabbatical with his colleague, an individual named Gideon [Burkee?], who was also involved in that same project.

So I spent that year in Fritz' lab. That summer of 1971, just as I was starting graduate school, Fritz had all of his graduate students present posters at the 00:21:00International Conference of Immunology. So I was just turning twenty-one, and presenting a poster at an international meeting. And Fritz made a point of introducing us to some of the biggest names in immunology at this meeting in Washington. And I was, I'd just finished my third year in college. And I and Fritz' graduate students, who were all quite a bit older than I was, we rented a van. We drove from Madison to Washington for the meeting. And had a wonderful time talking in the car on the way there and the way back. It also was an eye opening experience for me. It was something that, when I graduated high school, I had never imagined that I would do anything like that during my college career. I sort of imagined I'd graduate high school, I'd go to college, I'd take 00:22:00my pre med courses, I'd go to medical school, I'd be a doctor. And I was seeing these other things that made me realize that maybe there's something else out there.

I had a great time. Worked with Fritz on a separate project and published a paper, just Fritz and I with me as first author and Fritz as my mentor and senior author. That got presented at a meeting, small meeting in Virginia, at a place called the [Airley?] House. And I was asked to present the work there. And this was a very unique meeting. It was really the first scientific meeting I ever gave a talk at. And it was one of these small by invitation only meetings. They had invited Fritz. But because I had submitted this paper, and Fritz couldn't go, Fritz assured them that I'd be able to go and give a talk that would be up to what they were looking for. So they allowed me to go and I gave the talk. And it was a terrific experience.

RL: Did you enjoy it, Paul?

PS: I enjoyed it wonderfully. Because it was thirty scientists that were all interested in understanding how lymphocytes work, and there was a common theme to it. And even at that time, the spin that I was trying to put on it had something to do with this reaction of lymphocytes against another for transplant purposes. And I was wondering if there might be some way of turning them against cancer. And that's what I talked about. And it was all very theoretical. It was not based on a lot of data.

And speaking of theory, this gets us back to Jim Crow. Part of this theory that I was presenting involved some mathematical modeling that I had problems with that year, which was '71-'72. And Jim Crow was the master at mathematical biology. And so I asked him if he could look at this problem of mine. And I met with him. And he thought it was very interesting. He said, "Well, let me think about it. I'm going to a meeting next week. And I'll think about it and I'll get 00:24:00back to you once I'm back."

So five days later, I get a letter from him on Northwestern Airlines letterhead. He starts by writing, "Dear Paul, I found your problem so fascinating I decided to work on it here on the plane." [laughter] He solved the math of the problem and wrote it up on the airplane, and mailed it to me from his hotel when he landed. And, you know, Jim was probably dean of the medical school or something by that time, and chair of the Department of Genetics, and American Academy of Science, and doing all the things that he was doing. And here he was taking this time to answer my question. And that meant a whole lot to me. [beeping]

So back to that 1971-1972 year, I did graduate work with Fritz and was able to 00:25:00present a paper, and became close to the people in his laboratory. And he had a wonderful mix of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, and technologists who've all gone on to very interesting careers. And I'm in touch with some of them. The fellow I've mentioned before, Mike Widmer, he and I, we each published our first papers, co-authors together with Fritz. And day after I went off to medical school, Mike Widmer decided to go to graduate school and get his PhD, and got his PhD with Fritz. And finished with Fritz doing terrific work in this same mouse immunology field. He was more of a mouse researcher, and went from there into industry, and became the scientific director at the company Immunex, a very 00:26:00large biotech company out of Seattle. And did incredibly well both scientifically and personally. And retired maybe three years ago, after an outstanding career in industry, really being at the forefront of trying to take some of these immunology ideas and translate them into utility from the pharmaceutical perspective. So that year, doing research with Fritz was great. I won't go into detail about the specific experiments we were involved in beyond that. But it was wonderful for me as a graduate student to be doing that. But again, I was a graduate student without any intention of using that graduate credit for any purpose. But my being a graduate student enabled me to take maybe a little bit more seriously this year that I was doing research. Plus, I could 00:27:00tell my parents that I was still enrolled in school. They weren't thrilled with the idea of me taking a year off of school between going to college and going to medical school. But there was no way I was going to be able to get into medical school after three years of college, because I hadn't started any of the application process at the time.

RL: Now Paul, so you're even this year, working in Fritz Bach's laboratory, you're still not envisioning yourself as a research scientist?

PS: I am not. I'm imagining that while it would be a possibility, just as I had in the past imagined myself being a lawyer, I didn't do anything to realize that. Here I saw that I could be a research scientist, but my plans were to be a physician. Because that really was what my direction had been, and that was the way that I was moving myself. And during my years in college when I would go 00:28:00back to visit my family in Milwaukee, I would make a point of calling either Dr. [?? Shapiro?] before I get there to make sure I'd be able to go on rounds with him either on Saturday or Sunday morning. And that connection was a wonderful thing for me to continue on with.

During my third year here at UW, when I was applying to graduate school, a couple friends of mine and I were going to go out to Boston just for a fun trip over spring break and visit some friends. And I knew someone who was going to Brandeis, so I was going to visit her and take a vacation in Boston. And Fritz, who knew I wanted to go to medical school, and who had gone to Harvard Medical School himself, thought that as long as I was going to be in Boston, it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to just stop in at Harvard Medical School. And he knew some people who were doing cellular immunology of transplant work. and he felt highly 00:29:00about me, so he wrote a nice letter to them and made sure that I could meet with them and talk about the research I was doing with him. And talk with them. It was my first exposure to Harvard Medical School. I thought it was very interesting, and I liked very much the environment. I had, the year before, this is an aside, but I had mentioned that six-year program at [Rancaleer?] and at Northwestern that I didn't want to start after high school. By the time I had finished my second year at UW, and I was already working in Fritz' lab, I knew I wanted medicine. And there was a separate program at Johns Hopkins that allowed you to enter medical school a year early.

RL: Oh!

PS: So they would have taken students after the third year. So I flew out to Johns Hopkins to interview in that same summer of Sterling Hall. And it was the 00:30:00first time I had ever taken a plane trip by myself. It was the first time I ever went to a city all by myself and was alone. And I visited Washington, DC, and went to Baltimore, and went to Johns Hopkins, and did the interviewing there, and hated it. And part of it was just the environment. But it was so different from what I imagined that medical school was going to be like.

RL: Concludes side one of tape three.

RL: This is side two of tape three of the ongoing interview with Dr. Paul Sondel, June 12, 2006.

PS: So I visited Johns Hopkins and interviewed there. And I interviewed a couple of people on their admissions committee. And a distant relative of my mother 00:31:00married someone who was on the staff at Johns Hopkins. And I met with him. And he was very condescending and made a real point of how much I was putting him out, that he had to break from his schedule to meet with me. And the environment was inner city, but in addition to inner city, what I remember was inner city barbed wire surrounding the Johns Hopkins complex with an incredible amount of security to get in, which was something so foreign to anything I had ever experienced in my life, I couldn't imagine spending four years of my life living in that cage. And I know it's an outstanding university and medical school, and I know many people who have gone there and are outstanding. But just, we're all impressionable. And my impression was negative, so I didn't do that.

But I went to Harvard to visit at that point during my junior year. And it 00:32:00wasn't an official med school interview. I just went to meet these researchers that Fritz knew. But Fritz also knows how things work. And he figured if I did want to apply to Harvard the following year, to have met someone on the faculty and have them understand that I'm doing some pretty interesting research wouldn't hurt me at all. So I did that my third year.

And then my fourth year here, when I was a graduate student with Fritz, I went through the med school admissions application process. And unlike college, where I only applied to one college and I knew where I was going to go, I applied to a few medical schools. And Fritz was very encouraging to me to apply to Harvard, but he was also honest with me and said it's very difficult to get in, and there's no guarantees, and it's very competitive. And in addition, this was the fall of 1971. The Vietnam War was still in full effect. People who were going 00:33:00into medical school still had a deferment of sorts for medical school from being in the service. It was a very competitive time.

So I applied to Wisconsin and Stanford and UCSD and Yale and Harvard. Those five places. And I went out first to interview in California at Stanford and at UCSD. And I had a wonderful time. I interviewed at Stanford, and I met with Joshua Lederberg.

RL: Oh my gosh!

PS: Who knew Fritz. And Fritz had set this up for me.

RL: Oh, nice.

PS: And Josh, who had been at UW, had very fond thoughts about UW. As an aside, I mentioned the biology core curriculum and how wonderful it was to be in that class. One other thing I did during that one year that I was in graduate school, '71-'72, is I was a TA for Biocore. So I went through Biocore as a student in 00:34:00'69-'70, and '70-'71. And the very next year, I became a TA in Biocore. And it was wonderful. I loved teaching in it. And one of the exercises we did in the Biocore was to reproduce the experiments that Josh Lederberg did looking at mutation in bacteria that he did here at UW. And the way he did it, I mean it was novel technology, but it was very low tech. He took these little two by four wood blocks and put a little piece of velour over it, and used that to smoosh a Petri dish that had bacteria in it, and then took that. Because the velour has little tiny microscopic hairs. And each little hair would touch a different bacteria. He'd take that block with the velour on it and stamp it in an oriented way on many different other Petri dishes.

And in a way, he created exact replicas bacteriologically of these Petri dishes so that each one would be the same as the other ones. You could do different things to the dishes and compare. This bacteria does this in this condition and this in that condition. And he was able to answer very interesting questions about how mutation rates work, and what controls this. We in Biocore took his wooden blocks and his pieces of velour, and had students do the exact same experiment with his Nobel prize winning blocks.

RL: How cool! That's really cool.

PS: So I was able to, that same year, go and meet with him. And he interviewed me as part of the admissions process for Stanford. And I was able to talk with him about the fun things I was doing in Fritz' lab, and talk about how much fun I had in Biocore working with his wooden blocks. And had a very enjoyable time visiting there at UCSD and came back. And then got my call to go and interview 00:36:00at Harvard. And just before I went off to Harvard for the interview, I got my acceptance letter from Stanford. But I had time to tell them whether I wanted to go there or not.

And I went out to interview at Harvard. And we drove out there, two of my roommates and I. And there was a terrible snowstorm on the way. And we had to spend one night sleeping on the floor stranded in a Stuckey's Oasis on the Indiana toll road. I ended up getting there in time, because I'd built enough time for the trip to get there. And I had two interviews. One was from an immunologist, who was very appreciative of the stuff I was doing in the laboratory. It was a very fun talk. And then I had an interview with Dr. Daniel 00:37:00Funkenstein, who is a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry. And I didn't know this at the time, but he's famous for stress interviews. And so I went into his office. I was nervous. And sat down. He asked me how the trip was. I told him about the snowstorm that we got stuck in in Indiana. And the weather reports said that the snow was supposed to hit Boston that next day. So the storm was coming across the country, like they always do. And I said that it's probably going to be here tomorrow, the same storm. We just got ahead of it.

He said, "Oh, no. It doesn't work that way. We get all our weather from the east."

And I said, no, I really thought the weather report says this storm's going to be coming here. He picked a fight with me. And I was respectful and said, you 00:38:00know, I'm not an expert. I thought that's how it worked. But for whatever reason, it looks like you're going to have some weather.

Then he said, "It is a little hot in here. Do you think you could open the window?"

So I went over to open the window, and I couldn't get it to open. And I fidgeted with it and I unlocked it and I was playing with it. And I'm looking at it, and I said, "Dr. Funkenstein, this window looks like it's painted shut. I'm not sure I can open it."

He said, "Oh, yeah, you can open it."

I said, "I'm sorry. I can't open this window. But I apologize, but I just don't think I'm going to get it."

He said, "Well, okay, never mind." The window was really painted shut. And I'd never been through something like this. So I'm sure that there was a clear method behind what he was doing. I think that he wanted to interview potential 00:39:00physicians under stress circumstances because I'm sure everybody comes there with glowing letters of recommendation and good grades and stuff. And he wanted to see how people functioned under stress. And I really wasn't anticipating this at all. But I sure remember it. And I left there just devastated, because I had no idea what was going on. And I was sure that whatever it is he was grading me on, I must have failed badly, because I got the weather report wrong. I couldn't open the window. What good am I? [laughter]

RL: I almost feel badly for you, just hearing this now. I know there's a happy ending.

PS: Right. So the good news is that I did get accepted to Harvard. And I was very pleased. Fritz was very excited. I chose to go there.

RL: Why did you choose Harvard over Stanford?

PS: Well I visited both places. I also visited UCSD. And the head of the Neurology Department at USCS happened to be the brother of a family friend that I knew from Milwaukee. Friends of my dad and his twin. And he had done his clinical training at Harvard. Not medical school, but he did his residency there. And so I looked to him as someone who would really give me the straight scoop. Fritz was absolutely gung ho Harvard for a whole lot of quantitative reasons that he gave. But when I spoke to Robert Rosenberg at USCD, he said without a doubt, if he had the choice between Stanford and Harvard, he would go to Harvard right away. And he thinks that Harvard has the most outstanding clinical experiences and education not only because of the depth of the faculty 00:41:00that provides classroom teaching, but the depth of the clinical teaching that's there because of the number of separate teaching hospitals that are there. The program there has a medical school class of 160 each year. But there are some, I think, like well over a thousand new residents every year in the Harvard Hospital's teaching systems. And the medical students had the opportunity to work in all those systems. So there's a tremendous amount of depth. He spoke very highly about that.

Fritz, in turn, talked about the scientific opportunities that would be available at Harvard. And I think Fritz was seeing that even though I hadn't quite got the message yet, he thought that I probably was going to gradually transition to being a physician scientist, and thought that the opportunity for 00:42:00me to do that at Harvard would be better.

RL: Paul, during this year when you're in Fritz' lab, is this where you make the intellectual commitment to work in the area of immunological research?

PS: No. For me?

RL: You were just interested.

PS: You know, it was the luck that John [Oppitz?] didn't have room in his lab when I knocked on his door, and Fritz did, that I got into immunology. And as long as I was going to spend another year before starting medical school, it was clear to me that I would learn more by staying in that field in an environment where I was making progress than switching fields. So I stayed with Fritz, and I explored in the graduate school credit. And as luck would have it, like I said, I had completed really all of the PhD class requirements even before I started that graduate school year. And during that graduate school year, I got in enough 00:43:00credits in other areas that I qualified as a dissertator if I wanted to. So Fritz said, "Why don't you take your PhD preliminary oral exams? And that way at least you've not only done this year of graduate school, but it will count like two years of graduate school because you've got this exam that you will have taken, and you'll have finished that chapter."

So I took my PhD prelim that summer, just like two weeks before I left to go to medical school. On my committee was Fritz Bach, and Jim Crow, my hero, and Millard Sussman, and Dick Wong, and Robert Auerbach. And I took a month off to study genetics. It was a wonderful month, because I spent the whole month doing nothing but thinking genetics, and taking notes. And organizing things. And I took the oral prelim, which is supposed to be scary. And it ended up being a lot 00:44:00of fun. And there was a very pleasant conversation with people I respected so much. And I finished the thesis. And Fritz mentioned to me something about a story Jim Crow talked with you about. He shared with me what he told you, and I had never heard that side of the story. What I remember is that I was talking with them and we were talking genetics, and it was very interesting stuff. And I was learning a lot in this conversation, and I wasn't thinking it was an exam. I was thinking it was five wonderful faculty taking the time to talk with me about something we were all interested in.

And Jim started asking me a few different questions. And he finally said, "Well, I think I'm going to get you on this one." And he asked me a question about something called syzygy, and I still remember the word. And I know that I didn't know it then. And I looked it up afterwards. And it had something to do with an 00:45:00unusual sort of genetic event between chromosomes. And I didn't know it. And I said, "I'm sorry, I don't know what syzygy is. Can you explain it?" And Jim smiled and he said, "Well, here's what syzygy is."

RL: Well what Fritz Bach says is that Jim had asked you the most difficult questions that nobody in the room could answer. And you were answering them and answering them. And finally, it must have been this [sisugy?] and you said you didn't know. And Jim Crow's comment, according to Fritz Bach was, "I had to ask you something that you wouldn't know." It was a good story.

RL: So you're now, so you finished your prelims and you're back at Harvard, starting medical school.

PS: So I'm ready to move to Harvard, and I need to go back one important chapter 00:46:00that I have not mentioned, but was very important. And that was in summer of 1971, the year before I take my prelim, I go back to Milwaukee for a wedding--no, no, no. I've got to get this right. I go back to Milwaukee to visit family and I walk into a record store. And I see, I see the woman who's going to become my wife.

RL: Really?

PS: Yeah. And I had met her two years before at a wedding. A cousin of hers, a distant cousin of hers married a distant cousin of mine. And you know, she was fifteen, I was eighteen at the time. And we, you know, sort of looked at each other. And there was no way that we would be connected at that point. Two years later, I go back to Milwaukee to visit family, and she's going to be an incoming 00:47:00freshman at UW. And I have spent three years at UW, and am going to be a graduate student. So I tell her when she comes to visit for summer orientation, please give me a call. So she tells her mother this. And that summer they come for orientation. And her mother picks up the phone and dials the number to call me, and hands the phone to Sherry. [laughter]

RL: This is good.

PS: And Sherry calls me and so I take her, we go for a walk. And she ends up coming to college. And I ask her out for a date in late September. And like three or four times in a row she says no, she's busy, she can't go out with me. She finally goes out with me, but she has to come back early that night. So I get her back at 10:30. And I find out later she had to get back early because 00:48:00she had a date that same night with her real boyfriend who was waiting for her to finish with me. [Lange laughs]

So I called her on the phone and I called her on it. I said, "If you don't want to go out with me, you don't have to go out with me. But I think you should."

And so she gave me a couple of more chances. And we ended up going out together that whole year. And we got very close. And that next summer, I left to go to Boston. And she stayed here in Madison and was starting her sophomore year in college. And we left each other, we separated with the commitment to each other that we would only stay in touch. But that we would each go out with other people. We weren't sure whether there would be a future or not. I thought there should be. And so I had her come and visit me in Boston that fall of my freshman 00:49:00year in medical school. And I came back for winter break freshman year and asked her to marry me.

RL: Oh!

PS: And rather than waiting until summer, which is what we thought we were going to do, we got married January first. So it was like a one-week engagement. We got married very quickly.

RL: Wow.

PS: She dropped out of school here at UW. Moved to Boston. And I was just twenty-two, she was just nineteen. And there we were, married. But I mention this because you asked me about religion. And while I was raised Jewish and my parents were each Jewish, and we had Jewish culture in our home and belonged to synagogue, we were very liberal, reform, non-fundamental in our approach to it. 00:50:00And there were parts of the religion that I related well to, and parts that I didn't understand. And when I came to Madison and that sophomore year went through this eye-opening epiphany regarding psychology, philosophy, all of this stuff. While I was studying philosophy, I started studying a little bit of religion on my own. And encountered the Baha'i religion. Read a fair amount about it, and went to some Baha'i meetings on campus. And was very much impressed with this philosophy of the oneness of mankind. Related very much to that. So much so that during my sophomore and junior year here in college, when you had to fill out your forms to register and they asked you to check religion, 00:51:00I checked Baha'i. I really didn't know a lot about it, but I liked that connection.

In the process of going out with Sherry, her family was much more committed to Jewish practice than mine. And by being with her, I saw a side to my own faith, the faith that I was born into, that I connected much more closely with. And as a result, clearly got brought back into it, and was able to wrestle with some of the questions I had asked about the faith myself, and was able to find answers that I was comfortable with. and we got back into religion in an interesting way.

I guess as long as we're talking religion, I'll skip ahead. So this isn't entirely chronological, but while we were in Boston and married, I was very busy 00:52:00in medical school. And we weren't taking a whole lot of time to be active in organized religion, even though we were believers and did family holidays with our family. We ended up moving a block away from the Harvard Medical School for my third and fourth years of medical school. And it's a very crowded area in downtown Boston along Longwood Avenue. And there was no place to park. And right across the street from where we lived was Temple Israel, the largest congregation in all of Boston, with a big, empty parking lot.

RL: Oh!

PS: So we went and knocked on the door and said, "You know, except for Friday nights and holidays, your parking lot is empty. Is there any way that we could rent the spot in your lot so that we could park our car there so that when we're working across the street at the medical school, we could have our car there."

They said, "Sorry, this temple parking lot is for members only."

So we said, "What does it take to be a member?" [laughter]

RL: Organized religion, whatever it takes.

PS: So we joined the temple and were able to park our car there. And as long as we joined the temple, we started getting the temple newsletter. And the temple started a new thing, which was teaching adults who had not gone through a bar or bat mitzvah to be able to go through it. Now Sherry had come from a more religious family where her girls were never bat mitzvahed, because that was inappropriate. And I had come from a very liberal family, where nobody had ever gone through a bar mitzvah, because their perspective on Judaism was that was sort of an Old Country religious practice that we didn't do. So neither of us had been bar or bat mitzvahed.

So Sherry and I started going through the bar and bat mitzvah process together at the temple. And we really connected with it. Very much learned from the 00:54:00people that were teaching us there. And as luck would have it, Sherry became pregnant during my fourth year in medical school. And we went through the bar and bat mitzvah just a month before I graduated medical school. And the rabbi at the congregation told the community that this was the first time that they were having a bar and bat mitzvah together where the bar mitzvah boy has a mustache, and the bat mitzvah girl is pregnant.

RL: [laughs] That's got to be a part of the archive at Temple Israel.

PS: I think so.

RL: Well, that's quite interesting, though, that you were doing that while you were also becoming educated to become a physician.

PS: Right.

RL: So those parallel processes, what your references have said is that your Judaism is important to you. Clearly the practice of medicine is important to 00:55:00you. And you were doing that at the same time. It's just interesting.

PS: And I see a connection there. And I'm skipping way ahead. We have four children now. And our third child, our almost twenty-three year old daughter just got back from Jerusalem after spending a year there. She's completed her first year in rabbinical school. And is going to spend the next four years in Cincinnati completing her training to become a reformed rabbi.

RL: How interesting.

PS: If I have time for any hobbies, my hobbies are canoeing and bicycling, and Jewish texts and traditions. And so for me to be able to share that with my daughter, who's making that her career, is a wonderful thing.

RL: It's just, it really is wonderful. Yeah. Really.

RL: So you're in medical school at Harvard. And you're married during your first year.

PS: I get married during my first year. I'm living in the medical student dorm in Boston called Vanderbilt Hall, on Louis Pasteur Ave. A whole lot of tradition steeped in that. It's a coed dorm. Men and women have rooms on the same floor together. Men and women are living with one another, boyfriend and girlfriend in the dormitory, unofficially. This was sort of a revolution of sorts during those years. I come back from winter break with my wife and we move into the dormitory. And we tell the dorm leader what we're doing, and his jaw drops. "You're not allowed to be married in this dormitory." [laughter] So I got kicked out of the dormitory because I brought a wife back with me that we hadn't planned for. And I had to break my dormitory contract.

So I started at Harvard. And the first semester of medical school was probably 00:57:00the most intimidating time in my educational career because we, my classmates all had very similar stories to mine in terms of how they got to where they got. Each of them had been very successful at their various universities. And um, my guess is two-thirds of the students in my medical class were from the East Coat, and from Ivy League kind of colleges, and had a slightly different college experience than mine. Although I am convinced that their undergraduate education didn't compare to mine. Particularly in biology. I think I was far better prepared for all of what I needed biologically than my classmates were because of what I got here at UW.

RL: Really?

PS: No doubt about it. And what I got out of the Biocore was so far superior to what my classmates at Harvard Medical School got as a Harvard undergrad in 00:58:00biology. We compared notes and talked about the things that I did in my labs here compared to the sort of mundane exercises they did as undergrads. So that was terrific.

Biochemistry scared me. I was so worried I was going to fail my biochemistry exam. I didn't. But I was really worried about it. I did okay.

And it was a stressful first semester. But I had a little bit of spare time. And Fritz had said that while I'm at Harvard, if I have the chance, he gave me three names of people who were doing interesting work. He gave me the names of two immunologists. One, a fellow named [Buruk Benasser?], who went on to get the Nobel Prize for his work in [Mohs?] transplant genes; a fellow named Stuart [Schlossman?], who was doing some interesting work in [unclear] response. And a young surgeon who was doing some revolutionary work there that a lot of people 00:59:00thought was heretical on understanding how blood vessels grow into cancers. His name was Judah Folkman. And since that time, he's been featured on the cover of Time and Newsweek and you name it. He is probably the most well recognized clinician, I think, at least in the cancer discipline in the United States.

RL: Is that with an "F?"

PS: Yes. Judah Folkman. His underlying hypothesis was that tumors would not grow if they didn't recruit blood vessels to bring them blood and nutrients.

RL: Right. Okay.

PS: He had just come up with that idea two years before I started medical school. And had published a couple of papers on it. And he had just the scantest of data behind it, but was already making waves.

So I went to Harvard and started taking classes. And knocked on the door of 01:00:00these three guys, [Benasser? Shlossman?] and Folkman. And they were all real busy. And it took me a long time to be able to get in to meet with any of them. And in part based on Fritz' encouragement, I chose to work in Folkman's lab. One of the reasons is that when I met with [Bennassiraf?], who was an outstanding immunologist, and ended up winning the Nobel Prize, and he was the chair of the department of pathology, which was the immunology department at Harvard, which was sort of the world's best immunology department. So he had a fair amount to be pretty self important about. He was pretty self important. And I met with him as a medical student, and met very briefly. And he invited me to come to his department's weekly journal club seminar series. And the first time I went, I 01:01:00was there and it was an hour meeting. Started at noon, ended at one. One of the postdoctoral fellows there was a young researcher --I didn't think he was young at the time. I was twenty-two, he must have been twenty-eight or nine--was giving a talk. I think it was 12:35. Professor [Benassiref?] walks into the room. The second most senior professor in the department, a fellow named David Katz, stands up, pulls out his chair for him, seats [Benassiref?] in his chair. [Bennasiref?] sits there. The postdoc looks very quizzically at him and continues talking in the seminar. And [Benassiref?] says, "I don't keno what you're talking about."

And the postdoc says, "Well, I'm sort of towards the end of my data."

And he said, "Well, I didn't hear it. I'd like you to start over." And he made the postdoc start the seminar over from the very beginning, just because he happened to get there late. Really late. He's a marvelous scientist, and--