A Serendipitous Scientist

Abstract

Growing up in a middle-class Jewish home in the Bronx, I had only one professional goal: to become a physician. However, as with most of my Vietnam-era MD colleagues, I found my residency training interrupted by the Doctor Draft in 1968. Some of us who were academically inclined fulfilled this obligation by serving in the US Public Health Service as commissioned officers stationed at the National Institutes of Health. This experience would eventually change the entire trajectory of my career. Here I describe how, over a period of years, I transitioned from the life of a physician to that of a physician-scientist; my 50 years of work on cellular receptors; and some miscellaneous thoughts on subjects as varied as Nobel prizes, scientific lineages, mentoring, publishing, and funding.