Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mrs. Professor

2011; Elsevier BV; Volume: 286; Issue: 37 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1074/jbc.x111.287250

1083-351X

Carolyn Cohen,

Bacteriophages and microbial interactions

She should be fired—anonymous student evaluation I have titled the second part of my “scientific” memoirs “Mrs. Professor” because that is what I am called these days by Ann, the proprietor of a dry-cleaning shop (plus alterations and shoe repair) near my home. I was immediately drawn to her because Anna was my mother's name and because of her similar work ethic. Ann and I have agreeable views on a great many topics. I have learned that her parents were Syrian-Armenians who suffered greatly during the Armenian Genocide in 1915–1923. She first gave me my doubly honorific title when she learned of my profession, and, despite my disclaimer on marriage, she continues to call me Mrs. Professor. It seems a good title for this Reflections, in which I try to fill in certain aspects of my early education that are missing from my first Reflections (1Cohen C. Seeing and knowing in structural biology.J. Biol. Chem. 2007; 282: 32529-32538Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (2) Google Scholar). Here, I also bring the first piece up to date, as it were, by describing my adventures in the academy. More fairly, I should say our adventures, considering that I shared a “structural biology” laboratory with Don Caspar and Susan Lowey at The Jimmy Fund (or Children's Cancer Research Foundation) in Boston for nearly two decades before we all moved to Brandeis University in 1972. Within a year, we were joined by David DeRosier. In my view, Brandeis is a rather unconventional academy, and we were, quite fittingly, a most unconventional group of scientists. Indeed, I picture our commune in structural biology here as a kind of cheerful “Salon des Refusés.” 1The Salon des Refusés was an exhibition, originally held in 1863 in Paris, of works by certain avant-garde artists whose paintings had been rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon. 1The Salon des Refusés was an exhibition, originally held in 1863 in Paris, of works by certain avant-garde artists whose paintings had been rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon. At Brandeis, we were able to continue our analysis of the detailed physical basis for molecular recognition. Technical advances enabled us to obtain and decipher atomic resolution pictures (not imagined previously) of our beloved proteins in motile systems such as muscle. We were able to gain insights as well into how these molecular machines might work, and, as Don insists, we were not only looking down but also up to higher levels of organization. Mentors can be magical. If one is very fortunate, they will appear, like genies, when most needed. After my father died, I could not make him come back to us by simply needing him. Instead, a genie came to me in the form of his lawyer. Unlike my father, Samuel Sumner Goldberg was short and fat, a most unfashionable genie, but he wielded great power. When I was about twelve years old, I first visited his apartment, on West End Avenue in New York City, where he lived with his mother and sister. I remember finding his very old mother in a large playpen in the middle of the living room. A nurse was there to take care of her, and the elderly woman was comfortable with the arrangement, enabling us to chat peacefully. Sam showed me around his castle: books and paintings everywhere. It was the first time I had seen books stacked in front of other books on the same shelf. (My next encounter with such an arrangement was years later, in London, when, after a visit to his laboratory at The Royal Institution, David Phillips took me to his house. There they were again, the double rows.) Sam's education was courtesy of New York City. His mother had run a laundry, and Sam had picked up and delivered. Somehow, he managed to put himself through law school, and he became a great litigator. In fact, he rarely appeared in court himself but had a polished front man to carry out his instructions. His other life was as a devoted patron of writers and painters. Sam's appetite for that culture was as keen as his appetite for food. One had to protect one's plate in his presence. Only recently did I learn that among the recipients of Sam's friendship and much of his largesse was a young writer named Saul Bellow. Letters sent by Bellow to Sam, including his Nobel lecture, are preserved in the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library. Apparently, Sam served as the inspiration for the character of the lawyer, Harvey Simkin, in Bellow's mad reverie, Herzog. Sam was also my patron: he supplemented my education and nurtured me with everything from Tess of the d'Urbervilles to The Influence and Social History of the Potato, a riveting book that he lent me long ago. Our imagined world was wide ranging. After my father's death in 1939, my mother, sister, and I moved from Riverside Drive to Broadway, close to Joan of Arc Junior High School. There I was enrolled in a variety of classes in typing, cooking, and sewing under the assumption, I suppose, that, being a girl, I would become a homemaker or stenographer. However, I was tall, and the tall girls could also go to shop class with the boys, where I enjoyed making awful presents for my mother. In my last year, the girls took an examination for admission to a place called Hunter College High School, somewhere on the East Side. I had wanted to attend a coeducational high school, but I jumped through the hoops anyway and found myself accepted. Once I had set eyes on the place, I knew I had to attend. The atmosphere at Hunter was very different from the raucous chaos of junior high, and it was staunchly, emphatically, all girls. I recall that there was only one man in the whole school, Jimmy, the elevator operator, and we were warned not to get too close to him. The teachers at Hunter were a formidable group. When I entered French class (by default because Spanish was overbooked), Mademoiselle Garlati spoke French, never a word of English. “Fermez la fenêtre,” she said to me, and I was, of course, instantly mortified, but not the other students, who had been learning French for a year or two before me. I was what they called a “junior” (from junior high school), implying that I had lost a precious year of this privileged place. I had a lot of ground to make up, but it was a crazy kind of heaven in which studying became a passion, and, in these classes, I was never bored. I studied physics and Latin and, best of all, advanced biology with the formidable Mrs. Lilienthal. She expected us to be standing by our desks at attention when she entered the classroom, and she would then reveal the secrets of life in her rigorous and spellbinding way. I remember my great disappointment when she rejected my detailed plaster-of-paris model of an animal cell (made in our bathtub at home) because the “membrane” was too thick and appeared to be a cell wall, appropriate only for plants. She was unrelenting in her quest for perfection. There was also our memorable speech class taught by Miss Evangeline Trolander. She was a theatrical lady who attempted to “cure” us of our New York accents by pointing out that we all lisped. Whatever the diagnosis, any correction probably helped. By the time I was attending Hunter, we had moved from 92nd Street to 110th and Broadway, and I was relieved that I could now avoid the occasional packs of young bullies who would swoop down on my friends and me from Amsterdam Avenue to harass us with anti-Semitic epithets. On 110th Street, however, where Broadway was closer to the Hudson, one had to dodge the persistent predators who offered to “walk” with us in the dark down to Riverside Drive, but not for any picnic. Still, the area of New York City in which I lived and where my school was located was a kind of urban paradise, ethnically and culturally. These were the years of World War II. At our apartment, a tiny dining room entrance with doors on all sides served as a makeshift blackout shelter. For various reasons, the devastation of the Jews in Europe was largely concealed from our consciousness. The recent loss of my father was certainly the focus of my own meditations and mourning at the time. The world of war intruded, however, now and again. My cousin Lenny, my mother's sister's son, was serving as a medic in the infantry in Western Europe; he survived the Battle of the Bulge, where so many lives were lost. I vividly remember his visit to our small living room; he seemed half-crazed and was carrying a large German pistol at his side. Meanwhile, at Hunter College High School, we continued our studies almost oblivious to the war. I say “almost oblivious,” for there were exceptions. For example, we were in French class, beginning a discussion of a book by André Gide, when one classmate, Doris Adelberg, abruptly stood up and declared, “I won't read Gide: He is an anti-Semite.” Doris, with her sister and parents, had barely escaped Vienna in 1939. She was a brilliant student, and we became good friends. Doris is now a well known writer of children's books. Sometime later, in 1946, shortly after my high school graduation, I heard Albert Camus give one of his rare American lectures at Columbia University on “The Crisis of Man.” By then, I had become sufficiently conscious of world events to understand its significance. When I was very young, my parents used to send me to summer camp in the Catskills. I enjoyed being there so much; it seemed to me that summer lasted six months. They were inexpensive and Jewish with American-Indian names. I loved camp and the mountains and eventually became an underage “nature counselor,” teaching my unsuspecting wards everything from astronomy to frog anatomy. From early on, my mother expected me to return home with terrariums and new little creatures to care for. I should also mention that camp had “parents days,” when my mother would come to visit. At these times, there seemed nothing worse to me than being cordoned off from our parents as we were. Many years have passed since I lost my mother, yet I still feel that way: separated from her by a mere rope. Among the friends I did not make at Hunter College High School was a certain Cynthia Ozick, who, I learned recently, was our class speaker at graduation in 1946 and who has since become a most distinguished writer. I have been reading some of her beautiful work. In one well known short story, “A Drugstore in Winter” (2Ozick C. Art & Ardor. Knopf, New York1983: 298-305Google Scholar), she describes a young girl with a passion for reading who helps her parents at work in their pharmacy-cum-lending library in the Pelham Bay part of the Bronx and muses about what miracles might allow this child to develop her talents. Cynthia's love of books shaped her future. I loved nature, as well as books. Somehow, we each grew up, she, a celebrated writer, and, I, a scientist, who were in Cynthia's words, “dreamed and transfigured into being” (3Ozick C. Art & Ardor. Knopf, New York1983: 304Google Scholar). My first attempt (without advice) to attend college was quickly aborted. Under the youthful illusion that I would eventually enroll in medical school, I applied to McGill University (probably because of its wrong association with the Canadian discovery of insulin). I asked for a full scholarship; my application was rejected almost by return mail. My family advised me to change my name (as my father and his brothers had done for their business, which became Corboe Furs), but I stubbornly refused and applied elsewhere. One place was nearby Barnard College. At a so-called scholarship tea, I met Ethel Stolzenberg from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn (described in Ref. 1Cohen C. Seeing and knowing in structural biology.J. Biol. Chem. 2007; 282: 32529-32538Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (2) Google Scholar). Both of us, I knew, were “out of our element.” In any case, that was my first formal tea, and I found the proceedings baffling. I did not know how to deal with the teapots, hot water, and cups and was traumatized. Because of other deficiencies as well, I was rejected there. Then, Mademoiselle Rothschild (in the French department at Hunter) strongly advised me to apply to Bryn Mawr College, her alma mater. At my Bryn Mawr interview, I found a very welcoming dean and a truly beautiful sanctuary for study. Eventually, I was accepted with a full-tuition scholarship, but my mother was burdened with a room-and-board fee of $500 per year. The great gothic library with its stained glass windows at the college seemed incomparable to me, and I remember writing a letter in great excitement to my mother describing the traditional “Lantern Night” ceremony to her. This moving introduction to the college took place in the cloisters of the library, a few days after we had arrived. It was evening, and we freshmen listened to the voices of our older classmates as they descended from the upper story, singing the ancient Greek song in praise of Athena, the “Goddess of Wisdom.” 2“Thy torch divine, doth beacon thy votaries to thy shrine. And we, thy daughters, would thy vestals be, thy torch to consecrate eternally” (translated from the Greek). They paraded with lighted lanterns in the courtyard and then distributed a lantern to each of the first-year students, one of whom turned out to be Ethel. Many years later, I managed to find a rather handsome bust of Athena in an antique shop in Brookline, Massachusetts, and have kept it outside the entrance to my office ever since. Bryn Mawr was designed to be a privileged place of learning. I am embarrassed to say that we had maids in those days and dined in some splendor at long tables, but the physical comforts were intended to focus the student on the use of the mind. That was why we were there, disburdened, as it were, from many of the realities of everyday life: new friends to find, the library for its dreams, the laboratory for its beautiful reality … I thank my partner, Barbara Kneubuhl, for her presence and my good friends Alfred Gierer and Marjorie Senechal for encouragement.