Biochemistry careers

This work was supported by Grant GM 27256 from the National Institutes of Health and Grant DA 02507 from the National Institute of Drug Abuse. LL. is an American Cancer Society Research Professor of Biochemistry (Award PRP-21). H.V.V. is the recipient of a Research Career Award (5K6-AI-2372) from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. We thank Dr. Y. Hirata of Meijo University for generous gifts of palytoxin isolated from Palythoa tuberculosa. We thank Dr. T. Yasumoto, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, for the maitotoxin preparation. We thank also Jeffrey A. Bessette and Nancy Worth for their technical assistance and Inez Zimmerman for preparation of the manuscript. 

In the EPR of mammalian cells, we do not see much in addition to the signals from the respiratory complexes. The enzyme aconitase from the citric-acid cycle can be detected, and also the protein cytoplasmic aconitase, later identified as the mRNA translation regulatory factor iron regulatory protein IRP-1, which actually started its career in biochemistry as an EPR signal that could not be assigned to the respiratory chain (Kennedy et al. 1992). 

Dr. Richard Schweet later joined the faculty at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. His highly promising career in biochemistry ended way too soon in a fatal commuter airplane crash on his way to Louisville. He was an excellent mentor and 1 remain indebted to him for his help and attention during my undergraduate years at Caltech. 

Paul Berg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 30,1926. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School, from which he graduated in 1943. He then entered Pennsylvania State University (PSU), from which he earned a degree in biochemistry in 1948. His college career was interrupted from 1943 to 1946 while he served in the U.S. Navy. After receiving his B.S. from PSU, Berg enrolled at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) to continue his studies in biochemistry. He received his Ph.D. in 1952, after which he spent one year as an American Cancer Society research... 

Dr. Ames was director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center at U.C. Berkeley for twenty-three years, and he chaired the U.C. Berkeley Department of Biochemistry for six years, 1985-1989. Prior to that he was the Microbial Genetics section chief at the National Institutes of Health in Be-thesda, Maryland, a National Science Foundation senior fellow in the laboratories of Frances Crick in Cambridge, England, and F. Jacob in Paris, France, and a biochemist with the National Institutes of Health, where he began his career. 

Konrad Bloch, on how his career turned to problems of lipid metabolism after the death of his mentor, Rudolf Schoen-heimer article in Annual Review of Biochemistry, 1987... 

Appendix B Career Paths in the Biological Sciences A useful starting point for career information for biochemistry students. 

Another of Conant s students was Frank Westheimer (b. 1912), who, after postdoctoral work with Hammett at Columbia, held a post at the University of Chicago (1936-1954) and then returned to Harvard. Westheimer worked in several areas of physical organic chemistry and engaged in other chemistry-based activities, as revealed in an interview conducted in 1995 by Istvan Hargittai.233 For much of his career, Westheimer was essentially a physical organic chemist working in biochemistry and he has himself written reflectively on the discovery of the mechanisms of enzyme action over the period 1947-1963234 and on the application of physical organic chemistry to biochemical problems.235 Westheimer has also contributed, as Tetrahedron Perspective Number 4, an article on Coincidences, decarboxylation, and electrostatic effects , which, he writes, ...allows me to review some of my past .236... 

In 1875 Fischer followed von Baeyer to the University of Munich, and in 1881 he obtained his first academic post as professor of organic chemistry at the University of Erlangen. This was followed by his being called to the University of Wurzburg in 1888, and finally, in 1892, to the University of Berlin, where he remained until his death in 1919. His son Hermann Otto (1888-1960) went on to have a distinguished career in biochemistry. 

In Britain, many women chemists veered towards biochemistry for their careers, joining such organisations as the Lister Institute, London (see Chap. 2), and the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen (see Chap. 7). Nevertheless, it was the Cambridge... 

In earlier chapters, we identified particular niches in which a select few women chemists could find employment academic appointments in women s colleges (see Chaps. 4 and 6), domestic chemistry (see Chap. 3), biochemistry (see Chap. 8), crystallography (see Chap. 9), and pharmacy (see Chap. 10). But what of the many hundreds of women chemists who graduated during the interwar period Obviously, we cannot cover each individual nevertheless, there were some specific career directions, and we will discuss them in this chapter together with biographies of women chemists who followed each of these paths. 

In her article titled Biochemistry as a Career for Women in the Journal of Careers, Dorothy Jordan Lloyd made it clear that the biochemical sciences were among the most demanding in preparation ... 

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