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Explorations in the land of DNA and beyond

Nature Medicine volume 10, pages 1034–1037 (2004)Cite this article

Like many of my colleagues, I have liked science for as long as I can remember. Though not college educated, my parents were always encouraging, as were two uncles who knew a little chemistry. When I was still in grammar school, the basement of our house in Los Angeles became a sizeable laboratory where I built radios, spectroscopes and other instruments, purified radium and rare-earth elements from carnotite and monazite ores by fractional crystallization and ion-exchange chromatography, and synthesized for neighbors the recently discovered insecticide DDT.

The war, though far away, was nevertheless the focus of attention then, and it seemed wrong to spend high school vacations solely in recreational activities. So I took a job washing glassware at a vitamin factory and attended summer school classes to shorten the time required to earn a diploma and begin college. To my surprise, however, academic credits were not enough: California law required 3 full years of high school physical education. Then I learned of a college that took students without requiring the last 2 years of high school—the University of Chicago.

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Figure 1: Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl in 1996, standing at the place they met in 1954 at Woods Hole.
Figure 2: François Jacob, Max Delbrück, Matthew Meselson, Ronald Rolfe (partly hidden from view), Gunther Stent and Sydney Brenner in Pasadena, June 1960.

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  1. Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 7 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Matthew Meselson

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Meselson, M. Explorations in the land of DNA and beyond. Nat Med 10, 1034–1037 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1004-1034

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