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Through the looking glass

Nature Medicine volume 12, pages 1142–1145 (2006)Cite this article

After I had spent three years at boarding school, the headmaster decided I was a sufficiently serious student that I should go north to one of the 'elite' colleges. Because of the military draft at that time, colleges were sparsely populated and happy to have students. How Yale was chosen I am not sure, but I arrived in New Haven in June 1945, just as the Second World War was coming to a close.

Most of my fellow zoology majors were premeds, and for three years I thought I had to attend medical school if I wanted to follow my interests in the cell. Career counseling was nonexistent in those days, so I learned only in my senior year that there was such a thing as graduate school. With the help of Donald Poulson, my future Ph.D. advisor, I was admitted for graduate work in the Yale Zoology Department and began to think seriously about research.

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Figure 1
Figure 2: Lampbrush chromosome structure.
Figure 3: Autoradiograph of Xenopus ovary cells after in situ hybridization with 3H-labeled ribosomal RNA.
Figure 4: Autoradiograph of mouse chromosomes hybridized in situ with 3H-labeled mouse satellite DNA.

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Acknowledgements

Although much of this account has been written in the first person, I hasten to say that very little of what has been accomplished in my laboratory would have been possible without the contributions of the wonderful graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scientists and technicians who have worked with me over the years. For a complete listing of their names and their current positions, see my web site: http://www.ciwemb.edu/labs/gall/index.php. I also deeply appreciate the extraordinary role played by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in funding basic research in the United States, beginning in the years immediately after the Second World War. I received my first NIH grant in the early 1950s and have had continuous funding since that time for our work on the cell nucleus. Most of the Tetrahymena studies were supported by the American Cancer Society, which also appointed me American Cancer Society Professor in 1984. One only has to travel to other countries to understand the importance of both governmental and private support in catalyzing the phenomenal growth of biological research in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century.

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  1. Department of Embryology, Carnegie Institution, 3520 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, 21218, Maryland, USA

    Joseph G Gall

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Gall, J. Through the looking glass. Nat Med 12, 1142–1145 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1006-1142

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