Academic Auction Block

Each spring, if you had a freshly minted doctorate in the biological sciences, you became a potential candidate for the annual auction block. The major auction was held at the meetings of the Federation of American Scientists in Experimental Biology (FASEB) in Atlantic City. The purpose given for these meetings was not to find a job but to present a scientific research paper in one of the areas represented by some two-dozen scientific societies, one of which was the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. And so, in April 1961, I ventured to the Board Walk in New Jersey and its convention center which, at the time, was the only one large enough to accommodate several thousand researchers at the same event.

As did other graduate students, I heard many lectures on biochemistry, a field which mixed together chemists and biologists of all stripes and conditions. It was difficult to tell the difference between a biochemical-microbiologist and a microbiological-biochemist, let alone an organic chemist and a biochemist. Sixty years ago, these distinctions did not matter as much as they might today. Back then, a common language was spoken and understood by the vast majority of those in related fields. Today, biochemical grammars, dialects and vocabularies differ between geneticists and virologists, for example, as much as they might among French, Italian and Spanish linguists.

At the time I was searching for an academic position in which a common biochemical tongue was spoken. The problem, however, was that few academic institutions wanted to hire faculty who did not speak an advanced version of my new language. Instead of hiring junior faculty members, most of them wanted to engage postdoctoral fellows, paid for by federal training grants. The usual yearly stipend amounted to $6,000. However, as a “stipend,” instead of a “salary,” the funds were tax-free for federal income tax purposes. This amount was certainly better than the $300 per month stipend for a graduate fellowship or assistantship that I had been receiving.

I had fifteen-minute interviews with representatives from several institutions. (Speed-dating for millennial couples was invented much later, and probably was based on his employment model.) My preference leaned toward an opening for an Instructor in the biochemistry department at the University of Vermont Medical School; it paid $7,000 a year. But no offer was made. Postdoctoral positions with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and with the Texas Tech College in Lubbock sounded interesting, but who would really choose to move to that part of the country for advanced education? I did not receive any help from Dr. Wright, my own mentor, who spent most of his time in his hotel room in Atlantic City as a result of food poisoning, he had picked up his first night at the FASEB meetings.

I finally accepted a postdoctoral training-grant fellowship with Lucile Smith, Ph.D., in the Biochemistry Department at the Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire. I would have to change my field of research and was not sure how Dr. Wright would accept this upon our return to Ithaca. On the other hand, it was my future and I had to choose between continuing in lipid research, especially cholesterol, and a new endeavor in something called “electron transport,” the biochemical methodology for the transformation of molecular energy from glucose so that it could be used for all of the other processes found in living organisms. Although I knew nothing of the intimate details of the process, I believed I could, over the next few years, learn a lot about an enzyme called “cytochrome oxidase.” And I did.