Victor Wilson
The Rockefeller University, New York, USA

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.103.40

The Rockefeller University, New York, USA

During my final year 1947-48 as a pre-med student at Tufts, I had to decide what to do next. As the time approached to apply to medical school, I was pretty impressed with how good I was, and decided that only the best would do. I applied to several medical schools none of which accepted me. As a result, I spent another year at Tufts getting a Master’ degree. While doing this I applied once again to three medical schools that had previously rejected me, but not to Tufts where I had been promised admission. This is a clear indication that I was beginning to consider a career in research. I have often felt that in the field I ended up in (spinal cord, then vestibular neurophysiology), a medical degree and a residency in neurology would have broadened my outlook and made possible a career combining research and the clinic. Had I gone to medical school in 1949, however, it is likely that I would have ended up on a purely medical path. One can’t tell how things would have worked out, but I have no regret about pursuing research.

In due time the medical schools rejected me again. Why? I suppose there were several reasons, not necessarily in order of importance. I was very young (19) the first time I applied, and was competing with returning veterans; I don’t think that I did well in interviews; at Harvard I was asked how I felt about being Jewish, a question you couldn’t ask today. My reply was that I was proud of it. This last item leads into the fact that in those days the schools I was applying to had an admission quota for Jewish students, which was not large.

A key influence on me at Tufts was Professor Kenneth Roeder, a youngish English neurophysiologist (today he would be called a behavioral neuroscientist). He was an excellent lecturer and inspiring teacher, who even managed to make comparative anatomy interesting. His own work was on the behavior and nervous system of insects. He helped me apply for further research training in England as an alternative to medical school. Roeder was a Cambridge (England) man, and at that University there was an insect physiologist, JWS Pringle, who had published some very good papers in 1939. During the war, he, like many other scientists, had been involved in war-related research, in his case, I believe, on radar. Roeder wrote him and the appropriate papers must have been sent for application for admission to the University. Pringle agreed to have me as a student at Peterhouse, the College of which he was a Fellow, and the University accepted me as a Research Student.

I received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which would support me during my stay in England. In the late summer of 1949, I sailed for England on the Washington, a liner that had been used as a troopship and was not completely converted back for civilian use. I was lucky and had a cabin of my own, Accompanying me was a special amplifier, needed for experiments, which Pringle was unable to get in England. The trip, which must have lasted about a week, was pleasant. There were other students on board, including an English girl who I became friendly with, and we all had a good time. I was not seasick during the journey. However, when I woke up in Southampton after the ship had docked I felt queasy when I got up: I had adapted to the ship’s motion.

England and Cambridge

For some reason, perhaps because of their solitary stand against the Germans in the early years of the war, I have been something of an Anglophile, and although my stay in England lasted only about 11 months, I had a wonderful time. It was made even better when, just before I left the US, the UK devalued the pound. As my fellowship paid me in dollars, this immediately increased my income.

On arrival in England, I spent a couple of days in London, and then went on to Cambridge. Unlike most Universities, Cambridge and Oxford are made up of self-governing Colleges. I had to be accepted not only by the University but also by one of the Colleges, where you live and usually eat. In 1949, England was still recovering from the war, and food was rationed. I was issued a ration book, which I turned over to the College where I ate most of my meals. No coupons were needed in restaurants. Each College consisted – and still does – of a number of old and newer buildings. Many have their backs, typically gardens, on the river Cam. The various University departments are scattered among other buildings in the town. I would spend my time in the Zoology department, which was within easy walking distance of the College. Because many other things of interest were not, my first purchase on arrival was a bicycle.

I moved into rooms in Peterhouse, the oldest College in the University; one of the buildings dates back to 1284 or thereabout. Housing was spacious, but spartan. I had a large living room, and a small bedroom. The problem was that the only source of heat was a gas fire in the living room. Even though it was only September the bedroom was cold, and when I first arrived, tired from the trip, I started asking myself what I was doing there. The bathing or shower facilities were in another building two courtyards away. In many ways, it was like suddenly being immersed in a medieval world. College gates were locked at night, and undergraduates staying out late without permission, faced trouble (climbing over the wall was not unknown).

When I arrived in the Department, I was pretty soon assigned a laboratory with some equipment so that I could do whatever I had in mind. That was when I realized that at Tufts I had been a big frog in a rather small puddle, and wasn’t ready for this environment. Apparently, research students coming from English Universities, certainly from Cambridge and Oxford, were much better prepared than I was. Expecting to work with Pringle and learn from him, I had no particular project in mind. Although, as it turned out, I had relatively little contact with him. Pringle was the kind of person who, if he met you on the street, would be likely to look right through you without any acknowledgement – he was busy thinking.

I did play around with some experiments, but nothing memorable came of this. Finally, rather late in my stay, Pringle came into the lab one day to say that he had come up with an idea for mathematical analysis of biological systems. What was needed were data to test his idea. A good place to collect such data was from a large spine on the cockroach leg, which was to be stimulated (displaced) by a sinusoidal stimulus. The only other thing that had to be done was to record the activity of the nerve innervating this spine. Would I follow some suggestions and collect the data? He was going away for a while, but if I would leave him the data, he would take care of the rest. I spent some time doing experiments, and on my departure from England left him what he had asked for.

When I was back in the US doing my PhD work, probably in 1951, I received a manuscript that described the data collection and the analysis of the results. Except for the general approach, the analysis was incomprehensible to me, but I went over the manuscript as best I could and returned it to Pringle. The paper, with me as an undeserving co-author, came out in the summer of 1952. Shortly afterwards I received a letter from someone whose name at the time meant nothing to me, congratulating me on this pioneering work, which is what it turned out to be. Many years later, in the 1970’s, I was doing experiments which, with the help of my mathematically and computer-knowledgeable colleagues, were using related approaches.

Besides doing my work in the Zoology department, I attended some lectures in Physiology across the street. They were given by Adrian (who had won the Nobel Prize in the 1930s). Unknown to me, there was other Nobel Prize work under way in that department by Hodgkin and Huxley on the conduction of the nerve impulse, and famous studies on protein structure were ongoing in the Cavendish (Physics) laboratories. The closest I came to this was when John Kendrew, eventually a winner of the Nobel Prize for elucidating the structure of the muscle protein myoglobin, had me in his office to persuade me that IBM punch cards were an excellent way of storing references. He convinced me, and I used the system for a long time. Many years later software was developed for storing and finding references to the literature, but by that time I felt that I had too many to start transferring them into one of these systems. I stored the information in folders, and in my head. Not very efficient, but it usually worked.

From the personal point of view, the stay in England was a great success. I enjoyed College life, made friends, and did sports. In the winter I played squash. In the spring and summer I played quite a lot of tennis, including matches for Peterhouse’s second team.

Peterhouse had extensive sports grounds with beautiful grass tennis courts (here I am, in the picture above, ready to go). Playing on those spoiled me: when I came back to the US and to cement courts at Illinois I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get used to them. I wasn’t any good at cricket, but I enjoyed going to matches and keeping score for the Peterhouse team. We also had (sometimes vicious) croquet games on the College lawn. In the spring there were boat races on the Cam, and it was great fun racing down the towpath on my bicycle, keeping up with the College boat. I also played a fair amount of bridge, often with a College Fellow who later became a well-known expert in Italian history, and with the owner of an antique store down the street.

Finally, some of us would occasionally go to London. I recall one trip to the then Saddlers Wells Opera where we heard Simone Boccanegra sung in English; I have had a fondness for that opera ever since. I also must have had a social life of sorts. I had a date for the May Balls, a couple of days of parties held simultaneously in many Colleges: we dined at Peterhouse, then spent the night wandering from one College to another dancing and drinking. I was always a barely adequate dancer, but must have managed.

During vacations I traveled. For the Christmas holidays I went to France. In the summer, I traveled to Italy with a friend, and ended up on the Italian Riviera with friends of my parents.

After this interlude, it was back on the long train, and boat, trip to England. After a pretty short stay in Cambridge I was off to London, in early August, for some brief sight-seeing, then on to the airport and home.

What was the benefit of my year in England, besides the facts that I enjoyed it immensely, broadened my horizons, and co-authored a pioneering paper? It showed me that, my high college grades notwithstanding, I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and needed some serious training if I was to make science my career.