Monday, February 8, 1965, the fourth day after our arrival in New York City. I was having my first meeting with Dr. Milton R. J. Salton, chairman of the Department of Microbiology, in his office at the NYU School of Medicine on First Avenue near Thirtieth Street in Manhattan. Milton Salton, then in his early forties and already renowned for his research on bacterial cell walls, was an extroverted, convivial person. Australian by birth, he sounded and acted more like a mildly eccentric, old-world, upper-class Englishman, displaying a quintessentially British sense of humor. He smoked cigars incessantly and, as I found out only later, toward the end of his working day he also liked to have a gin and tonic—or two.
We had been having a cordial conversation and I had the feeling that all was going well. Given that he had promised me employment sight unseen, I sensed that Dr. Salton was reassured to find that I was a normal-seeming person and that I was able to communicate in English. Dr. Salton chatted with me about some Czech scientists he had met, and asked me about my experiences after the defection from Czechoslovakia. We talked about my research plans, and I told him I wanted to continue working on interferon.
“May I see my future laboratory?” I asked at one point.
“Let’s do that some other day. We didn’t have a chance to have the place tidied up for you,” replied Milton Salton.
I was disappointed, but did not consider it appropriate to protest. Dr. Salton asked me to come back at the end of the week at which time, he said, we would also discuss more details of my employment.
I came back to see Dr. Salton a few days later, as agreed. By then I was anxious to begin work. Not only did I want to continue my research, I also needed to start earning a living. Since leaving Czechoslovakia almost four months earlier, we had been borrowing money left and right, and by the time we arrived in New York City our debts had reached a few thousand dollars. But Dr. Salton was not in a hurry. He seemed to enjoy conversations about a multitude of subjects, except the specifics of my employment.
Finally, I gathered the courage to ask whether he had decided on my starting date. He had his secretary make an appointment for me with the Personnel Department (the term “human resources” had not yet been invented). Even though the appointment was set for the following week, I was relieved. Then I asked again to see my future laboratory. “We had the space cleaned, but I should warn you that it is still not completely ready,” he said.
We walked there together. It turned out that my future laboratory was going to be in a space that, until recently, had housed experimental rats and mice. The cages were gone, but not the smell of animal waste. The space, covered from floor to ceiling with beige tiles, consisted of one fairly large room with a glass-enclosed cubicle and an adjacent smaller room that, Dr. Salton pointed out, I could use as an office. Figuring that the odor would eventually subside, I thought the space was quite adequate.
“Where will the laboratory equipment that I need come from?” I asked. Dr. Salton said that he could find an incubator for me. As for my other needs, I would have to do what everyone else in my situation did in America—write and submit grant applications to secure funds for my research. Once I received the grant money I could buy equipment and supplies, hire a technician, and perhaps recruit graduate students or postdoctoral fellows.
This was a new concept to me. In Czechoslovakia there were shortages of equipment and laboratory supplies, but everyone received some money for research from the administration and we did not have to write grant applications.
Parenthetically, it is worth pointing out that hiring practices have changed profoundly in academia in the US since the days when I was hired over fifty years ago. On the one hand, the recruiting process for new faculty is now much more formal and stringent, with multiple levels of approval required for each appointment. On the other hand, it is common that newly hired faculty members are offered recruitment packages that may range from something like one million dollars in research support for a junior faculty member to eight-figure sums for the most senior investigators. Other perks, like subsidized housing, are also quite common.
Getting me fully processed for employment took an additional ten days, and I did not get my first paycheck for another five weeks—which was almost two months after our landing at JFK Airport. In the meantime our debts continued mounting, but at least we could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Meanwhile there were other surprises in store for me. On the day I officially started work, I stopped by Dr. Salton’s office. “What are the working hours here?” I inquired. Dr. Salton explained that technicians and administrative employees were generally expected to work from nine to five, but no such rules existed for faculty, graduate students, or postdoctoral fellows. “How much vacation am I entitled to?” “As much as you want,” was Dr. Salton’s response. I knew that I would be working long hours every day including most weekends and not taking lavish vacations, but still, what a refreshing difference from the Socialist system where everything was tightly regimented!
The day we arrived from Frankfurt at JFK Airport was a glorious, sunny winter’s day. We moved into Ivan’s one-bedroom Manhattan apartment quite close to the NYU Medical Center, where Ivan worked as an attending anesthesiologist. Marica and I slept in the bedroom, Ivan—unmarried at the time—on a sofa in the living room. As much as we wanted to move into a place of our own, we were not able to sign a lease without first completing all of my employment formalities with NYU.
We used the free time before the official start of my job to look for an apartment. When we arrived in New York, there was a glut of newly constructed apartment buildings in Manhattan and, even though rents were not cheap by 1965 standards, some buildings offered two months rent-free to tenants willing to sign a two-year lease. Strapped for cash, we thought this would help us recover financially. As soon as my employment was officially confirmed by NYU, we signed a lease on a one-bedroom apartment in a brand-new high-rise building at the corner of Thirty-Second Street and Second Avenue, a stone’s throw from NYU Medical Center. It helped tremendously that the NYU administration confirmed they would keep the promise to help with our relocation expenses. The money for relocation was almost enough to wipe out our debts.
The apartment did not have much character, but it was on the eighteenth floor, with huge windows, and had an unobstructed, spectacular view of the Midtown Manhattan skyline; the Empire State and Chrysler buildings competed for our attention. We owned no furniture, and we figured that the view was the substitute for having nothing to look at inside our apartment. So, after two weeks at Ivan’s, we packed our two suitcases, bought a bed, sheets, pillows, and towels at the B. Altman & Company department store and moved into our brand-new apartment. We were ecstatic.
Moving into the new apartment was the easy part. The adjustments to life in the new country were more complicated. We thought our English was adequate, but it didn’t take us long to discover that we had trouble understanding people who spoke with regional accents. When we listened to the weather forecast on the radio we had no idea what “30 degrees Fahrenheit” would feel like. Buying the right amount of ham in the supermarket created a problem because ounces and pounds meant nothing to us. And the aggressive sales practices that were common in this country often took us by surprise. When I called AT&T to order telephone service, we were impressed that we could have telephone lines installed the next day, but we ended up with three wall-mounted lightgreen Princess telephones, even though one or two standard phones would have been perfectly sufficient.
And then there were the social interactions. About a week after our arrival in New York City, Ivan told Marica and me that a friend had invited him to a cocktail party and asked that he bring us along. We had never been to a cocktail party—a form of entertainment that did not exist in Bratislava. The party was hosted by a friend of Ivan’s who was married to a well-to-do husband, in their apartment on Central Park West.
When we arrived there were about fifty people standing in the living room in groups of three or four, all having animated conversations. We were introduced to some of the people in the room. Everyone was cordial, but we had trouble maintaining a conversation, partly because in the noisy room we had a hard time understanding people, but also because we had difficulty with the small talk that seemed required.
We were offered martinis (at the time, wine was still not commonly served at parties in America), a drink that was new to us, and that, at first, we did not find pleasing. A waiter was serving shrimp from a tray. We had never seen let alone tasted shrimp, and we did not find the unfamiliar smell inviting. Overwhelmed by the new experiences, Marica and I retreated to a corner near the window from where we could quietly admire the view of the Central Park reservoir. Our hostess approached us with a big smile. “Are you having fun?” she asked.
On the first day at work, Dr. Salton personally introduced me to everyone in the Department of Microbiology, which at the time consisted of about ten faculty members and some fifty other people, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, lab technicians, and administrative employees. They were all extremely welcoming. As promised, Dr. Salton had had an old incubator moved into my empty laboratory, but it was of a type that could not be used for growing tissue cultures, and so was of little use to me. The smaller room—my office—was now equipped with an old metal writing desk and a used desk chair. A reassuring sign of progress was that the foul smell was almost gone.
I knew that the first order of business was to work on finding grants. Several of my colleagues in microbiology offered to help familiarize me with the business of preparing grant applications.
At the same time, I was in the midst of an extraordinary group of scientists I wanted to get to know. NYU School of Medicine in those days was (and still is) a remarkable place. Chairing the Department of Biochemistry was Severo Ochoa, a refugee from Franco’s Spain, who had earned the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to the elucidation of the mechanisms of RNA and DNA synthesis, and for deciphering the genetic code.
Especially strong was the field of immunology, represented by, among others, three towering figures: Baruj Benacerraf, born in Venezuela to a wealthy banking family of Sephardic Jews from North Africa, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1980. He was awarded the Nobel for the discovery of immune response genes—genes that control the immune system’s ability to respond to infections or other foreign material. Edward Franklin, another prominent immunologist at NYU, received the honor of having a disease named after him, but, sadly, would die of a brain tumor in 1982 at age fifty-four.
And then there was Michael Heidelberger, already in his late seventies when I joined NYU, who is considered the father of modern immunology. He is credited with many basic discoveries, including demonstrating that antibodies are proteins and that complex sugars in microbes can act as antigens, meaning they can stimulate the production of protective antibodies. Working full-time until close to his death at age 103, Michael was also a colorful person and a great raconteur, always at the ready to come up with a new story from his long and productive life. Michael earned every conceivable scientific honor—including the Lasker Award and the National Medal of Science—with the exception of the Nobel Prize. In one of his stories, he related to me why he thought he had been passed over by the Nobel Prize Committee—he had once turned down an invitation to give a lecture at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. (Selections of Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine are made by professors of the Karolinska Institute.)
Michael’s joie de vivre at his advanced age was admirable. When he was about ninety-four, he was told that he needed to have a heart valve replaced, which required open-heart surgery. The heart surgeon told him there were two options, he could use a pig heart valve or an artificial one, which one would he prefer? “I don’t care,” said Michael, “but give me the valve that will last longer.”
Another renowned faculty member, until his departure in 1969, was Lewis Thomas, a noted experimental pathologist as well as author of The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher and of many other award-winning books of essays. At NYU, Lew Thomas served successively as chair of the Department of Pathology, chair of the Department of Medicine, and dean of NYU School of Medicine. He was a great thinker and humanist. Encounters with him were always stimulating.
One of the people who played a role in bringing me to NYU was Joseph Ransohoff, chair of the Department of Neurosurgery. After hearing about me in the operating room from Ivan, Joe had mentioned my name to Dr. Salton and the then-acting dean, Saul Farber, which led to the job offer. Joe was a world-class neurosurgeon, an almost legendary figure—he inspired the medical drama series Ben Casey that ran on ABC television from 1961 to 1966. He had not only pioneered surgical treatments of brain tumors, he was also interested in learning about their causes.
When I first met Joe, a few days after starting at my new job, he confided that he was hoping I would come up with ways to identify viruses responsible for some of the deadly brain tumors he was interested in, such as glioblastoma. At the time it was suspected that viruses might be responsible for some human cancers, because certain tumors in animals were known to have a viral etiology. But there was still no specific virus known to be implicated in any type of human cancer. To motivate me toward expanding my interests into the field of experimental cancer research and the role of viruses in cancer, Joe introduced me to two wellknown cancer researchers, Lloyd Old and Edward Boyse, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Lloyd turned out to be invaluable at later stages of my career when I became interested in the tumor necrosis factor protein, or TNF.
Unfortunately, I never was of much help to Joe’s quest to identify viruses as causative agents of brain tumors—this was not a project I thought I could successfully tackle. To this day, fifty years later, there is still no virus positively identified as the cause of brain tumors in humans. However, progress has been made in identifying viruses that cause some other types of human cancer, for example Epstein-Barr virus (the causative agent of infectious mononucleosis) is also known to be the cause of Burkitt’s lymphoma—a cancer occurring in children in equatorial Africa; hepatitis B and hepatitis C viruses are the cause of primary liver cancer; and human papilloma viruses have been identified as the cause of cervical cancer of the uterus. Altogether, it is now estimated that about 20 percent of all human cancers have a proven viral etiology and it is likely that more types of human cancer will turn out to be elicited by virus infection. In his general instincts, Joe Ransohoff was on the right track.
In my first weeks, I also met scientists outside NYU, including two well-known researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. One was Wolfgang “Bill” Joklik, a prominent virologist who was interested in interferon research. Using Bill as a sounding board for some ideas I had for my future interferon research helped to clarify my thoughts about what I would include in the grant application I was about to start writing.
Another scientist I met at Albert Einstein was Barry Bloom, then still a young microbiologist and immunologist, soon to become a widely recognized expert in infectious diseases, vaccines, and global health. Though not working on interferon, Barry was interested in my work because of his involvement with another protein important in host defenses against microbes, called macrophage migration inhibitory factor.
My first grant application took about two months to prepare, not very long considering the fact that I was new to this business. It was already known that interferon was a cell-made protein—that is, a protein produced and secreted from cells—but the production happened only after the cells’ infection with a virus. In the application, I proposed to investigate what made cells switch on interferon production. It was suspected that cells must have one or more genes for interferon, and that the expression of this gene or genes was somehow turned off until a virus infected a cell. However, why and how a virus would turn on the generation of interferon was not known, and I was proposing to find some of the answers.
The answers were important because at the time interferon was the only known substance that selectively inhibited the multiplication of viruses without harming cells. There was already some support for the idea that interferon was important in the body’s defense against viral infections. I believed—as did others in the field—that as we learned more about how interferon was made and how it worked, we might be able to use interferon for the treatment of viral infections. In that first grant application, I wrote, perhaps a little too optimistically, that interferon might turn out to be as important for the treatment of viral infections as penicillin along with many other antibiotics are for the control of bacterial infections. It is now known that interferon is important in the body’s resistance to many virus infections, but it is used relatively infrequently as a therapeutic agent for viral diseases.
I knew in writing my application that not everyone would be persuaded about the importance of the work I was proposing to do. The interferon molecule had not yet been isolated in pure form, and consequently there was no physicochemical proof of interferon’s existence. All the available evidence rested on indirect biological assays. Some scientists were not convinced, and detractors commented that a better name for interferon might be “imaginon.” In addition, the research methods available for the work I was proposing were still quite crude, again depending more on indirect evidence than precise molecular analysis.
Heeding the advice of Dr. Salton and others to apply to multiple agencies and hope to have my choice of grant offers, I submitted the application to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the New York City Health Research Council, in addition to the National Institutes of Health, the major federal funding agency of biomedical research. Responses, I was told, could take about six months. I was hopeful but not very confident that my grant application would be funded. In the meantime I was getting ready to start teaching, attending lectures, and doing as much reading in my field as possible.
As I was settling into my new life as a research scientist and medical educator in America, some colleagues and acquaintances asked whether I had considered the practice of medicine as a career option instead of devoting myself to laboratory research and teaching.
I remember vividly a conversation with Ernst Wertheimer, a friend of my parents who with his wife, Lilly—my mother’s best friend in Bratislava—had emigrated to Israel but later moved to the Boston area. Ernst, a gynecologist by training, was in his fifties when they moved to the US to join their daughter and grandchildren. Perhaps because of his age and because he never completely mastered the English language, Ernst had failed to pass the examination all foreign medical graduates need to get through in order to be allowed to work with patients. Unable to practice medicine, Ernst had to supplement his small Israeli pension by working as a technician in a hospital lab in Brookline, Massachusetts. Lilly, still attractive and lively, worked as a receptionist in a restaurant.
Ernst and Lilly came to visit us when they learned from my parents that we had settled in New York City. As close family friends, they didn’t hesitate to ask personal questions.
“How much do you make?” Ernst asked bluntly. I answered truthfully. “That’s not bad,” said Ernst, “but do you realize that you could make several times that amount in medical practice? You are young, your English is good, I am sure you would have no difficulty passing the ECFMG examination [the exam Ernst had failed].” He went on to point out that in science the success of my career would always depend on my ability to secure grant support. “You will be working your ass off, and you will never make enough money to live a really comfortable life.” (I should mention that in the 1960s doctors enjoyed a very high social standing—probably more so than today—and, in relative terms, their average earnings too were higher than in the days following the introduction of managed care.)
I knew that he had our best interests in mind. But, after thanking him, I told Ernst that I had made up my mind. I knew there was no guarantee that I would succeed as a research scientist, but I was willing to take the risk. “I probably could become a decent doctor and earn more money,” I said, “but I love what I am doing and I don’t mind if I never get rich.”
At the same time, Marica was trying to find a professional home of her own. There were—and still are—fewer job opportunities in art history than in biomedical science. Nor did Marica have the type of professional contacts in the US that I had been able to establish while working at the Institute of Virology in Bratislava. She sent out letters to museums and libraries in New York City, inquiring about possible openings. Today, most organizations don’t bother to acknowledge unsolicited job inquiries; at best they respond with a form letter. In 1965, people were more courteous. She received many replies, and even though at first no one invited her for an interview, some of the letters offered words of encouragement and assurances that if a suitable opening should arise, she would be notified. The director of the Frick Collection went as far as to suggest, in a personal letter, that Marica’s chances would improve if she had her CV revised and reformatted so that it conformed to American standards. She did!
During our stay in Vienna, Margaret Kunz—the American wife of my Austrian colleague Christian—had given us the phone number of her cousin in New York City. We contacted Helen Garrison and her husband Bill shortly after our arrival. Helen was very eager to help Marica in her job search—and in the process of adjustment to life in America in general. When we met her, Helen was at home with her young twin daughters, but earlier she had worked at the Brooklyn Museum. When it became clear that finding a paid position for Marica might take some time, Helen asked whether Marica would be interested in working temporarily as a volunteer at the Brooklyn Museum, explaining that such experience might be helpful in Marica’s search of a permanent job. Marica agreed enthusiastically and by springtime, thanks to Helen’s recommendation, Marica started working as a volunteer in the Brooklyn Museum’s library.
Marica’s spirits improved. She too would now come home in the evening with new experiences to share with me over the dinner table. By then we did in fact own a dining table—like the few other pieces of furniture we had in the apartment at the time, it had been acquired from a thrift shop run by the Salvation Army.
Then, before the summer ended, Marica secured a permanent job. In fact, she suddenly received two job offers. First she had been invited to an interview at the New York Public Library—one of the places where she had submitted her improved résumé—and shortly thereafter she was told that she could have a position there. She would have said yes, had she not also been told of a possible opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some months earlier, Helen Garrison had referred Marica to a curator at the Met who had talked to Marica and then guided her to personnel, where she filled out a job application for the position of a cataloger, and where she was told she would be contacted if an opening arose.
It turned out that the position available at the Met was not for a cataloger, but for a clerk-typist at the museum library. Marica was offered the job. Museums were not and still are not known for paying generous wages; the gross annual pay in the position offered to Marica was $3,750 per year, or about two dollars per hour. This was a meager compensation even in 1965 when the federal minimum wage was $1.25 and a gallon of regular gas cost less than thirty cents. Despite the low pay and unattractive job title, Marica accepted the offer, hoping that if she did well she would eventually move to a professional position. Besides, even though Marica’s salary was low, it helped significantly with our expenses and the remaining unpaid debts. To this day, one piece of advice Marica often gives to people seeking their first jobs is that in the fluid American job market it is important to get started in some position, even if that position is not the most desirable one.
Marica spent about seven months working in the Met museum library before being promoted to the professional position of cataloger, more in line with her background and expectations. Fortunately, her position of clerk-typist did not require a great deal of typing. The head of the library at the time, Elizabeth Usher, recognized that Marica’s familiarity with several Slavic languages in addition to German, French, and Hungarian was more of an asset than her not-so-stellar typing skills.
Marica quickly became popular at the library, partly because of a small faux pas committed on one of her first days on the job. She answered a telephone call, which, it turned out, was for an older unmarried female colleague. In continental Europe a professional woman of a certain age would never be addressed as “Miss,” no matter her marital status. “Mrs. Wozar is on a lunch break,” Marica announced. The next day, Miss Wozar (“Ms.” was not yet in use in 1965) received a congratulatory call on the occasion of her marriage.
The fall marked for me the beginning of a new experience—I was asked to help with the teaching of the laboratory section of the microbiology course for medical students. While I had worked as teaching assistant in microbiology during my medical school days, the standard of teaching at NYU was higher. In those days microbiology was taught one full semester in the second year of medical school, with two two-hour lab sessions scheduled per week. The students learned the basics of diagnostic microbiology and, unlike in Czechoslovakia, they also performed some fairly sophisticated experiments that taught them principles of the science of molecular microbiology.
I was taken under the wing of Lane Barksdale, a kind if somewhat eccentric senior professor in the Microbiology Department. Every year, when he gave a lecture on yeast and fungal infections, Lane would bring a wicker basket filled with mushrooms (also a kind of fungi, of course) that he would throw into the auditorium during the lecture. Lane loved teaching, even though some students complained that his lectures were incomprehensible.
Toward the end of the year I received the first reply from one of the agencies where I had submitted my grant application; it was from the New York City Health Research Council, an organization that ceased to exist when the financial crisis hit the city in the 1970s. I was thrilled when I learned that they were willing to fund my research. More good news was on the way: the NIH and the National Science Foundation, too, were ready to give me the research support I had applied for. I don’t know if it was compassion for a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain, or that they believed in the importance of interferon, despite the detractors. I accepted the grant support from the NIH and—because it would have been improper to accept funds for the same project from more than one source—I declined the other two grants, though with gratitude for their offers.
Eager to get started with my research project, I placed orders for several pieces of equipment. I did not have to purchase a carbon dioxide (CO2) incubator—an expensive piece of equipment needed for tissue culture work—because a few weeks before I had received word that my grant was funded, I was approached by a young NYU colleague who introduced himself and said, literally, “I have a CO2 incubator, can I move it into your laboratory?” At the time I was all by myself in the lab, and without much hesitation I invited the colleague, Alvin Friedman-Kien, to join me. (More about Alvin very shortly.) The funds provided by the NIH grant were sufficient for only one salaried position, which I used to hire a technician. I found a competent young woman, Millie Varacalli, an immigrant from Puerto Rico who then worked with me for more than a decade.
A few weeks later, I was approached by a newly admitted PhD candidate who inquired if I would consider becoming his thesis adviser. The student was Mun H. Ng, a native of Hong Kong who came to the United States planning to earn his PhD degree in microbiology, and then return home. Interested in working in the field of virology, Mun asked Dr. Salton who in the Department might be available to become his adviser, and Salton told him that I was the only person researching viruses. Soon another graduate student, Toby Rossman, knocked on my door to inquire about the possibility of joining my lab. Toby had completed most of her required coursework and was ready to start the laboratory research necessary for writing and defending her PhD thesis. She had read some of my publications and was interested in the work I was doing with viruses and interferon.
I was quite stunned that any self-respecting student would consider joining a lab that was still far from being fully functional, but sensing that both Mun and Toby were smart and personable, I agreed to give them (and myself) a chance. A third student who joined the lab in the summer of 1966 was Douglas Lowy. Doug had stood out as a bright and inquisitive medical student in the laboratory section of the microbiology course I had been teaching. Remembering how I had become interested in research as a medical student in Bratislava, I asked Doug if he might consider joining my lab for a research internship during the summer, which he readily agreed to do.
And then there was Alvin Friedman-Kien, who had talked his way into my lab by offering to share his CO2 incubator with me. Alvin was an MD completing his fellowship training in dermatology. Earlier, he had spent time at the dermatology branch of the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, and during that period he worked in the laboratory of Wallace “Wally” Rowe, a highly regarded virus researcher with a number of discoveries to his credit. Restless and ambitious, Alvin not only aspired to become a leading clinical researcher-dermatologist, he was also a passionate collector of art and antiques from many different cultures and periods. Moreover, he was successfully investing in real estate in New York City and occasionally making a profit by buying and selling art and antiques. Alvin became indefatigable in his efforts to help me—and later Marica too—to get adjusted to life in New York and to introduce us to the art and culture of this country.
One day during our lunch break Alvin offered to show me the Seagram Building designed by the German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Alvin took me inside the building into the fabled Four Seasons restaurant—not to eat there, of course, but to show me the interior, conceived by influential American architect Philip Johnson, now a designated New York City landmark. Alvin pointed out the sculpture by Richard Lippold (then a friend of Alvin’s) that still hangs from the ceiling above the bar in the Grill Room and the large stage curtain painted by Pablo Picasso adorning a wall near the entrance to the Pool Room. (In 2014 the fragile curtain was taken down for a badly needed cleaning and restoration. It has since been moved to the New-York Historical Society for permanent display.)
Before leaving, Alvin also showed me the richly decorated marble men’s room of the restaurant. But he wouldn’t let me linger inside the men’s room. “Let’s get out fast,” he said, “so that we don’t have to pay them a quarter.” Alvin and I have remained close friends.
The small coterie crowded inside the tiled walls of my lab got along splendidly. Mun and Toby went on to successfully complete their PhD thesis research and to publish good scientific papers. Doug came back to work in the lab the following summer and he too had his name included on a publication. American-born Toby and Doug helped me tremendously to gain an understanding of how young people think in this country. All of the people inside my small laboratory were smart and creative and they deserve a great deal of credit for getting my research successfully underway. I can only hope my students—all of them, not just Toby, Mun, and Doug—have learned as much from me as I have learned from them.
In addition to setting up the lab and getting started with the experimental work, I took on another project. Shortly after my move to NYU, I received an invitation to write a monograph on interferon from the European science publisher Springer-Verlag. This was a tempting and flattering invitation because the resulting product would become the very first comprehensive text devoted to the review of the entire field of interferon research. I responded that I was interested but—in view of the fact that I had to complete my grant applications and get my newly established laboratory going—I could not start working on the assignment until the middle of the 1967 calendar year and—if all went well—have it completed a year later. The publisher accepted. I worked in the laboratory during the day and at home, after dinner, I wrote the text of my book longhand. Doug, an art history major in college and a skilled wordsmith, acted as my unpaid editor, helping tremendously to make the 140-page hardcover book readable when it finally saw the light of day in 1969.
Every member of my small laboratory in the mid-1960s went on to build a distinguished professional career. Mun Ng returned to Hong
Kong, as planned, where he eventually became professor and chairman of the Microbiology Department of the Hong Kong University School of Medicine. Toby Rossman went on to receive postdoctoral training and then returned to NYU to become professor of environmental medicine at the School of Medicine.
Doug Lowy completed training in dermatology, then moved to the NIH where he later joined the National Cancer Institute and built a stellar scientific career. Doug made a major contribution to the development of the papilloma virus vaccine—a vaccine widely used to prevent infection with papilloma viruses in preteen girls—and lately boys too— and impart protection against cancer of the uterine cervix and some other malignant tumors caused by papilloma virus infection. In 2014 President Obama awarded Doug and his colleague the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, one of the two highest honors bestowed by the United States government for achievements in science, technology, and innovation. Doug is now acting director of the National Cancer Institute.
Alvin Friedman-Kien went on to establish his own research program at NYU, becoming the first physician-scientist in the early 1980s to identify cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma in young homosexual men—a telltale sign of the emerging AIDS epidemic—thus becoming a living legend in the history of AIDS research.
Witnessing the growing success of many of my former students and colleagues has been one of my life’s greatest satisfactions.