10My Academic Descendants
I have supervised the research of six PhD students and one master’s student. I have also mentored dozens of undergraduates; some have gone on for PhD or MD-PhD programs. The six PhD students were all at UCLA.
1.John Southin (1937–2015) was born and died in Brockport, Ontario, in Canada. I met him as a student in my genetics class at Queen’s University. John became my first graduate student and came with Nedra and me when we moved to Los Angeles. At UCLA John studied the mosaic distributions of induced dumpy mutations. He was a loyalist to the Queen and an admirer of left-wing rebels (Tito and Castro). He helped Americans who came to Canada to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. He taught in Havana during the summers until he was told not to come back because he was gay. He taught the rest of his career at McGill University. He opened an androgynous bookstore in Montreal. He retired to Brockville where he died of a neuromuscular degenerative disease. John was an outstanding teacher at McGill.
2.Ronald Sederoff (b. 1939) was born in Montreal, Canada. He worked in my laboratory as an undergraduate and started a Medical School at Stanford but decided he preferred research. He did his dissertation on a comparison of mutagenesis in bacteriophage (with Robert Edgar at Caltech) and with fruit flies at UCLA. He went to Geneva to do a postdoctoral stay with Charles Epstein . He settled in the University of North Carolina in Raleigh and worked on forestry genetics devising a technique to introduce DNA into woody tissue and culturing trees from the altered cells. This was both new and important and it led to Ron’s election to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2018 Sederoff received the Wallenberg Prize for plant sciences in Stockholm from the King of Sweden. He was still active in 2017 as an emeritus professor.
3.Harry Corwin (1938–2017) was an able student in my genetics class at UCLA and I asked him to explore working in my laboratory. He studied chemical mutagens in Drosophila. He enjoyed his academic life at the University of Pittsburg where he became the Dean of the Honors Program. He asked me to teach in the Semester at Sea program (Spring 1992) for which he served as an academic dean. He retired to Colorado and died in the state of Washington of complications from diabetes.
4.Robert J. Hendrickson studied the cytology of the dumpy locus and induced rearrangements with X-rays that altered that gene’s expression. He did a postdoctoral at Yale where he became an alcoholic. He had served in WWII and was about ten years older than me. He lost two jobs and joined Alcoholics Anonymous in Denver. He earned a living as a photographer. I used to meet him in Colorado Springs when I was active with the Lilly Endowment workshops in the Liberal Arts. He disappeared a few years after recovering from a heart attack.
5.Dale Grace (1939–1990) was a gymnast as an undergraduate. He studied the structure of the dumpy gene and added additional sites to its map. He went to Holland for a postdoctoral study but switched to medical school there. He dropped out after a severe case of mononucleosis. He went to Oregon and studied mosquito genetics. I last saw him at a genetics congress meeting in Toronto in 1988. He died shortly after that.
6.John Jenkins (b. 1941) was born in Springfield Massachusetts. He did his undergraduate work at Utah State and joined my laboratory and used ethyl methane sulfonate as a mutagen to compare chemical and spontaneous dumpy mutations. He took a position at Swarthmore College and is still active there as an emeritus professor. He has written two textbooks in genetics and human genetics.
7.Shari Cohn (b. 1957) was born in Plainview, New York and she was an undergraduate at Stony Brook University who worked in my laboratory for undergraduates. She did a project on color blind expression in carrier females studying one eye at a time and using Ishihara charts with diminished lighting and other means of comparing homozygous XX or hemizygous (XY) normal color vision individuals from mutant bearing carriers. She found variations in color perception in such heterozygous females exist, confirming Mary Lyon’s hypothesis of X-inactivation for this trait. She extended this to a Master’s degree with me and David Emmerich, a psychologist at Stony Brook University, using more sophisticated machinery, a tachistoscope, to measure the time involved in recognizing colored dots or numbers. Shari went to Edinburgh, Scotland to do her PhD on second sight exploring its folklore, history, and prevalence in families and communities. She learned Gaelic to converse with Scottish people having a tradition of second sight experiences. She still resides in Edinburgh with her family.
Among my undergraduate students at Stony Brook University who have entered academic careers are:
1.Alfred Handler a PhD with John Postlethwait studying fruit fly oogenesis. He took up a postdoctoral course at Caltech and works in Florida doing Dipteran research for the US Department of Agriculture in Gainesville, Florida.
2.David B. Weiner got his PhD in Cincinnati and did research on vaccines at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now Vice-President for Research at the Wistar Institute. He is noted as a “father of DNA vaccines.”
3.Philip F. Giampietro received his MD at Stony Brook University and his PhD with Robert Desnick at Mount Sinai Medical School in NYC. He specialized in human genetic disorders and taught in Wisconsin before moving to the Philadelphia region, where he is a professor of pediatrics at Drexel University.
4.Daniel Ciccarone (b. 1960) was born in New York City. He received his MD at Stony Brook University and he is now a Professor of Community and Family Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School, where he got a MPH. He has published on the prevention of HIV transmission and opioid addiction. He has testified before Congressional Committees that addictions are stigmatizing diseases and need community responses that address their social problems and not just their psychological problems. He views were shaped in his youth. When he was attending medical school and his parent went bankrupt, he slept in a tent in the woods by the Biology Buildingw and took his showers in the basement of that building.
5.Owen Debowy received his PhD and MD at New York University with a dissertation on the neurological control of vision perception. He is Medical Director at Sturdy Medical Hospital in Plainville, Massachusetts, with specialization in internal medicine and pediatrics.
6.Thomas Houze got his PhD in Gothenburg, Sweden, and worked in molecular medicine and holds a patent. He went to Great Britain and cofounded a startup company using stem cell research. He worked for the NIH and is now with the FDA in Silver Spring, Maryland.
7.Bruce Luke Wang (b. 1965) got his PhD at the University of Illinois in Chicago where he worked on molecular pharmacology projects.
8.Gary Joel Vorsanger got his PhD and MD at Mount Sinai Medical School and has worked