9.Peter W. Thompson, MD attended medical school and has focused on the hospital centered patient care model of treatment. It is heavily committed to maintaining a relation with patients throughout their illnesses. This physician-owned program is in some 20 states. It is called Apogeephysicians and mentoring is a major part of how participating physicians are trained. Thompson is Chief of Clinical Operations and mentors’ young physicians in the program.
10.Suzanne M. O’Neill was the coordinator for my Biology101–102 course. She took an interest in human genetics and went to Pittsburgh to study genetic counselling and eventually got a PhD there in 2001. She enjoys the practice of genetic counselling and helps other students entering that field at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.
11.Leonard Kellner (1952–2018) did a project on twinning, taking photos of identical and same sex non-identical twins. He would cut these, and match the left face of one twin with the right face of the other twin and this showed asymmetry for non-identical twins but perfect matching for identical twins. He also got photo albums of twins and showed that at all stages of life to old age the identical twins maintained their symmetry. After graduation Kellner took an interest in non-invasive prenatal diagnosis and founded his own company for detecting alpha-fetoprotein in maternal blood and other markers in maternal blood for a variety of genetic disorders. The alpha-fetoprotein identified a faulty development of the neural tube leading to spina bifida and anencephaly.
12.Tracey E. Meyers got her MD at NYU and worked for several years at Harlem Hospital working with sickle cell anemia patients and those at risk. She moved to Duke University in North Carolina and teaches Family Medicine.
From UCLA, I would add mentoring as an undergraduate, Anthony Shermoen, who got his PhD at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He does research on embryonic transcription in Drosophilia at the University of California, San Francisco, California.
Many students I have mentored so that they could direct their energies to creative outlets. This includes several Stony Brook students. Jonathan Hanke got his PhD in mathematics and taught basic creative mathematics as a professor and now applies mathematics to industry as a vice president at Goldman Sachs. He devotes time to encouraging high school students to experience mathematics as a creative activity. Michael Kramer developed his talents in computers and art and became Viacom’s art director. He also used his talents to restore WWII airplanes for the USS Enterprise museum in NYC. He now works for IBM in Texas. Michael’s older brother, Richard Kramer, also entered a field using computers as a systems engineer in Chicago. Howard Diamond studied Biblical references to sexual and eugenic practices and attitudes in the Old Testament. I learned a lot from his insights into Jewish interpretations (mostly Talmudic) of birth defects, intersex conditions, and eugenic practices. He became a Rabbi at Temple Bńai Sholom Beth David, Rockville Center, New York. Leonard Jay Moss started a graduate program at Albert Einstein Medical School and then shifted to a DO degree with a specialty in cardiology. He practices in New Jersey. Michael Yeh practices emergency medicine and toxicology. He combined journalism, epidemiology, and medicine in his formative years, and he hopes to write about medicine and society from his experiences. He is now at Emery University in Atlanta, Georgia. Sean Li practices anesthesiology and pain management in New Jersey and has published articles and book chapters in his field. Steven Chaikin became a lawyer representing impoverished clients in criminal cases. Scott Stein started a PhD program at IU but switched to medicine and specializes in rheumatology and immunology and practices in Victoria, Texas. Burton Rocks (b. 1972) got his law degree and combined it with his love for spectator sports. He coauthored autobiographies of baseball players and developed his own firm for representing them for their negotiated contracts. He teaches sports contract law as an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University. Adam Greenberg got his MD at SUNY Downstate and studied cell biology and genetics at Cornell Medical University. He is now at UC Davis.
I would also add a student I knew mostly through telephone conversations over more than two decades. Mark Italiano (1960–2017) was a gifted pianist who taught piano in Colonia, New Jersey to make a living but had an interest in what were then called hermaphroditic disorders. He earned a doctorate degree in alternative medicine and he wrote articles on intersexual disorders and how they have been interpreted by science and Society.
I would add Anthony Delurefficio who worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library as an archivist for the Watson papers. I have encouraged his interests in the history of genetics. He was a Librarian for the New School in NYC and now is data managing at Sloan Kettering.
I single out the influence of Robert Desnick (b. 1943) on my interests in human genetics. Desnick is Dean of Genetics and Genomic Medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System, New York. He is a member of the Institute for Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. I met him while I was a visiting professor in the history of science at the University of Minnesota and came back to spend a semester in his laboratory at the University of Minnesota and went on rounds with his pediatric fellows to acquaint myself with over 100 human genetic disorders and while there co-authored two articles with Desnick on mosaicism in retinoblastoma and how to counsel families with varied onsets of the condition in their children. Desnick and I also mentored a Stony Brook University student I recommended to him, Steven B. Galson, (b. 1956) who became Acting Surgeon General under the Bush Administration and Assistant Secretary of Health in the Obama administration. Galson has focused on public health issues such as obesity in children and the prevention of epidemic diseases. He is now Senior Vice President of Amgen.
Note that 26 names can be attached to my intellectual pedigree. With the 35 from Muller’s intellectual pedigree, that yields 61 persons associated with the Muller pedigree.
11Representing Inputs to My Academic Life
The circular figure that follows represents my life from the perspective of inputs. We know many of the major influences on our lives. Many of them are shared by others. Each of us is unique in the environmental sense that we live independent lives (even conjoined twins). The circle begins at noon and goes clockwise. For convenience I have listed these in more detail in the legend to this circle of inputs. I have listed the environmental factors but realize there are also genetic factors that may filter or distort our reception and interpretation of environmental influences. Those are harder to designate because our knowledge of the genetic composition and regulation of the nervous system is still inadequate compared to what we know about environmental influences on our lives. Muller used the phrase “life the lucky” to represent the diversity both genetic and environmental influences in our lives. When we are born may determine if we experience wars and catastrophes. We have no control over who our biological parents are or if we are orphans or adopted and raised by parents unrelated to us biologically.
In my own life I have been heard by thousands of students because I preferred to teach large introductory courses with 100 to 600 students in a lecture hall. I presume this is also true for the thousands of persons who have read my various books and articles. But as people leave their institutions and work elsewhere or retire or die, they are rapidly forgotten. I used to ask my students to name as many Nobel laureates in the life sciences as they could, but few could name more than a dozen. My selection of inputs is thus biased because I do not remember who taught me each fact or idea I know or when I first came to know them.
I chose Muller as my second example because next to myself, I know more about his life than I do even of my siblings. I had the privilege to write his biography and I helped classify thousands of documents he left to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Muller’s life is more adventurous than mine and he lived his adult life largely in a world at war or in economic collapse. His education reflects more of the nineteenth century than does mine. We both chose academic lives, but Muller’s was much more heavily involved in research and