Well, that was an amazing thing, and a thing again like the Mass General itself that cured my... any snobbery that might have come from being an autodidact, because that of course was another great institution, and in those days... in the early Rockefeller Institute there was a style which we don't see much anymore. You know, you and I have talked about this. So what was that style? Well, it was the idea of having people develop their own views – not in some departmental organization or some coterie or some category, and there was nothing heritable about it. Every lab was centered around a particular individual and his style. But that style, while it was idiosyncratic, had a shared belief amongst all of them; they all had this almost quasi-religious belief in the powers of science. And this chap Bronk, who was in fact a dean at Swarthmore College and then was at this Johnston Foundation which I originally mentioned and where I had worked, and finally became President of Johns Hopkins University, was in fact at that time President of the National Academy of Science and he then became President of the Rockefeller; and he had this brilliant idea of setting up a graduate program, in the broadest sense, where you just didn't do it the way they did in the universities – in fact you didn't have a committee, you had an interview with Bronk, usually a walk in New York for two hours, in which you were asked the most remarkable variety of questions. And he personally chose the students, and I have to say he was some kind of small genius because that student program within rapid order became the leading one in biology in America, even though there were great institutions in competition – for example, Harvard itself. So it was an extremely fortunate thing that I... that I got there.
And what happened at that point is I decided to exercise my interest in... in this antibody molecule which was called gamma globulin in those days. There's an interesting referent here because that book I mentioned I read in Paris by Cohn and Edsall; Cohn was the man who fractionated serum for military purposes, and Cohn fraction two... usually ammonium sulphate fractions, Cohn fraction two was the gamma globulin fraction, it wasn't exactly pure; it was my good luck to get a huge bottle of it from human placentae, of all things, from Lederle Labs in New Jersey. And so that was my sort of bailiwick; I could dig in and do all kinds of things.
Well, I began to be very interested in physical chemistry and in molecular structure, and I decided I would work on that. And I have to say one of Bronk's great attributes and remarkable notions was apprenticeship was the key – not pedantry and lots of courses. In fact, we didn't have any courses. So I sort of taught myself again physical chemistry. A little later on I got some help from some trained physical chemists but, initially, I got into protein physical chemistry. And it was there that I decided I would really go after the structure of the antibody molecule. That hope and that assertion turned out to be extraordinarily naïve because I didn't have any idea of how difficult a task it was going to be. Nonetheless that pretty much gives you an indication of how accidental all of these things are; they aren't really – if I hadn't read that book in Paris, if I hadn't had the naïve thought about going after this molecule, the terrors of which did not yet overwhelm me, I wouldn't have started.
