The Department of Molecular Genetics (aka Medical Genetics) has been an inseparable part of my life for over 26 years. The venerable institution has given me such incredible opportunities again and again and any success that I have experienced could not have been achieved without its support.
In the spring of 1993 I received a phone call from Medical Genetics while working in a lab as 4th year undergrad at Dalhousie University. Being a small town kid from a mining town, I was both humbled and intimidated by the invitation to visit the department. I have vivid memories of touring Alex Joyner’s lab at SLRI (now LTRI) that summer, and her student Kathy realizing that cross-sections of mouse brain slices was not turning my crank. I thought I wanted to study mammalian brain development, but Kathy new better. She spontaneously led me down the hall and knocked on Joe Culotti’s office door. He’s in this small office, and has his own dissection scope in there along with tons and tons of worm plates everywhere. Always generous with his time, and ever-enthusiastic, Joe offers me a seat and introduces me to APOG- the awesome power of genetics with C. elegans.
I am a little ashamed to say that I had never heard of C. elegans before meeting Joe. No one at DAL worked on it, and if it was discussed in class, I must have been daydreaming. As an undergrad, I worked on Sea Monkeys (Artemia franciscana), so I was use to working with small animals and primed to learn about an even better system.
Joe starts explaining how the worm is transparent, how he uses this technique called LacZ staining to see axons (remember- this is before Chalfie invents GFP as a reporter) and how he can EMS worms to find axon guidance mutants and then clone the genes. At the time, I didn’t realize (or even understand the significance) that Joe, Andrew Spence and colleagues had just cloned unc-5, and Joe and his buddies cloned unc-6 the year before, but it didn’t matter. Joe’s enthusiasm was permeating, and the beauty of the worm was self-evident. Right then and there in Joe’s office, I knew I wanted to work on the worm with Joe.
Sometime later in 2002, I’m working in Stuart Kim’s lab at Stanford on using microarray technology to better understand gene expression during axon guidance in C. elegans. Those experiments didn’t work out quite the way I envisioned, but I got a story out of the work nevertheless and my boss was pretty excited about it. Stuart was invited by then Chair Brenda Andrews to come up and give a Distinguished Lecture talk hosted by Molecular Genetics and he highlighted my work. One thing led to another and Brenda ended up offering me a job. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss California, but I am forever grateful to Brenda for giving me my first real job and for giving me encouragement to pursue projects that some might consider off the beaten path.
It will come off as cliché, but I can’t imagine a better collaborative and supportive working environment than MoGen and U of T in general. The collaborative spirit of Toronto’s Research District fosters the development of projects that would be next to impossible to pursue for any single lab. And the caliber and drive of my colleagues continually inspires me to push our science beyond what we think is possible.
So, thanks to you MoGen, Brenda, Howard and Leah, and happy 50th Anniversary!
