...

Peterkofsky: It was called Portia, P-O-R-T-I-A,  Law School, which was a school that was set up specifically to allow women to go to law school, while Harvard was an all-men’s law school at that point in time. I believe that it was not until 1950 that Harvard Law School admitted men and women. I went to elementary school, and I was generally a quite studious student but didn't have any early inklings of what my life would unfold to be. It turned out that because I got reasonably good grades in elementary school, I was put on a list of students to take an exam for an academic high school that was not in my neighborhood in the Bronx. The school was Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan. I went there and just studied and did whatever I could. At some point in time, I had a little bit of a sense of what medicine was all about, because when I was 13 years old, I had an appendectomy. In those days, there were no antibiotics, so the incision that I got from that appendectomy became quickly infected. I had to spend my time once a week going to a local doctor to get that infection treated with no antibiotics, where he would swap swab it with phenol that would burn out the bacteria. I became a bit fascinated with medical practice at that point.

...

Peterkofsky: You keep hearing stories about the environment in Building 3. He was really enthusiastic, and he got in touch with me and said, “By all means, do anything in your power to come to NIH like I did.” He suggested that I contact a scientist in Building 3 who he referred to as Chris Anfinsen [Christian B. Anfinsen]. Chris Anfinsen had, at that point in time, become very well known for some of the studies that he had done on spontaneous refolding of proteins, especially ribonuclease nucleotides. He was destined to, and then actually did eventually, win a Nobel Prize. He [Weissbach] said, “Get in touch with Chris Anfinsen, and he will be a great opportunity for you.” I assumed that when he referred to Chris Anfinsen that was a bit too informal for me as a young man to contact him. I assumed therefore that I should write a letter not to Chris Anfinsen, but to Christopher Anfinsen. Little did I know that his name was not Christopher, it was actually Christian.

...

Well, it turned out that because they took a close interest in my welfare, they convinced me that it was not going to be a great future for me to stay at Albany, and said if I was smart, I should move back to New York City. They came up with a couple of names of people who they felt might be good preceptors for me to go on to a PhD degree. Lawrence Levine came up with the name of an immunologist at Columbia University. His name was Elvin [A.] Kabat, and Elvin Kabat was a rather eccentric scientist who had been very well recognized because he had respiratory problems. He was always walking around with a World War II gas mask on, and he was quite recognizable because of that. I went to Colombia Columbia to be interviewed by him, and for the life of me, I couldn't pay that much attention to what he was asking me because he was wearing a white lab coat that was wide open and his pants zipper was open. I was so distracted by that, that I just couldn't understand anything he was saying. I went away, telling him that I would consider his opportunity to go to Columbia University.

...

I went to become a graduate student at the Public Health Research Institute in the summer of 1955. Racker arranged for me to get a pre-doctoral fellowship through the NIH that was going to start in the fall of 1955, but I went there in the summer of 1955. The fellowship was going to pay $1,800 a year, which was for me okay because I was still living at home and didn't have to worry about getting fed or housing at my own expense, so it was an okay arrangement. In the meantime, one of the attractions that Racker felt that I offered was that I had done some work in immunology, and he said, “Well, why don't we, before you start on your thesis project, do an immunology project of making an antibody serum to one of my purified proteins that I brought with me from Yale.” There was a method that I had learned from Lawrence Levine at Albany called an ouchterlony Ouchterlony detection method for the interaction of an antigen with an antibody. Racker purchased a rabbit for us to inject with his antibody and told me that he would introduce me to this world-famous immunologist who occupied a laboratory the floor above the laboratory there, and his name was Jules Freund, who was very famous for developing what was known as the Freund’s adjuvant that everybody in immunology was using at that point in time. We got the rabbit, and we took it up to the fourth floor with Jules Freund with a sample of the protein. Jules Freund, who was rather a mystical type of scientist, had this little vessel that looked like a small glass vase, and he put a sample of the protein in there and then add added this magic mixture that he called the Freund’s adjuvant in there and mixed it by squirting it up and down in a syringe to make a suspension, and then said, “Oh, now we have the mixture that will go into the rabbit.” And he injected it into the leg muscle of the rabbit and said, “Now we wait a month.” A month later, we brought the rabbit back to him and he bled some of the blood out of the rabbit and gave it to me, and then I performed this antigen antibody test using the method that I knew and, lo and behold, we had antibody. Everybody in Racker’s lab was very excited. It proved that I was an authentic immunologist, and now I could throw that experience away and start becoming a biochemist. That was my introduction to the laboratory.

...