I think I would have had a satisfying life in private practice, but it would have been a totally different
life, and I clearly would not ever have been asked to write a Master’s Perspective. I often think of the dramatic turns my life has taken based on single, unpredictable events, but this one was, by far, the most life changing. The NIH Blood Bank in the early 1960s was part of DBS, and while there, I got my first taste of research https://www.selleckchem.com/GSK-3.html and learned some techniques of blood fractionation that would later serve me well. Subsequently, the blood bank was transferred to the Clinical Center Department of Clinical Pathology and I moved to the Clinical Center where I would spend most of the next 50 years. I was in desperate search for a research project and decided to study the cause of febrile transfusion reactions
that were unrelated to the cellular elements of blood. It was my hypothesis that persons who were transfused might be exposed to serum proteins different from their own and develop antibodies (Abs) that could initiate febrile or other deleterious reactions. To test this, I prepared agar gel plates in the fashion described by Ouchterlony and had metal templates fabricated by the NIH workshop that consisted of a seven-well punch, creating one center well surrounded by six equally spaced peripheral wells. Serum from a transfused patient was placed in the center well and normal donor serum in the peripheral wells. When the diffusing samples met, a white precipitin arc would form in the presence PR 171 of an immune reaction. I became immersed in agar, but not in success. One fateful day in 1962, Richard Aster, then a young investigator in the blood bank and now a world-renowned investigator in platelet
immunology, told me that he heard an interesting lecture and that the speaker was performing experiments very similar to my own. He advised that I talk to him. As it turns out, that speaker was the Nobel Prize winner in waiting, the late Baruch (Barry) Palbociclib price Blumberg. I went to see Barry the next day and we immediately established what would be my first, and, in retrospect, most important, research collaboration. Blumberg, I would learn, was a complex, gregarious, and very interesting man. He was a philosopher as much as a research scientist and he could pontificate at length on almost any given subject. He liked nothing better than to “smooze” over morning coffee or afternoon tea. Blumberg was a geneticist and his interest was in protein polymorphisms. He and Tony Allison had already established that polymorphisms exist among the serum lipoproteins, and I informally joined his lab to help study this further. I subsequently went through more Ouchterlony plates than Ouchterlony himself, each day testing multiply transfused patient sera against an array of samples that Blumberg had collected on his many treks around the globe.