David Gelfand, PhD ' 70 Mushroom Pool, Yellowstone 1995
Meanwhile, at UC San Diego, a counterculture was blossoming in the late’ 60s as a new student matriculated from Brandeis University to the graduate program in biology. David Gelfand, PhD’ 70, arrived on campus equally as interested in folk music and scuba diving as he was in science.“ I knew nothing,” he says,“ and I wanted to change the world.”
Studying gene expression under Professor Masaki Hyashi, Gelfand remembers years of intense work and extreme independence.“ You had to learn everything on your own, but I did learn science very well,” he says.
By the time Gelfand headed to the San Francisco Bay Area with his degree in the early 1970s, another young student was riding his motorcycle onto campus, fresh from the Army and a recent transfer from community college to Muir College. Robert Lindstrom recalls a campus alive with protest,“ a very revolutionary period,” he says. The same description went for his chosen major in biology, where breakthroughs in the understanding and usage of genetics were taking the discipline to exciting new frontiers.
“ The more I learned, the more I thought it was beautiful, how it all worked,” says Lindstrom.“ I grew up fascinated with the tide pools in Ocean Beach, but professors like Ralph Lewin and Michael Soule opened up the world of biology to such deeper levels. I was learning about enzymes and ribosomes; it was so enlightening.”
After some post-graduation rambling through the Americas, Lindstrom eventually headed to Montana, where he found work in logging and was able to purchase property with friends. The logging experience would be of use in building himself a cabin, as well as in his first job in Yellowstone National Park on a crew cutting trails. Yet his UC San Diego education never left him, especially when proposed trails crossed habitats only a biology major would know about.“ One day, my crew wanted to cut through a hot spring overflow with thermophiles in it,” he says.“ It just looked like orange slime to them; no one knew what it was. But I said,‘ Not only is that alive, but it may not be found anywhere else on the planet!’”
Needless to say, the trail went around.
Back on the West Coast, Gelfand was a postdoctoral fellow at UC San Francisco when he got a call from Cetus Corporation, an early biotechnology company that wanted him to
lead a brand-new genetic engineering division. Gelfand was reluctant to leave academia at first but ultimately took the job, seeing great potential for doing collaborative work, his preferred mode of science.
There were plenty of collaborators to be had at Cetus. While the general life and times at the company are described in detail in Paul Rabinow’ s 1996 book, Making PCR, it’ s fair to say that relationships within the organization were at times congenial, at times contentious, but above all, exciting. After all, the company was at the forefront of using genetics to develop clinical therapeutics such as interferon and cancer-fighting pharmaceuticals that could benefit society on a large scale.
There was also the particular focus of a particular scientist, Kary Mullis, who would ultimately go on to earn the Nobel Prize for his conception of the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a novel method of amplifying
26 TRITON | FALL 2021