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