Senior year of HS I found myself interning at Memorial Sloan Kettering in Rye, NY. It was right behind the woods by our athletic fields where I had ridden my bike through "the trails" as a kid. I had heard the horror stories about cleaning test tubes for months. I mean how could a kid help real scientists? But it would look good on a college application and my grades weren't exactly stellar, so I took that risk. And I love science. I recall the building being very cold in that medical way; formica and concrete. Designed to be easy to disinfect. A lot of grey.
I met Dr. Kim in his office that first day and we talked. He ran the lab for "Ontogeny of the immune system"; ontogeny being a fancy word for 'origin'. He was performing fundamental research on how parts of human immunity work, hoping for an insight that would help us fight cancer. We worked with chickens, rabbits and colostrum deprived piglets. We did not injure any of them. They each donated little bits of blood products to the experiments. Specifically chicken red blood cells, rabbit anti-chicken antibodies and porcine alveolar macrophages. (a kind of "white" blood cell) Each chicken RBC would pick up 1 "count" worth of radioactive Chromium that would be detected in a radiation counter if they were lysed (split open). We knew how many cells were in each assay, and so by the radiation count afterwards we'd know what % of the cells had been lysed. The assays were to make determinations about the macrophage's ability to tell self from non-self. It was critical that the pigs they came from had no prior exposure to anything, hence the "collostrum deprived" qualifier. This is a key factor in understanding both immune and auto-immune responses. 40 years later this is all probably 100 level class stuff, but in 1981 we really didn't know. Here is one of the papers they wrote: https://www.jimmunol.org/content/129/5/1859
Net net, Dr Kim gave me a book list and a task; read the books and write him a report on how humoral immunity works and based on that he would decide what kinds of tasks I would be allowed to participate in. I went home, read for 2 weeks, studied and wrote. Not a great paper by any means, but I demonstrated enough basic comprehension that I got assigned to work with Robert Rothlein and act as his assistant. He was really kind. I spun down blood, made assays, learned the stats calculations, and got treated much more like a team member than a kid they were stuck babysitting. I'll always be appreciative of that kindness.
What does any of this have to do with music? Well, based on my Bio & Chem ACT test scores and my time at MSK I never applied to college but was accepted into the in-vitro cell biology program at SUNY Plattsburgh. I wanted to take a gap year, my parents did not agree (in hindsight I don't blame them!). So off I went to maybe become a research scientist. Tl;dr, I didn't apply myself there and after 3 semesters of not applying myself, or really going to classes, found myself facing bit of a crisis. I wasn't in school, and didn't have a job or any real skills. I bought a car (an old Triumph convertible which launched my love of old cars and learning to fix them) and enrolled at Westchester Community College. There I met my new friend Eric who had co-written an original musical based on Poe's "Masque of the red death". I had been playing guitar a little at home for a couple years but no real public performances and I was all self taught, which is shorthand for "I know my cowboy chords". Eric had me audition for the pit band, took me in and soon I was performing in front of an auditorium full of people and having to come up with real guitar parts. He had attended Juliard and got me thinking about a lot of things in a new way. I also made friends with Mark and Steve (bass and drums) who had played together before. Months later, Mark would call me up and ask me to come by "The Loft" in Bronxville, NY to watch his cover band record their new demo. I went, I showed their guitarist how to do some parts in one U2 song he was having trouble with and was offered a job on the spot. And so I joined "Free 4 All" and started gigging out in the Bronx & Queens, getting paid to play guitar. We rehearsed at The Loft. And as it happened, Bob Mayo used The Loft as his home base in between tours and he gave guitar lessons, so I wound up taking guitar lessons with one of the world's most talented sidemen. All because I went to school for biochemistry and flunked out.
Life is funny.
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