Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes - walking, talking, moving, feeding - are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it's supremely interesting.
As we returned to Argentina, I started seriously to work towards a doctoral degree under the direction of Professor Stoppani, the Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical School.
I think if people are passionate about something, it could be real estate or biochemistry, and that spark gets turned on in them, everyone's beautiful in that zone.
I chose biochemistry as my major and graduated after 4 years with an Honours degree in Biochemistry. During that time, I had come to love biochemistry research, although I was just getting my feet wet in laboratory research.
It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.
It was an extremely trying time for me. Best was still intimate with MacLeod and the others about the laboratory. I was out of the picture entirely. MacLeod had taken over the whole physiological investigation. Collip had taken over the biochemistry. Professor Graham and Dr. Campbell had taken over the whole clinical aspect of the investigation.
After taking my B.A. degree in 1939 I remained at the University for a further year to take an advanced course in Biochemistry, and surprised myself and my teachers by obtaining a first class examination result.
Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why.
My interest in protein breakdown as a research problem began in l955 at about the time I joined the Biochemistry Department of Yale University. It was known that proteins break down intracellularly in the mature animal.
I floated around in the department of biochemistry and learned some interesting things, and then I began to... I never wanted to work with a mentor because I always wanted to have my own reputation and be free to do what I wanted to do. So I worked with the weakest people in the department. Don't make that public.
