I started in the Department of Biophysical Sciences (DBS) at UH in the summer of 1974, following a successful post-doc studying the structure and function of messenger RNA (mRNA) with George Brawerman at Tufts. Rapid progress was being made at this time in understanding mRNA biology due to the discovery of the poly (A) tail, which provided a way to rapidly identify and isolate these molecules from the vast excess of other types of cellular RNAs. I came to UH with two research goals in mind:

1. To determine the location of specific mRNAs in the cytoplasm, particularly in egg cells, where they had recently been proposed by Eric Davidson to serve as determinants for establishing cell fates during embryogenesis, and
2. To identify the proteins associated with mRNA and its poly (A) tail, which I considered as likely candidates for the localization of these molecules.

Graduate students in DBS and the UH Department of Biology were numerous, talented, and ambitious, and I was quickly able to staff my lab with three of the best: David Adams, Daniel Noonan, and David Capco. All of them received master’s degrees at UH and accompanied me to the University of Texas at Austin when I left UH in 1977, where they received their PhDs. They are now successful professors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, University of Kentucky, and Arizona State University, respectively. During this time, we developed the first procedures for mRNA in situ hybridization, which was the forerunner of techniques that are now of widespread use in cell and developmental biology research. This resulted in our discovery of the first localized mRNA, a cytoplasmic actin mRNA, in the egg of Styela, an ascidian. In order to obtain and use Styela for research, we traveled to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, a long way from Houston, by car with all of our equipment, during the summers. Thus, we were able to trade a hot Houston summer for cooler one on Cape Cod.

DBS was a small department in these years, around 7 or 8 faculty, mostly cramped into a small crypt-like area in the basement of the Science and Research Building 1. However, every faculty member was highly committed to research, so it was a good place to train graduate students. We were not rich or well equipped, and didn’t have very much individual lab space. My start-up was $10,000, which the chair proudly informed me was generous, and the teaching load was heavy, two full courses a semester. There were long faculty meetings, mostly debating a departmental name change, but we could never agree on the right name, and the change didn’t ever seem to come, no matter how passionately we discussed it, at least while I was around. In order to survive, we all had to work very hard and efficiently, often deep into the evenings during weekdays and on weekends. For relaxation between fractionations and centrifugations, etc., we set up a badminton court in the grassy area next to the building and played tournaments between the labs. The relationships between the labs were very good, with a lot of communication and cooperation. I think we all got a lot done because of our healthy attitudes. My own lab accomplished a great deal in research, and this period jump-started my career and readied me for the next challenges. For this, I think fondly of UH, despite the heat, humidity, and surprising torrential floods.

After completing my Ph.D. at Harvard in 1962, I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Animal Physiology (now The Babraham Institute) in Cambridge, England. I then moved to the neurochemical laboratory at the McLean Hospital (a division of Harvard Medical School) in Belmont, MA. My recruitment by the Department of Biophysical Sciences in 1974 came about through the professional friendship of fellow Catalans Juan Oro and Jordi Folch-Pi, the director of the laboratory unit I was then working in. I first visited UH in February or March of that year, during an early season hot spell. I was introduced to the campus by Allen Bartel, the chair, and was interviewed by Dean Hugh Walker. I remember Allen told me that the climate was so hot that the British consulate in Houston offered hazardous duty pay to its employees. Not long after I received notice that my NIH grant had been renewed, I received an offer to become an associate professor, with tenure review within two years and $10,000 in startup funds.

I began my appointment in January 1975 when the department, consisting of seven faculty (counting me), was housed in part of the basement of SR1. That semester I taught what was then BCHS 435 (the second semester of the introductory biochemistry sequence) and began to equip what I remember as quite generous lab space. Not far from my office were the labs of Horace Gray, who was then a very expressive faculty member, Tom Spring, an enzymologist, and Pat Kimball, who had been a student with Juan Oro. Within two or three years, Tom Spring left to join Abbott Laboratories. Another departmental hire that was made at (I believe) the same time as me was Bill Jeffery, a developmental biologist with whom I became quite friendly. He did not stay long at UH and soon moved to UT-Austin and thence to a very distinguished career. Brian Middleditch was, I think, hired effective in Fall 1975. Two years later, David Tu and George Fox joined the department, followed by Ralph Hecht.

In 1977, Allen Bartel stepped down as chair, and Pat Kimball was appointed as his successor. He remained in his job for only a year before indicating his intention to resign. I became his successor for the next nine years with time out for a six-month development leave in Utrecht, Netherlands. During that period, the number of faculty remained fairly static, and as I recall, we added Dan Nelson in about 1981 and Bill Widger in 1986. Dan failed to gain tenure for lack of productivity.

The office staff consisted initially of Siglinde Lakey, who was a superb departmental administrator. After Siglinde’s departure, there were a succession of administrators, including Chris York, with whom I had a rather fraught relationship, Nora Yeung, with whom I got on much better, and also Elaine Pearson.

It was in the late 1970s that the department was graced by the presence of a Nobel Prize winner, Archer J.P. Martin, who had received the award for his contributions in the 1950s to the technique of partition chromatography. For several years, he occupied space adjacent to Juan Oró. His primary appointment was in Chemistry, which eventually “fired” him for lack of productivity.

The status of the department within the College of Natural Sciences during this period suffered significantly from its low undergraduate enrollment as compared to Biology, although BCHS had an ample number of graduate students.

A recurring issue was a desire to change the name of the department to better reflect the biochemical interests of the faculty. This was eventually accomplished following the recommendation of an outside visiting committee in 1981, when the name was altered to Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences.

In those early days, there were several overtures from the Department of Chemistry to join forces or perhaps to absorb us. This seems ironic in retrospect, since at the time the Chemistry faculty seemed quite hostile to biochemistry in general. At any rate, I remember visiting multiple times with John Bear, then the Chemistry chair, in his miniscule office. We also collaborated in an unpublished study of the inhibitory effects of rhodium on glyceraldehyde phosphate-3-dehydrogenase.

My first graduate student was Dennis Epps, a prototypical East Texan, but who was quite productive in collaboration with Juan Oro and me. After earning a Ph.D., he went on to a career in industry. Other Ph.D. students early on were Jeff Browning, a master’s student who years later earned a Ph.D. elsewhere, Bob Bostwick who is still active in pharmaceutical research, and Abboud Ghalayini who taught at several Caribbean medical schools for many years. In the middle 1980s, Mike Xi Zhu joined my laboratory. Mike was recruited through an international program to identify talented Chinese students. After completing his Ph.D., Mike went on to have a very productive career and is now a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

I was born in Mainland China, moved to Taiwan when I was six, went through different stages of public education, was accepted by and received my B.S. degree from National Taiwan University, and spent one year and three months for my mandatory military service. These early years were followed by a major change in my life. I came to the U.S. in 1967 for graduate study at Cornell University, got married in 1970, received my Ph.D. in Biochemistry in January 1973, and pursued postdoctoral research in the Bio Labs at Harvard. I then joined the faculty of the Department of Biophysical Science at University of Houston in 1977 (the department was renamed Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences and years later in 1998 merged with Biology as the Department of Biology and Biochemistry). I rose up in the ranks of my professor status and retired in 2013. Now, you know the story of my life.

Ever since my childhood, I was pretty polarized in my learning habits. I studied hard in subjects that interested me but only tried to get by in other classes. I have been particularly fond of things that can be explained explicitly and information that can be quantified and rationalized. I did a Senior Thesis in human nutrition but found the field overly complex. This was why I changed my major to Nutritional Biochemistry for my M.S. and later to Biochemistry for my Ph.D. at Cornell. Biochemistry was and still is a very broad field. I decided to specialize in enzymology for my doctoral research and stayed in this field ever since because many important enzymological questions can be approached and answered in basic scientific terms.

For all those who love their jobs, working hard is never a burden. It is certainly true to me that working in the field of enzymology gave me nothing but enormous pleasure and satisfaction. There are several people who helped mold me into what I have become. First is my late father. He was the first son of a very poor Chinese farm worker family. Through hard work and study, he miraculously completed his college education, devoted to a career as educator, and was later elected as a National Legislator (equivalent to U.S. senator). He was proud to be one of the poorest among all the Legislators, explaining to all his children that it was much more important to get things done right rather than worrying about fortune and fame. Through him, I learned that “self-respect” and “inner peace” should guide me in my life.

As for my choice of an educator/scientist career, I was deeply influenced by several people—one of my elder brothers, a teacher in my fifth grade, a mathematics teacher, and a physics teacher in high school, several professors at NTU, and mentors for my graduate and postdoctoral studies. They all share some common features. They constantly challenged me to be better and showed me dedication and hard work by example. I am forever grateful. My own students now serve as physicians, professors, a manager of a big pharmaceutical company, a CEO of self-established biotechnology company, a senior partner of a patent-right law firm, a Dean, and another has been the President of national universities in foreign countries. Another former student has become the director of a large research laboratory in the U.S. and has thus far published more than 10 papers in Science and Nature.

Why did I decide to come to University of Houston? In 1977, in addition to UH, I received five other job offers, from places both less and more established than UH. It all boiled down to one major reason. Houston was then the fifth largest city in the U.S. and the largest city in Texas. Every big city should have at least one top-ranked large public university, and UH was the logical choice to grow and excel. About my decision to come to UH, there were some regrets, but far less than the positive aspects. I had several job offers during my 30-some years at UH. The fact that I retired from UH testifies that I have been generally happy about my career choice. It gave me pleasure and pride to witness that UH evolved into a first-tier research university during my time.

Finally, let me share a couple of interesting stories. Due to my unbalanced study habit, I was rather poor in English in high school and college. I went into my military service immediately after graduation from NTU. That was exactly the year TOEFL tests became a mandatory requirement for a student visa to come to the U.S. Among the several test categories, “listening comprehension” was my weakest point and one that was extremely difficult to overcome while serving in the Army. It turned out that the recording for the test was about the sinking of the Titanic. I had seen a B-and-W “Titanic” movie while in college (probably by cutting a couple of classes) and answered all the questions based on the movie to score an “A” for the listening test (a letter rather than numeric grade was given at that time). It was dumb luck but shows sometimes it wasn’t so bad to cut a few classes.

Another story has to do with what happened during one of my General Biochemistry class lectures. I always believe that teaching is a very important part of a professor’s job and pride myself for being well prepared. While bringing up the term “Km” as a criterion for characterizing enzymes, a student asked me how enzymes can be evaluated by “kilometers.” That was a rare occasion that I was caught off guard. I think that I may have said something like “It is by miles in the U.S.”

In the spring of 1977, it was time for me to move on after almost four fantastic years with Carl Woese at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. By the time I was invited to Houston for an interview, I had been looking extensively. My wife was expecting, and life in small town Urbana had its limitations. So, I first arrived in Houston in the spring of 1977 to interview for an open faculty position in the Department of Biophysical Sciences. I was housed at the Warwick Hotel on April 24–25. I spent a busy day talking with various people and giving a seminar on my research and what I planned to do next. At the end of the interview, Allen Bartel took me to the airport. He continued selling UH as he informed me that although UH was only recently entering the world of research, it could not possibly fail because it was in Houston. From my perspective, the presence of Juan Oró made UH a great place to be for those of us who were doing Origin of Life research.

I got a job offer, and by August, we were moving to Houston. I was to receive $10,000 in startup funds and laboratory space near an exit on the first floor of Science and Research 1. The funding was very modest, given that the acquisition of the electrophoresis equipment I needed to set up the Sanger sequencing technology we had been using would cost about $8,000. I went forward with this, and within a year or two, the equipment was basically obsolete as sequencing technology had moved on. As fortune would have it, David Tu had also been hired in 1977, and we had adjoining space. So, we created a shared area that connected our labs and that housed key items such as a balance and pH meter. In addition, David found out that we were qualified to obtain used items from a State of Texas facility that was near the university. I still have key items such as a paper cutter and a large cabinet that had many small drawers for 8.5x11 paper.

Life on the first floor was frequently interesting. One year around Christmas, my technician Ken Luehrsen left his parrot on top of a refrigerator where other students would take care of it while he was away. Next to it, I placed a plant from our apartment that my wife had purchased in Illinois for 79 cents. I assumed whoever fed the bird would water the plant. When we all returned from the holidays, the plant was gone, but the parrot survived. It happened again, when I had a bender for making wire models of protein or RNA structures. It was mounted on a tripod in my lab, which soon went missing leaving the $1,000 bender behind. Life lesson—maybe location matters.

The bender had its own story. One of the early atomic resolution structures of the ribosome had been published in Nature. I wrote to the senior author and requested the bender coordinates. After 2–3 weeks, I finally got a response. According to the author, the data could not be released because the structure had not yet been published. Interesting!

From the very beginning, my group always included at least one computational person as we were developing databases of ribosomal RNA sequence data and constructing phylogenetic trees. These early IT people frequently were out of control in that they constantly wanted to upgrade to the latest technology. At the time, that was the ARPANET. A Physics group had a computer center on the second floor of our building that actually had access to it, but we did not.

One day when I came into the office, we had access, too. It was very exciting. I could “talk” live, essentially email to a colleague in Australia. Without my consent or knowledge, the IT folks had during the evening hung a wire from the ceiling of my lab to David’s and then up to the second floor where the computer center was located. Soon, my people were helping everyone with their computer needs. This ultimately led to the addition of an IT person to the departmental staff.

Among my first students was Diamuid Nicholson, whose father had been a key person in the early history of the university. Another was Robby Eaves Jr., who made an impression on me in multiple ways. For example, one time while cleaning up the lab, he threw out a box of stuff that unbeknownst to him included baby pictures of our first son. My wife was not happy and is still asking me, 45 years later, why those pictures were at the lab in the first place. Fortunately, my parents had the same pictures and so gave us their copies. On another occasion, Robby borrowed my lab keys. When it was time to pick up my son Brian at daycare, I reached into my pocket and had no keys. I remembered I had given them to Robby. He was not to be found, and soon we worked out that he had taken them home. Meanwhile, the daycare people were charging me $1 for every minute we were late. So, I had to have my wife fill in, which may have been worse.

Robby was a very intelligent individual who had served in the military on active duty in the Vietnam War and was a world-class expert on the rules and procedures relating to military benefits. For example, while in the reserves he volunteered for parachute duty. So once a month he would jump out of plane for an extra sum of money. Having been stationed with a medical unit in Cambodia, Robby’s dream was to be a doctor. When he was accepted to the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, he left my lab. While attending medical school, he was in the ROTC and upon graduation became an officer. It is my understanding that he subsequently, as required, served in the military for two years after which he was eligible for full retirement. He is now apparently a successful Sports Medicine Specialist in Beaumont, Texas.

Some of my very best students, including Richard Devereux, Jeffrey Wisotzkey, and Janet Siefert, were jointly supervised with Peter Jurtshuk Jr. Peter was a classical microbiologist, and as such, he was expert with microbial nomenclature in general and was particularly expert with the genus Bacillus. Thus, his group could pick the strains of interest and grow the cells in support of our 16S rRNA studies of Bacillus species. This resulted in several highly cited papers.

Classes could always be interesting. My first class was proteins about which I knew nothing. The powers that be apparently heard this because I never got asked to do that one again. Instead, I mostly taught nucleic acids and protein synthesis. On one test, I asked the students to explain RNA processing as it pertained to transfer RNA. One student did not know the answer, but instead drew a picture of a tree stump with a cloverleaf tRNA perched on it. Next to that was a large man swinging a hatchet about to “process” the tRNA. I think I gave the student nothing on the question but extra credit overall. I still have the drawing but do not know who the student was.

An experience I still regret occurred in the undergraduate version of my class. Two students, a guy and girl, were always together, and both were exceptional, far and away the best in the class. When it came time for the final, they did not show up and no explanation was given. I assigned both incompletes, which would convert to failing if they did nothing. The guy eventually showed up and explained they had a huge argument. I converted his Incomplete to a grade. However, I never heard from her, and the grade never got converted. Based on the test scores, she already had enough points to be in the B group of the class, and I should have given her a grade before the incomplete deadline.

The relatively new department was itself learning how to do its job and was a very friendly environment. One of the key elements was students. By the time I arrived, a program of courses leading to a Ph.D. had been developed and was already approved by the relevant authorities. Graduate students were badly needed to staff the growing research environment. However, when we got student applicants, we had no obvious way to fund their first year while they were selecting a research group. We had very few graduate assistantships as none of our courses were large or required for a biology degree. So, the strategy that emerged was very co-operative. One faculty member received application materials. Files of the good applicants were passed around so everybody who needed a student knew what was available. Faculty with active grant support would offer to fund the first year or first semester on the hope that the student would join their group. If they did not, that was all right.

In the early days, we had staff that would type letters, grant proposals, papers, etc. With the introduction of PCs, these jobs reverted to the faculty, while staff gradually moved to college and higher levels where they could service us better by creating “forms” for us to fill out and arcane rules. In any event, to the extent they existed, the departmental staff were generally wonderful.

However, from my point of view there was one exception. This person regarded the chair as her God. Anytime he asked her to do something no matter how unimportant, she dropped all other projects. This was a major change as up to that point the admin person always viewed all the faculty as her concern. This one eventually left for a better paying position in the medical center. However, this almost didn’t happen. It was on a Friday that two of my graduate students went down to her office to get their monthly paychecks. They were told that there had been a screw up, and the checks would not be available until Monday as she had to pick them up in person but did not have time to do so. They pointed out to no avail that they needed to pay their rent. The screaming soon became very loud as I was told by Bill Widger, who witnessed the incident. They had apparently threatened to kill her. Fortunately, they decided not to kill her as there would have been much paperwork to do.

From day one, it was always about grant proposals. It was not uncommon for me to get things in at the last possible moment. So, I would get final approval from the Office of Grants, run off to get the required number of copies made, and take everything to the airport. I used one of the professional copy services as there was no way our office printer could make 15 copies of a 40-page document in a reasonable time. I don’t recall for sure what happened next, but most likely as long as you were postmarked before some submission deadline you were okay. However, it was inevitable that something would go wrong. In my case, there was a problem with the printers, and I missed the last flight. It appeared for a while that I would have to fly to Washington on the first morning flight and deliver the copies in person. Fortunately, I learned that there was a company that would do exactly all this for a fee. I signed up and it happened. In relating this story, I learned that TcSUH had a separate solution. They would send a person to Washington a day before the deadline and then FAX corrections to that person who could than make a final delivery just before the deadline.

Another event occurred while doing one of many proposals with Richard Willson. Richard and I collaborated for many years and published over 30 peer review papers, directed multiple students, filed multiple patents, and submitted an endless number of grant proposals. In this instance, we were as usual up against the deadline, and Richard was to edit the file and send changes to me. When I opened the file, there was about one sentence per page as he had the font size on 1000%. I soon learned that he had eye surgery that morning, and he was still dilated. Might have mentioned that!

The Fox lab also had various senior-level visitors. One of the more interesting was Jerzy Jurka. Fearing for his freedom, he fled from his home country of Poland around 1988 when strikes and demonstrations were attempting to upend the communist government. Once out of the country, he spent time at multiple locations until he finally received a permanent position. Along the way, he visited the Fox lab for several months where he conducted studies on 23S rRNA secondary structure. These were not successful. We later realized this was because the alignment programs being used were designed for proteins and were not handling insertions and deletions properly. After a few months, his stay with the Fox group ended, and he moved on. His subsequent studies on mobile DNA have amassed over 30,000 citations. His visit to my group was followed closely by the FBI. About once a month, an agent would come by, close the door to my office, and then ask how Jurka was doing. Apparently, there was concern that he might be a communist spy. So, they wanted to know if he had the skills of a real scientist. After a couple of visits, I asked why the government was so interested in Jurka when university labs all over the U.S., including mine, were overflowing with students from communist China. His response was that it made no sense to him either.

Overall, the department had regular meetings involving all faculty to address various issues. Although we were not explicitly told, there apparently was a smaller group of more senior faculty. Thus, occasionally things were unanimously decided at a regular faculty meeting but somehow never got implemented.

Two issues never went away. The first was the departmental name. Department of Biochemistry would be preferred by many, but my understanding was that Chemistry opposed this. It was only after the department merged with Biology that this was resolved. The merged department became the Division of Biochemistry in the new Department of Biology and Biochemistry. The other long-standing problem was space. Our faculty were always located in separate/multiple buildings. This is detrimental because it decreases the interactions that can lead to joint grants. One novel achievement was the introduction of two-credit-hour graduate courses. Because they were graduate courses, they counted as three credit hours when calculating teaching load. These courses would meet for half the semester and allow faculty to teach courses that relate to their research while having half the semester off.

As a postdoc at Purdue University, I was, at best, fed up with snow and winter. Being stuck in the Rochester, Minnesota, airport in a driving snowstorm, and stopped on I-65 at midnight in a sleet storm with a fever driving back from Milwaukee, I hoped for a position in a warmer place. A while later, I received an interview for the Department of Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences (Biophysics) at the University of Houston, which I eagerly accepted. Arriving in Houston for the first time, I walked out of Hobby Airport, and the humidity hit me like a wall of water. At least it isn’t sleet! UH was an up-and-coming university that had potential but was not a research powerhouse. I had the idea that I could help UH gain in research.

I accepted the position to start in August 1986. Janet was expecting our first child, and we moved without having health insurance for her. My laboratory consisted of two smaller rooms in the basement of SR1. However, my office (and phone) was just behind the lab but required a walk down the hall into another corridor, next to Dr Gray’s (Horace) office. I could hear the phone from my lab, but by the time I could get to it, the caller usually hung up. Getting another phone in the lab was next to impossible because the infrastructure was not designed for that. My first “UH fix” was to put a splitter in the phone line in my office and drag a phone cable through the wall at a pipe opening into my lab and use an old rotary phone in the lab. I set up my working office in the lab next to the phone.

My startup was $100,000 plus $25,000 in equipment from a Biology professor’s lab (Baust) that had left the university. Here was my first indication of the hostility and competition between the Department of Biology and the Department of Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences. I was picking up some dry ice in Fleming to replenish the cooler I brought with me from Purdue, which contained many host strains, cloning vectors, and cloned chloroplast genes. I ran into Arnold Eskin (Biology) just outside of SR1. He came up and said that I should give back the 25K to Biology, and I got the impression it was my fault that I was given that part of the package. When I was finally offered the equipment, it was old, broken, and not useful for a molecular biology lab. I was astonished at the attitude of the Department of Biology in preventing or at best obstructing a colleague from success. After complaints to my chair, I was offered a used Waters HPLC system that had been donated by Waters for a course in HPLC. It was used and worth about $4,000. I took it, realizing the Dean was somewhat powerless in fulfilling his offer. The Department of Chemistry at SUNY Albany where I earned my Ph.D. also had a toxic environment where faculty sniped and argued among themselves and hardly ever collaborated. The graduate students ultimately got caught up in this mess depending on who was their advisor. At Purdue, the opposite was true. In UH Biophysics, collaboration was encouraged, but with such diverse interests, usually did not occur.

The $100,000 startup was ledger 5 monies. At the time, I did not understand ledger 5, but it was monies to spend on equipment over $3,000. Small equipment like balances and Eppendorf centrifuges, electrophoresis power supplies and apparatus, pipettors, glassware, etc., could not be purchased on ledger 5 money. Since Biophysics was a small department, there was no room to swap out funds! How was I to build a lab? The purchasing department consisted of three people who did all the purchasing for UH! Two purchasing agents did everything by the book and would not allow me to purchase smaller items on leger 5 money. UH fix #2: Bill Benner, however, came up with a plan. I would place common items in a list and get a company (Fisher) to send in a quote with one catalogue number. Several “Kits” were put together like a weighing and balancing kit. The kits were sent out for competitive bid and only Fisher bid. I worked with the Fisher representative. I hoped those in charge of inventory would not look for tags on a piece of small equipment. They did not. I hope lab start up is easier now for current new assistant professors. For me, it was at best frustrating.

My $2,000 restriction/DNA manipulation kit was placed in my -20 freezer in the lab. On Friday night, the cleaning crew plugged in their floor machine in the same outlet as the freezer and blew the circuit. I did not discover the blown circuit until the following week. All my DNA enzymes were lost! When my glassware came in, I washed it and put the flasks and beakers in the drying rack. As I finished washing, the air conditioning maintenance crew changed the air filters, broke the heavy door in the air handler in SR2, and it fell on the drying rack breaking all my glassware. They did not replace it and left the cleanup to me. Around that time, I had a two-year plan written on the black board in my office, outlining grant deadlines, experimental timelines and research direction. Three days later, the cleaning crew erased and cleaned the blackboard in my office!

However, the biggest issue was graduate students, or lack of them. I had a USDA grant when I started, which I applied for at Purdue and transferred to UH. I did not get a graduate student the first year I was at UH. The second year, there were no graduate students in Biochemistry. However, I stole two students from Biology because they could not find an advisor. At that time, I had received a Texas grant and now had money for four positions. In the third year, five graduate students were recruited in BCHS, however, all five were recruited into Dr. Brian Middleditch’s lab. He also was the graduate committee in charge of recruiting. Complaining did only one thing. I was now given the job of graduate recruiting, including advertising (recruitment posters were sent to over 100 Biology/Biochemistry programs), and sending letters to prospective students identified by the GRE advanced testing in biology and biochemistry. Fortunately, the department gave me a small budget. At that time, the Peterson’s guide to graduate schools was the most useful tool. A well-crafted description of the department attracted several good students.

My first student, Sam Chen, started with a funded project for mapping the genome of a cyanobacterium. I had built a CHEF (Clamped Homogeneous Electric Field) system from scratch and programed an IBM computer to drive the system and set it up in the cold room in the basement of SR1. The problem was the daily power outages that would stop the computer, but the power supply to the electrophoresis system would turn back on and ruin the gel. After several months of intermittent power, my student reprogrammed the system to put on the hard disk where the run was interrupted (recording the progress updated every few minutes). When the computer auto rebooted the program, it waited 1 minute and reloaded the remaining run parameters. That worked and we finally got a good, pulsed field gel of the bacterial genome.

Joe Cole, then the head of Biology, contacted me and asked if I would like to be part of a joint proposal to NASA to understand how to grow and maintain food plants for survival in space. This made sense because I had a strong photosynthesis background, and another Biology member, SV, had plant tissue culture experience. We wrote the grant and had a site visit by NASA. Unfortunately, we did not get the grant, but I was introduced to SV, and we worked together on the project. About a year later, SV came to my office with a graduate student, Hrissi Samartzidu, and asked if I could take her into my lab. She had a background in plant biology. I accepted her into the lab. A few days later SV passed away! Hrissi became a very productive graduate student and along with Sam Chen constructed the first restriction map of a cyanobacterium genome, added the gene map, and made an overlapping cosmid library. Hrissi subsequently did a postdoc with Anne Delcour in Biology and simultaneously earned a MBA. Currently, Hrissi is the global director of marketing for Fisher Scientific. Sam is at VCU.

I had never met Hal Kohn (organic chemistry professor) until he stepped into my lab in SR2. I was generating herbicide resistant cyanobacteria at that time. For his NIH grant, he proposed to identify the target of a novel antibiotic, bicyclomycin. He had proposed a chemical mechanism for its action but had no biological evidence. He wanted to determine what protein bicyclomycin inactivated. Since bicyclomycin was like a double beta lactam, it was very similar to ampicillin. He reasoned that the mechanism might also be similar to ampicillin. So, he wanted to see if it bound to the known ampicillin binding proteins. Hal was a bit crestfallen when I told him binding may not indicate inhibition. However, I came back with a proposed experiment. Let’s take E. coli, characterize the inhibition by finding the I50 value, and do UV mutagenesis to identify bicyclomycin resistant mutants. From the mutant DNA, clone a randomly digested DNA into a plasmid, transform into a bicyclomycin-sensitive strain, and identify clones that confirmed bicyclomycin resistance by selection on bicyclomycin. Sequencing the plasmid insert should then identify the gene. Hal gave the project to his post doc Tony to train and do the experiments. Tony was an organic chemist and had to learn molecular biology and microbiology. He easily found the I50 to be 60 micromolar. UV mutagenesis led to 21 bicyclomycin resistant colonies, of which several were resistant over 3 millimolar bicyclomycin. From these resistant bacteria, we determined rho transcript terminator factor was the target of bicyclomycin. This led to 24 peer-reviewed publications and two more NIH grants. I was advanced to associate professor in 1991 just before the departmental merger.

The overriding memories I have of my 15 years at UH is that of close colleagues and collaborators. This started right from beginning when I was being recruited into Biochemistry. I am pretty confident that some of the senior faculty contributed their own resources, whether grants or institutional, into making a startup package that was attractive. I was quite surprised to learn of this generosity, but the collegiality remained true throughout. Along similar lines, I was grateful the faculty chose to ignore the fact that I was in no way a biochemist but really a geneticist at heart using molecular tools. On the one hand, it was a stretch to even pretend I could teach biochemistry, but on the other hand, I had very different insights on projects and problems and on occasion came up with some unique approaches. As a result, it was easy to find joint projects to work on. I wanted to collaborate on at least one paper with each faculty member from BCHS. Although I never quite met that goal, it was close. I can imagine no other institution where one even would have thought that possible. Collaborations with Kurt Krause and Richard Willson really took off. I think I had more than 20 joint publications with either one or both of them over a decade of collaboration. It would have been more had I not moved toward the “dark side” of academic administration.

Not only were the faculty welcoming, but so were the students. My first student started doing her research even before I moved down! I got her set up to do some work, and she identified a set of interesting mutants that formed the core of her thesis, and that of two other students as well, during the summer before I moved to Houston. My lab may have reached its peak productivity a few years later during the year I was on sabbatical at the NIH. No doubt, there is an object lesson to be learned from the two incidents, but I will choose to ignore it.

Another vivid memory was from one afternoon in my lab where all of us were discussing some new data. We were standing by the large picture windows in my lab that faced south. As we looked out in the distance, there was a storm coming in, and we became completely mesmerized in watching a tornado funnel cloud form right before our eyes and come towards us. After a few minutes, I snapped back to reality and realized that standing in front of an enormous picture window was a really stupid place to be, so I managed to move us all out to the hallway. Fortunately, no damage to campus ensued.

All my memories of those years are fond ones (except for the NIH pink slips), and I remain grateful to all my colleagues and students. —Michael Benedik, Doha, Qatar (September 2021)

When I came to UH, there was no biology in the College of Engineering. Chuck Goochee, who had recruited me, did cell culture and glycoengineering but left for Stanford as I arrived. I inherited his collaboration with George Fox in the nucleic acids area, and there was nobody else in the College of Engineering who thought about proteins, nucleic acids, or microorganisms. My collaboration with George was long, productive, educational, and very pleasant, and the beginning of a career of close association with many of my closest friends and collaborators on the campus.

My next catalyzed interaction with UH biologists came with the departure of Prof. John Baust, who was teaching a class in HPLC in collaboration with Waters Corp, which I had visited while at MIT. I was interested in chromatography as a biophysical process, as well as a major technology, and I volunteered to take over teaching that class. Richard Knapp (then a grad student with Peter Jurtshuk Jr. and now a UH Instructional Professor) was actually my TA at one point. We would have lecture, then a brief break, and then a long lab, which could run fairly late into the evening. It was very popular, with people even driving from Texas A&M University to take it, but eventually Waters didn’t want to support it any longer.

I had brought Ellen Thorne, an MIT undergraduate researcher, with me to the Department of Chemical Engineering. She proved to be a more enthusiastic biochemist than chemical engineer and changed departments, thus becoming the first of my many students in biochemistry.

I was originally advised by my bosses in engineering not to take too many students in biochemistry, mainly because of credit hour allocation. But, I always had some because they brought unique backgrounds and skills, and in many cases, because they bridged collaborations with my friends in the department. Now I’ve had dozens, and they’ve had good success, with the most recent being at Astra-Zeneca, Baylor, and Harvard.

There was mutual interest in my joining the Institute for Molecular Biology, which had people and resources that attracted me (I remember a lot of discussion of whether we ought to maintain our own oligo synthesizer). As I recall, if that institute took in a member from the College of Engineering, it would have to become a campus-wide institute (and NSM would lose the IDC). So, it was simpler to make me a member of Biochemistry then to change the status of the institute. This, my teaching of the HPLC class, and my fairly heavy involvement in the department ever since, made me a bit more than the typical adjunct.

David Tu used a lot of techniques that we had in common, especially in protein purification and characterization, and I was fascinated by luciferases. He and I did some very good work together, measuring missense errors of translation using his ultra-dark point mutants. We also later were co-founders of VisiGen.

Mike Benedik and I collaborated on many different things, ranging from what was likely the first NSF engineering grant for phage display (about 1990), to cloning of enzymes for degradation of hydrocarbons and cyanide. We’re actually still talking about research to this day.

Kurt Krause and I had lots of common interests in structural biology, medical applications, and pathogens. I don’t think we ever had a funded collaboration, but I really enjoyed my interactions with him. I also remember a truly amazing party thrown for him in a house with an indoor reflecting pool surrounded by Warhol Marilyn Monroes…

Bill Widger has always been helpful and incredibly knowledgeable, especially in advanced experimental methods.

Horace Gray embodied the heroic era of biophysical chemistry with his work on the SpinCo Model E analytical ultracentrifuge, a large scary machine with unique capabilities. Its users were a very special group of people who were incredibly good at solving problems with very complex equipment not supported by the manufacturer anymore. I always told him he should have named Bal 31 nuclease “Gray-ase” after himself, and I was a bit dismayed by his not entirely voluntary transition to primarily administrative roles as it became difficult for him to get grant support in his area.

I had always imagined I might collaborate with Brian Middleditch on mass spec, but negative reports of his behavior circulated and then he left.

Joe Eichberg's area had too much complicated cell biology for me, but I always liked and respected him, and he always gave a sense of adult reasonableness in any setting.

Lian Gao and I shared interests in nucleic acids and in biophysical chemistry. I was always impressed with her abilities and tremendous work ethic, though I worried she did not take good enough care of herself.

I admired Arnold Eskin for his research productivity and also for his joie de vivre. The chemical engineers at that time were a rather strait-laced group, and departmental events would consist of people (all male) wearing jackets, having 1 or 2 drinks, and going home early. I vividly remember a biology party where the food was sumptuous and largely prepared by our host, and I left as the tequila shots were starting around 2:00 a.m.…

During my early years at UH, I conducted retinal electrophysiological and anatomical/histological studies. Subsequently, I began quantitative light microscopy, fluorescence microscopy, and retinal biochemistry studies.

Since my college did not have the necessary equipment to conduct some of these studies nor faculty with related experience or interest, I reached out to Drs. Joseph Eichberg and Horace Gray for assistance and guidance. Both immediately offered to help me find the necessary equipment in their department and laboratories. They gave me access to their centrifuges, liquid scintillation counter, and bench equipment. Moreover, they assisted me with help in experimental design and techniques. I spent lots of time in their basement offices talking science and getting mentored as a young scientist. Dr. Ralph Hecht kindly gave me access to his laboratory microscopes.

When my NIH RO1 grant was up for renewal, both Drs. Eichberg and Gray provided extensive advice, suggestions, and proofreading that improved its readability and quality. When the grant was renewed, I purchased an Olympus BH2 binocular microscope equipped with fluorescence, phase contrast, and Nomarski optics for my lab that I then shared with them, their faculty, and students.

However, I still needed to use the low-speed centrifuge and ultracentrifuge in Dr. Gray’s lab, as well as the department scintillation counter. When the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics upgraded their equipment, Drs. Eichberg and Gray arranged to have the old ultracentrifuge and liquid scintillation counter transferred to my laboratory.

As my laboratory began to conduct more biochemical studies, Dr. David Tu provided me with his expertise in enzymology. After I was awarded a joint position in the department, several Ph.D. students from the department earned their degrees in my laboratory, where I served as their mentor and advisor. These students were among the best that I ever had.

In addition, Drs. Eichberg, Gray, Tu, and others would invite me to departmental events and outside dinners. In summary, I can honestly state that the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and their faculty greatly contributed to my academic/career success and recognition at the University of Houston as well as in the national/international scientific community. To all of these contributions on my behalf, I am eternally grateful, proud of the association, and thankful for the long-lasting friendships with Dr. Eichberg and my former Biochemistry Ph.D. students.

Being able to join the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Houston was a big break for me. I enjoyed my time there thoroughly and made a number of good friends and colleagues that I still keep in touch with today.

Upon reflection, it's a little surprising that I came to join UH, having been turned down for a job in Biochemistry right before I moved there! After finishing my Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1986 with Professor William Lipscomb at Harvard, I returned to Houston to complete a residency in Internal Medicine.

Following this training, I joined the Baylor College of Medicine as an assistant professor of medicine and cell biology. I set up a lab in the Section of Atherosclerosis run by Prof. Antonio Gotto. Around the same time, I wrote Prof. Joe Eichberg at UH to inquire about potential for crystallography positions there. He wrote back right away saying there was no position available, and they were not looking for a crystallographer.

I filed that letter away and set about trying to get access somewhere to X-ray equipment. I heard a rumor that Prof. Andy McCammon, UH Chemistry, had been successful in getting funding for X-ray equipment. I had known of Andy's work for some time, and in fact, almost studied with him at UH after medical school. Andy and I met up and had a long chat. While I tried to pick his brain about how to raise money, he let me know that the crystallographer UH wanted to hire, Lawrence DeLucas, had decided to become an astronaut instead of an academic. Andy suggested I consider applying now to the Department of Biochemistry instead of trying to raise my own equipment funds. I mentioned that I had already been turned down by Prof. Eichberg and didn't see much hope there, but Andy persisted. In the end, I took his advice, and remarkably, an offer appeared.

In 1989, I moved to Biochemistry at UH and set up a lab from scratch! During this process, I never actually spoke to Joe about the rejection letter he had sent me. I think I was worried it might make the new offer disappear! In 1989, the department was located mostly in the basement of Science and Research 1. I was given a roomy lab near the corner. It was a little bit isolated, and there was no natural light, but I quite liked it. I found some cool protein models that I still have with me today. I found an old transmission electron microscope that I now wish I had kept. And, I had lots and lots of space. I found I had a number of talented colleagues with whom I could collaborate including David Tu – luciferase, Michael Benedik – Serratia nuclease, Ralph Hecht – GAPDH, and Bill Widger – Rho terminase.

At first, my lab struggled a bit. I remember that we bought an Enraf Nonius FAST area detector. The FAST had some advantages but a few major problems. One problem was that ambient room temperature variability affected the background noise of the detector and was causing us to collect poor quality data. We were stymied, but Andy McCammon saved the day. He funded building an air-conditioned room within my basement lab that surrounded the X-ray equipment! He did this out of his discretionary funds, without university help! The new enclosure was a game changer. The noise problem was solved, and the quality of the data was now excellent.

Soon after I had fully settled into my basement lab, I was pretty much alone in SR 1. Everyone else from Biochemistry had moved to the brand-new Houston Science Center (HSC). David Tu, the department chair at that time, had told me I was going to stay put in the basement lab, but somehow the decision was made that I needed to move, too. This was a bit tricky because X-ray crystallography equipment is heavy, awkward and fragile. But, we moved, and it was ok.

The new building proved to be very nice. I found myself in a great office with a brand-new, wet lab. As I was moving in, Prof. Alan Bartel, who was retiring, was moving out. He donated some of his old books to my library. We used to chat, and I recall asking him for some parting words of wisdom. I remember that day. He stopped. He looked at me and said, “Kurt, I never regretted missing any committee meeting in my entire career.” I loved that comment and have repeated it many times over the years.

The new laboratory was great, but there was a problem. None of our proteins were crystallizing anymore! Before we moved, we had promising crystals of several proteins. We were stymied, again!

Frantically, we searched for a reason and found there was some contaminant in our water supply that was absorbing in the 300 nm range, but we could not identify it. Several weeks passed. We were gearing up to carry out ICP–AES on the water, but the problem vanished. We started getting crystals again! Perhaps whatever was causing the contamination was flushed out? No idea, but thankfully this critical problem had resolved itself.

Now all moved in, with pure water and growing crystals, I recall it was a great time to be in Biochemistry at UH. I had great mentors and inspiring colleagues. Grant success was challenging but very doable. The department had a strong esprit de corps and collaborative projects were proceeding well. I dove into research in my laboratory. We did well, but I decided to move more strongly into the area of infectious diseases and completed a clinical fellowship at Baylor. The department was very supportive of me doing this!

With this additional training, I was able to continue my joint appointment in the Department of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine but now in the Section of Infectious Diseases. One morning each week, I saw HIV patients at Thomas Street Clinic, and I attended once a year at Ben Taub General Hospital. During some evenings, I saw HIV patients at Northwest Clinic, and on some weekends, I rounded at Methodist/St. Luke’s as cover for one of the private ID practices. My research moved more into anti-viral and anti-bacterial drug discovery, which is still my main focus.

I also remember that murmuring was beginning about the prospect of a merger with Biology. The idea of a merger made fiscal sense to a number of the Upper Administration, but from memory, our department faculty was strongly opposed. Some faculty were more resigned that the merger was likely to happen no matter what we did. My impression was that Arnold Eskin was named the new head of department specifically to oversee this unwanted merger. I had an inkling that things were never to be the same for us again.

Life in the new department, however, was not so bad. Many new colleagues arrived. The Eskin years were very positive. Arnold was a strong advocate, and the department did well. I thought it was unfortunate that Arnold was not renewed as Chair.

Around 2005, I explored some moving opportunities, and I recall interviews at Vanderbilt and Cincinnati. I received an offer from the University of Cincinnati to head a Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease Centre that that was being set up by their Dean. During my negotiations, the Dean was replaced and the project put on hold! Almost out of the blue, an offer appeared for me to interview for a professorship in New Zealand in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Otago. To my surprise, I found a great opportunity there, and I took that job. Working in New Zealand has been amazing.

I got my start as a scientist at the University of Houston. I was fortunate to land in a very supportive environment. David Tu was an awesome chair and a great mentor and friend. George Fox, Horace Gray, and Joe Eichberg were also strong role models and mentors—even though Joe “fired me” before I even started! Mike Benedik, Ralph Hecht, Andy McCammon, and Bill Widger were wonderful colleagues and collaborators. Mike and I ended up working together on several projects, and I can’t thank him enough. I'm very grateful for the chance to get to know and work with everyone in the department. All the best from New Zealand!

I remember very well how my contact with John Oro, and therefore, with the University of Houston, began. From a very early age, I was interested in the study of the origin of life, and at the suggestion of A.I. Oparin, I sought out John Oro, knowing that he was Spanish and hoping that he would be interested in visiting the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where I was beginning my academic career.

I was not wrong. I invited him to give a couple of talks, and he made a splendid impression on both the students and the faculty. There were not many at that time who applied the concepts and methodology of analytical organic chemistry to extraterrestrial bodies, such as meteorites and lunar samples.

John’s visit to Mexico was a success. Since he liked my interest in interstellar molecules and comet nuclei, he invited me to write a paper on HCN, an extraordinarily toxic molecule, which John himself had shown, with an elegant experiment, was the precursor of adenine, one of the components of nucleic acids, and a molecule that also plays an essential role in contemporary bioenergetic processes.

That was the origin of my relationship with the University of Houston.

John invited me to continue our collaboration, and I traveled there for the first time in 1978 or 1979. I met John’s collaborators, and most especially, Marianna O’Rourke, who was his secretary and handled all the laboratory affairs. She was a generous, active woman, always ready to explain the virtues of the Democratic Party, curious about Mexico, and deeply Catholic. The first thing she did when I arrived on campus was show me a center open to all faiths, and as she knew that I was coming from Mexico, she told me “surely you must be Catholic and you go to mass every day, right?” In order not to disappoint her, I told her that I belonged to a Mexican sect that carried out the rites in the morning before the bath and breakfast. Although she was not very convinced, the subject of my attendance at church was not touched on again.

John’s personality was extraordinary. He laughed all the time, and I never saw him cross. I was quickly accepted as a friend by his family, and over time, the collaboration with John allowed me to get to know his friends and colleagues, including George E. Fox, Emile Zuckerkandl, Linus Pauling, Margaret Dayhoff, Lynn Margulis, and Stanley Miller, with many of whom I collaborated on scientific projects.

Over time, I witnessed how the university grew and how the number of professors and students increased, but the memory of those times, more than 40 years ago, continues to move me, especially because of the generosity of John Oro and his colleagues, who helped me define my academic vocation.