How I became a biochemist: An Honorary One!

How I became a biochemist.

It was a sunny September day in a Madrid that had started to grow after years of stagnation, when I entered a modern red brick building at the corner of Velázquez and Joaquín Costa streets. I had an appointment with someone unknown to me, but whom I had been told was an important enzymologist. I was far from imagining that the encounter with that person would determine my future scientific life...

How I nearly became a Marlboro man.

How a real housewife became an astrobiologist.

In 1987, with three children, all sons under the age of 10, a husband who lost his job in the oil bust of Houston, and a family that needed money, I found myself at the local public school employed as a teacher’s aide. I made $742 a month. At the end of the year, I had the obligatory review of my work. The principal was demanding and was considered somewhat difficult. However, she offered some ...

Why I became an occupational physician ...

In gratitude for their prompt help in a serious accident in a new sewer tunnel outside the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, the medical staff were invited to see the work excavating the wide bore, using as a rough guide the layer of pebbles on what had been the bed of the Rhine 18 000 years ago. That was so interesting that registrars arranged visits to other local enterprises, including Colman's ...

How autism became autism

This article argues that the meaning of the word 'autism' experienced a radical shift in the early 1960s in Britain which was contemporaneous with a growth in epidemiological and statistical studies in child psychiatry. The first part of the article explores how 'autism' was used as a category to describe hallucinations and unconscious fantasy life in infants through the work of significant chi...