Winter 2013 - Baldwin School

Electron microscope image of coated vesicles budding
from a membrane.Each coated vesicle has a diameter of
around 150 nm (0.000006 inches).
recently been purified from pig brain by Barbara
Pearse at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular
Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England. Barbara
had shown that they were mainly made out of a
protein that she named clathrin, but I speculated
that they might also contain a protein called
tubulin, and I wanted to test this. So I located a
pig slaughterhouse in Boston, traveled there by
bus with a cooler, collected a couple of brains,
and then took the bus back to Woods Hole. I sat
next to an elderly woman who was concerned
that my “lunch,” as she called it, which I’d placed
on the floor under my feet, might tip over and
spill. I didn’t enlighten her about what was really
in the cooler. And I did manage to purify coated
vesicles and I did find tubulin (using what would
now be seen as a very low-tech protocol),
although later on I realized that the tubulin had
been a contaminant. It was present in the
preparation, but not actually associated with the
coated vesicles.
But although I had become completely
captivated by coated vesicles, I was in the wrong
place to work on them. So after receiving my
Ph.D., I decided I wanted to work with the world
expert, Barbara Pearse herself. I was very nervous
about approaching her, but she turned out to be
the least intimidating person in the world. She
told me that she would be happy to house me in
her lab, provided I could come up with my own
funding. Surprisingly, because I didn’t have any
publications from my Ph.D. work, I managed to
get a postdoctoral fellowship, and started
working at the LMB in 1982.
The LMB was a real eye-opener. It has more
Nobel Prizes per capita than any other place in the
world, and the quality of the science is
astonishing. A number of important new
techniques were developed there that I was able to
tap into, including monoclonal antibodies and
methods for sequencing proteins and DNA.
However, I got a bit sidetracked during my first few
months there, because I spent a lot of my time
working backstage for the Cambridge University
Opera Society, together with my Baldwin Maskers
friend Leslie Dunn ’70. But then I started going
out with one of the junior group leaders at the
LMB, John Kilmartin, and he worked practically
around the clock, so I started keeping the same
hours. With the extra time that I put in, my work
suddenly took off. I published a couple of papers
and got a second postdoctoral fellowship, and
during that time John and I got married.
But then I hit a brick wall.
Although everything was still going well
scientifically, and the LMB gave me a short-term
position, they made it clear that they weren’t
going to offer me a permanent job. John was
amenable to looking for jobs in the States, but
this wasn’t the best time for him because he had
recently changed fields. So I started looking for a
job in Cambridge. The closest I came was when I
was shortlisted by the Biochemistry Department.
However, my interview was disastrous - among
other things, I accidentally walked off with the
handbag of the only other women in the room,
a very distinguished professor - and they didn’t
offer me a job.
Fortunately, another option eventually
materialized. The Wellcome Trust had recently
launched a Senior Fellowship scheme, which
Scottie Robinson (third from left
on the stage) with fellow Maskers
in 1969. Mary B. Robinson ’71
(Scottie’s sister) is on the far left
standing below the stage, and
fellow science groupie, Charla
Thompson Bendas ’69, is in the
middle below the stage. Scottie
still enjoys going to the theater
and opera in her spare time.
WINTER 2013 ECHOES
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